The Moot - Recap

Conversations at the Round Table

Thank you to everyone who participated in July’s Subscriber Q&A (aka The Moot).

Truly Paid Subscribers are more intelligent, noble, and just generally better people than everyone else!

(I jest, of course, all are welcome).

But in seriousness it was a lot of fun and I was impressed by the quality of the discussions and depth of thought on display by all involved. This post is a non-exhaustive recap of some comment threads from The Moot that I found interesting, along with some added commentary from me that didn’t make it into the original post. Topics include Cryptids, Qigong, Ayahuasca Shamans, Atheism, A Book, The Holy Gast, and more.

The format is as follows:

Q: The reader’s question.

A: My answer in the comment thread.

Additional Commentary: A more in-depth look than what was originally given in The Moot.

Please note that I have purposefully kept this more informal and less ordered than a normal article. The Moot is meant to be conversational.

Question 1: The Afterlife and The Loch Ness Monster

Q: What do you think happens to us when we die/before we are born? — Jack Ruben

A: What happens after we die and where we were before we were born are difficult questions. For the first, we can only rely on the testimony of those who claim to have had contact with the other side, and for the second, only, perhaps, our intuition. The clear-cut death->judgement->heaven or hell picture that a lot of people seem to have is not so clearly laid out in scripture or in tradition, and I suspect that the areas where it is confusing are, as you say, probably a function of trying to speak about an existence outside of time in temporal terms.

My own thoughts on the matter are as follows:

Before we are born we have some measure of existence. I'm not sure how much, nor in what capacity, but both personal experience and The Bible seem to point to it. For example, my first daughter, when she was just learning to talk, once told me, unprompted, about how she had come from "a warm place" where she "only ate and drank soup." A place where "she could hear mommy, but couldn't see her." Now obviously children are not the most reliable sources, but I could not help but think at that time that she was recalling being in utero, a time of our lives when memories are not supposed to really be possible. In this case she was of course not recalling a time before her conception, but that did open the door for me that the memories other children seem to have of existence before their incarnation might be genuine.

Solomon speaks of this in The Book of Wisdom, where he asserts that "being good, I came into a good body", and the Apostles seem to likewise have had some notion of such a thing when they asked Christ if the man born blind had been so afflicted because of his own sin. How could he have sinned before he was born? Well apparently the apostles at the time had some notion that you could, which points to some undefined pre-incarnate existence. Likewise Jesus, speaking of John the Baptist, states that he is Elijah come again. Is all this evidence of so called "Past-Lives"? Maybe. I am not sold but I do not close it off either. I think that there is a difference between Soul and Spirit and that perhaps the Spirit can be passed between physical forms while the Soul, the individual consciousness, is not. Elisha receiving a "portion of Elijah's spirit" for example, even though he did not have Elijah's soul. I think this solution may well bridge the gap between reincarnation (the default view of life and death in world religions) and Christianity, which does not speak of this... for the *soul*. Soul and spirit, as the author of Hebrews implies, are not the same thing, and can be divided one from the other.

Another solution is simply ancestral memories. It may be that "past-lives" are simply memories of our ancestors that we somehow tap into. In some ways that is simpler.

As for what happens after death I am a firm believer in ghosts. Indeed, I think the existence of ghosts is more or less a proven thing at this point, as they've been captured on countless photographs and other recording devices. Science asks for reproducibility, and ghosts certainly are. People see them over and over again. They just aren't reproducible *on demand*, like one would want in a laboratory setting. My wife and I have had at least one strong communication from her grandmother after her grandmother had passed. That being the case I do not think it is as simple as instant judgement into heaven or hell, but rather, Heaven and Hell appear to be a spectrum of existence that is in some way porous and allows crossing over. If a soul repents after death (somehow) and ascends out of Hell to Heaven then from his perspective Hell was simply Purgatory. I think that Heaven and Hell are somehow, I don't know... overlaid? maybe? on our physical plane of existence. This is how it is that demons can be both in hell and tormenting a man on earth at the same time. They are overlapping states of being, just as, in the presence of a saint, Heaven can be drawn down to a localized point on earth as well.

On the whole I think it is probably best not to fuss about it too much as the specifics are unknowable until we ourselves pass on. It is enough to know that this life is not all there is and that what we do here echoes in eternity. For ourselves and for others too.

Additional Commentary: Recent subscribers might not realize it, but I came into theology mostly by the way of the paranormal. It began as a UFO encounter, which I wrote about here, but has continued throughout my life and I must say that I’ve found no theology sufficient to describe the range or reported phenomena that people experience. Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise. If souls, spirits, God, and the angels and all that are real and exist then it’s probable that a lot of the ways we’re going to interact with them simply aren’t going to be easily describable in human language. That said, it doesn’t mean there aren’t patterns.

My own personal opinion is that much of what is talked about as separate phenomena in the paranormal world are actually different instances of the same thing. For example, let’s say you hear knocking noises up in the attic of your house and footsteps in the hallway. Let’s say you find things moved about sometimes in the morning when you wake up. Well, most people are going to assume you have a ghost. But, if you experience exactly the same thing in the woods, footsteps, knocking sounds, disturbances to items in your campsite… people are going to say you encountered Bigfoot. In the same way a light floating around your bedroom is a spirit… but somehow a light floating around in the sky is a UFO. When you take a step back and look at it the big picture from 100,000 feet, it seems clear that a lot of the things under the overarching umbrella of “weird” may after all be one and the same, or at least close cousins. When I say therefore that I think Hell and Heaven overlap our Reality, I’m thinking of all these numerous similar intrusions into our life. Perhaps even the Loch Ness Monster is but another kind of ghost, a dinosaur ghost, and itself a proof that the souls of animals do persist beyond death just like those of humans do. I actually think the world is quite haunted and it surprises me that it’s so difficult to convince some people that it is.

Where else are you going to read that Nessie could be a Dinosaur Ghost?

Question 2: Qigong with Saint Nicholas.

Q: How come Jesus never talked about things like “energy” but you see mention of “energy” in eastern practices and methods to harness or use this “energy”? Why do you think Christ only emphasized prayer and none of these methods? — John

A: I think the Christian model is not so much that energy needs to be cultivated or harvested but rather that barriers to such energy need to be removed. In the past the analogy has been made to a crystal covered in dirt. If we only remove the dirt, we will be reflectors, emanators, projectors, of the Divine Light and Energy without even trying. I think it's just a different model of how Divine Energy flows.

Additional Commentary: I must admit I’ve never been big on Eastern Spiritual Practices. Not for lack of trying… it’s just not a good fit for me. If it was going to be something I could get into it would have happened long ago, as I have been steeped in Asian culture from a young age. An Americanized version of it, sure, but still, the point stands. Perhaps my years in martials arts put me off of it. That space is so filled with grifters claiming to possess secret powers or to understand the subtle metaphysical meridians of the body which you could pinch to put someone to sleep or poke and to kill them. It was always all hogwash. I prefer the very unsubtle Western methods of simply punching a man in the face. That’s not to say I think such things are impossible… I just… hmmm… I just don’t know if “energy” or “qi” or what have you is the correct model with which to think of it.

I, again being Western, use a model based on the idea of Logos instead of energy. The idea that, if your actions are truly aligned with your speech, if you speak Truly and are a Man of Your Word… then other people, and even Nature itself, starts to listen. I think that’s perhaps how miracles are done. How the saints of the past could heal the sick and the blind and talk with animals. But people lie so much today… we are all constantly, every moment, engaged in misrepresenting ourselves on social media, checking ourselves lest we say the wrong thing, being dishonest… I doubt many of us can easily get to the kind of place Saint Blaise or Saint Nicholas got to for instance, curing diseases or casting out demons with a word. For my money focusing on your Logos has a better ROI than focusing on your qi. As it says in the Bible “..if anyone does not stumble in what he says, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle his whole body.”

Question 3: Catholic Ayahuasca Sunni Shamans

Q: Thank you for your thoughtful writings. My question is about how we can be certain that what we think we know/intuit on the spiritual journey is actually truth. We are really mysteries to ourselves and our ability to deceive ourselves is astounding. Emotions lead us astray, thoughts seemingly arise on their own, from who really knows where and unsurprisingly humans disagree on much. Regardless, we feel that we ought to respond to what seems like a calling even though we don’t really know what awaits on arrival. — GB

A: Thank you for reading and for your compliment!

I think desiring certainty can prevent you from moving forward. To my mind, what we are to do is pursue the Highest Joy with Discernment. What I mean by that is that a lot of things might bring us a great deal of joy in the moment, shooting heroine for example, or having sex with a beautiful woman in betrayal of your wife... but which, if we think it through, would ultimately be not a small net negative. And so I think what you do is you sit down and you say, okay, how do I find the Highest Mode of Fulfillment. Of Meaning. Of Joy. Right? And then you come up with an answer and you start working towards it.

But this answer isn't going to be very good. It's like saying, "I want to walk to Montana" but all you have to go on is the Sun and the stars, so you just vaguely figure out where North is and start moving. You're not actually pointing at Montana yet, you're, in reality, going, say, decidedly North East and if you continued in a straight line you'd hit Ohio. But you have no way of knowing that until you've walked far enough where you can look around and say, "wait a minute... this doesn't look right." And then you reassess, reorient yourself, and try again. You're probably *still* not heading the right way, but you're closer to the mark than you were, and you may have to do this reorienting and reassessing many times before you find the true path.

I think it's the same in the spiritual life. We simply *can't* know, exactly, how to get where we want to go. But we start heading the direction we think is best and maintain an openness and humility to being proven wrong and changing course as we go along. It's a winding road, and it would be nicer if we could just walk a straight line, but we can't, and moving, even in not exactly the right direction, is better than staying still your whole life waiting for someone to hand deliver you a map. The map's not coming. You just gotta start.

Additional Commentary: Upon reflection I see that what I wrote in answer to this question is very Jordan Peterson-esque. That’s okay. I don’t mind the man, but I do strive for a bit more originality. But you know I do think there’s something to be said for simply sticking on the spiritual path you’re on, even if doubts do from time to time arise in your mind. I’ve known young men (and it is always young men, women never seem to have this problem) who float about from tradition to tradition, always second guessing themselves, over thinking, reading more and more books to try and be certain their religion is the right one. They start out Protestant maybe, and then spend some time as a Norse Pagan. After that they have an epiphany (always short lived) and go through RCIA and become Catholic. A year or two later and they’re looking at Eastern Orthodoxy. Sometimes then they become Muslim. After that they grow their hair long and do an Ayahuasca retreat in the woods because Joe Rogan told them to on a podcast and then suddenly they’re self-declared “urban shamans” …

It never ends.

Certainty is just another word for going in a circle.

Another word for wasting time.

Just do DMT bro.

Certainty is not something you get to have in this life. You’re a finite creature, with a finite mind and the universe is, by contrast, a place with a literal infinite number of facts. The possibility that tomorrow you might learn something which completely upends your worldview is always present. If it were not so we would not, as a species, have gotten so good at cognitive dissonance. My advice to you is that if you indeed feel as though you have a calling… answer it. No, you don’t know what awaits you upon arrival and you never will, just as Abraham couldn’t have imagined all the adventures and joys and pitfalls that were ahead of him when he answered his call. You just have to go, and to stick with your calling… even if it starts to seem stupid. The alternative is just endlessly doubling back to square one. Never getting anywhere, always waiting for the perfect compass or the perfect map before you move.

Question 4: Cutting Off Abraham

Q: Yoshi.... do you have any ideas on why it seems that atheism, and its kissing cousin agnosticism, seem to be so powerful in transmitting their worldview to successive generations?

I don’t know that any statistical study has been done, but observation and inference has led me to the conclusion that a child of nonbelievers or anti-faith parents tends to retain that perspective more so than does a child of parents of strong faith. That’s always been a conundrum to me. In particular, because the occurrence of the social pathologies which typically follow in the wake of most non-faith upbringings tend to be so prevalent. One would think that just by looking around and saying to oneself, “hey... which worldview seems to be more effective?” would caution many to not be so hasty in abandoning the faith of their parents. But the allure of college and the materialist influence of society and social media appears to be overwhelming. Any thoughts? — Mike Drapeau

A: Hi Mike,

I think the answer to this is fairly simple. The creation myth controls the mind. Most people, even most Christians, today, do not believe in the creation narrative of the Bible. Man fashioned from dust, Adam and Eve, sinless in the Garden. The tree, the snake. The fruit and the fall. Instead, nearly all children are taught in school, on television, in the movies, in society, and often even by their Christian parents and pastors, that we evolved over millions of years on a planet that is the result of a random and careless explosion untold aeons ago. I have long said that, *if* evolution is true Christianity isn't. People fight me on that but it's true. If we evolved from a proto-ape then we were not created from the dust of the ground by the hands of God. Leftism, atheism, all the things which Christians bemoan colonizing the minds of their children, are *the logical consequence* of that scientific creation myth. If everything started off as a random explosion and is the result of random, meaningless mutations, then of course all ethics and morality is just a set of social constructs open to renegotiation. And how can the sacrifice of Jesus make sense unless there was an actual, literal, original sin? How are children going to believe the stories of a book even their pastor says is actually, scientifically, incorrect on page one? They can't. In my mind evolution and all that goes with it is simply an alternative creation myth for an alternative religion, and attempts by the Church to shoe-horn Jesus into it are both misguided and frankly pathetic. Christianity isn't a random collection of beliefs but the logical consequence of the stories of Genesis. Take that away and it stops making sense. People stop believing it because they can't, even if, as you say, what they *do* believe (that life is meaningless and nothing matters) tends to make them unhappy.

Additional Commentary: Perhaps this is obvious after my recent post about how I don’t believe in evolution, but I am, more or less, a Biblical literalist. In fact I think I tend to throw people with how far I go with it. They hear I’m a creationist and assume that I’m like that pastor they saw on T.V. when they were little. You know, a kind of American stock character they know and understand. They might not agree with it, but they could understand who I was. When I get around to telling them, oh, yes, well, not only that but also there are Dragons and Giants and The Earth is the Center of the Universe… I think they just shut down.

That’s a bit too weird to even get a handle on. That’s okay. I was inoculated against social shame from a young age.

I simply don’t think that you can piecemeal your Tradition. The New Testament, the Gospels… they didn’t just spring sui generis out of nothing. No. Behind them is thousands of years of philosophy, theology, and people wrestling with God. And those people, all those Old Testament folks… behind them, even further back is the backdrop of the Flood and the Tower of Babel. Things they all believed in. Things that informed how they saw the world, and their place in it. David would not have been David if he hadn’t believed in the Flood. Abraham wouldn’t have been Abraham if he had not seen himself as a descendant of Noah. The prophets, all of them, took Adam and Eve for granted and saw their condition as one in the aftermath of a great apocalypse. A Fall from Eden. From Grace. For a modern person to try and cling to Jesus and his religion, and deny all those things… well…

It just doesn’t make sense.

And I understand. I do. I get it. It actually really is hard to be the guy who believes in Dragons if you want to fit in at dinner parties and talk about the interesting stories of the day on NPR. In our day and age you have to be willing to be a little bit of an outcast to hold onto such things. Personally though I think it’s worth it. I think the Christianity opens up to you in ways you could have never imagined if you’d stuck with the alternative creation myths and stories given to you at school. At the end of the day that’s all I’m trying to share here: Christianity as viewed by someone who doesn’t really believe in metaphor. I think that makes the whole thing more coherent and it’s no surprise to me that the position of “Well Christianity is true but all that stuff Jesus believed about the Creation of the World and The Flood and Talking Snakes isn’t…” has turned out to be undefendable.

Question 5: Book

Q: Yoshi, simple question. I remember a few posts back, you said your goal (ideal, dream?) was to be the successor, in one way or another, of the great Christian writers of the past history (if I’m not mistaken, you mentioned Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien - sorry, didn’t take the time to look up the direct quote.) If that is correct, are you thinking of publishing a book, or something of the sort, that would delve more deeply into a particular topic? — Fr Bruce Wren

A: Hi Bruce and thank you so much for all your support. I enjoy seeing your interactions.

I will, hopefully, soon compile a lot of my writings here into a specific theme, likely with some additional commentary which will go deeper. The working title right now is "Theology with a Spear: Christ the Eternal Om." Maybe this isn't a good title. Not sure. But Theology with a Spear, as a concept, has really resonated with a lot of people and I think it encapsulates the embodied, not in your head message I'm trying to get out there. I hope it will come out soon.

I have also written some fiction, which I'm currently piecemeal publishing over at modernpulp.substack.com . It's piecemeal because this is my method of proof-reading my novels, a daunting task. They are otherwise finished though, the two novels. I wrote another book long ago on the Joyful Mysteries but it was my first attempt at writing and I don't think it's overly good. I'm not even sure where the ePub of it is now that I think about it. Probably on the hard drive in the desk.

Additional Commentary: Another reader informs me that my book on the Joyful Mysteries is still up on Amazon, which I was unaware of. I can’t say that I recommend it as it’s been so long I don’t remember really what I said in it nor whether what I said was any good. It was a first attempt at writing and, therefore, probably a poor one.

That said, I would very much like to get “Theology with a Spear: Christ the Eternal Om” out and published, but it is such a daunting task collating and organizing the articles here altogether that it will probably take me some time to do so. I really need an editor to be honest. If anyone out there is up for the task of helping me put that book together, I’d be very grateful. I can’t really pay you or anything, but people have been generous enough to help me in the past so it can’t hurt to ask now.

Question 6: The Holy Gast

Q: "But… the division of soul and spirit is a deep well. One we will have to talk about another time."

Actually Understanding the Bible Pt 5.

Abraham, The Man of Faith

Hello Yoshi. Have you written about this in any other publication? Thank you, Elisabeth — Elcisneros

A: Hi Elisabeth,

No I haven't. I should though, I wrote about what a spirit was here, but I have not yet delved into the distinction between soul and spirit and where they overlap and diverge. You remind me that I should put that on the to-do list though. Thank you!

Additional Commentary: I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about it.

Apart from the writings of Saint Paul, who said things like:

“May the God of peace himself make you perfectly holy and may you entirely, spirit, soul, and body, be preserved blameless for the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” — Bible, 1 Thessalonians 5:23

we would maybe have never realized that soul and spirit are in fact distinct. In the modern context the words are used more or less interchangeably and it might be that they were largely used interchangeably in the ancient world too. Paul here however, is being quite technical, and laying out details about our “metaphysical anatomy”, if you want to call it that. Those of us who are English speakers maybe have an advantage here, as English offers us two registers with which to express ourselves, the Latin and the Germanic. When we hear Saint Paul speak of a spirit (a Latin word) I think we’re probably closest to understanding it if we translate that as a “ghost” (a Germanic word) in our minds.

Of course I’m hardly the first to make that connection. “The Holy Ghost” has long been used as another name for “The Holy Spirit”, even if in recent times using the “Ghost” nomenclature has fallen widely out of favor. But the two things, the ghost coming from the Old English “gast” which is probably related to the word “gasp”, are more or less synonymous and the image that the word “ghost” conjures up in your mind is pretty darn close I think to Paul’s idea of a spirit.

For “gast” and “spirit” both relate to breath (gasp, inspiration and expiration, etc) and share a common understanding of our metaphysical anatomy with the Hindus and their concept of prana. As I wrote about here, it is the breath, the air, which animates matter and makes it alive. It is, in a real and concrete sense, our “life force”. And, as the Bible states and medical science confirms, “the life is in the blood”, the blood being the carrier of that oxygenation to the body. You’re alive as long as you're breathing. You’re dead when you’re not.

The twist is that most ancient people had this idea that your breath was your breath. Particular to you. This might be thought of as analogous to how wind blown through an oboe or a flute vibrates in a certain particular way that is unique to each and every individual instrument. Yes, two given flutes may be similar, but the pattern they impose on the air passing through them is, like a fingerprint, never exactly the same as any other’s.

So it was with our bodies. Our bodies were thought to shape and form our breath after particular patterns… modes of existence which, just as musical notes can carry beyond the instrument that shaped them, could persist even after the body had gone away. Thus “ghostly” apparitions of a person and the like could be seen, not only after a person had died, but even while they were still alive and just in another place. You could also, by trying to alter your body, clothes, and behaviors to match another individual, replicate their breath, their pattern of existence, and, in that manner, “summon” them. Hence the rituals with masks and dances and so on, trying to “inhabit” the spirit of another person, or of a god.

This is not so far fetched an idea as it at first sounds.

In fact we’re well familiar with that very process. What is an “Elvis Impersonator” but somebody doing just that? Somebody who, by putting on the affects and behaviors of a dead person, is, in some measure, allowing themselves to be “possessed” by their mode of being.

Okay.

That’s a Spirit. A Ghost. A Gast / Ghast.

But what’s a soul?

As near as I can tell, the soul, by contrast, is what we would today call “The Mind” or “The Consciousness.” It is that part of you which is Aware. That part of you that thinks. This is related to but not synonymous with the brain of course, the brain being the physical seat where The Mind interacts with the body. Crucially, just as the body is a vessel which can house different spirits (purposefully, as in an Elvis impersonator, or not-at-all purposefully as in demonic possession), The Mind is likewise Mutable. We can experience, for instance, alerted states of consciousness, as under the effects of drugs, or illness, or merely while we are dreaming. The Mind can also stop altogether, as it does when we are sleeping or in a coma… but this does not mean we are dead, or that it will never start back up again.

I’m practicing spirit possession ritual magic Little Momma.

Modern people, obsessed as we are with the intellect, are apt to imagine that that is all they are. So we get ludicrous ideas like death being final or that a person being “brain dead” is the same as being dead dead. We tend to think that the absence of consciousness implies the absence of being.

How silly when we still exist while we are sleeping!

By contrast the Biblical view, and the view of ancient religions more generally, was far more holistic. You… YOU… were the sum combination of all your parts. Body, soul, and spirit and, at least to some degree, they all believed that if some parts of you were lost then they could be reconstructed from what remained. The idea of reincarnation, for example, is the idea that your soul can find a new body and the idea of resurrection is that your spirit will one day find a new both. Frankly, I find these ideas far more reasonable than assuming that I’m just my thinking mind.

Thank You

Thank you to all who participated in July’s Moot. It was a lot of fun and I hope the August Moot to come will be just as productive. If I didn’t review your question here, please don’t take that to mean I didn’t think it worthwhile, I simply chose things I had more to say about at the moment. I appreciate all of your comments very much.

Until Next Time,

Peace out.