Episode 36 - Wild Goose 2016

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[Music] and just trying to find a way for all of us to a feel like we belong to some form of spiritual community some stream of historical christianity but more than that to put that faith that belief into actions that help heal our world so i hope you enjoy this time of question response from the wild goose festival and we'll kick off with season three in just a few weeks in august we've got some really amazing episodes planned with some really compelling voices on topics that i'm really excited to share with you so enjoy this episode and we'll catch you with season three in just a few weeks my name is alex johnston and i'm from seattle washington my question is is cynicism an evolutionary defense mechanism or is it a completely unhealthy neurological thing that's happening or is it a mixture of the two yeah okay so ask science mike fans might get a little bored i think i answered this last week or the week before uh but it also means i got a really good answer spooled up and then michael can devil's advocate so cynicism is a adaptation to pain and trauma uh there's no such thing as a born cynic although there are genetic factors that contribute to a propensity for cynicism cynicism is a distrust of the motives of other people and it stems from hopes dreams or ideals falling through so you put your faith and trust in that church and the pl the priest who served you the sacraments molested a child and guess what now you're a cynic you know why it's a psychological defense mechanism and it's necessary here's the drawback to cynicism as a way of operating with reality it carries a heavy neurological tax and health tax it actually affects your brain function it affects your chronic stress levels and one study recently found that chronic cynicism is a significant contributing factor to dementia later in life jeez so cynicism is a healthy short-term phenomenon it is an unhealthy long-term outlook it is extremely necessary for your own health that you learn to forgive and release those who've hurt you and i hate this thing in church where we say you have to forgive people because it's a spiritual thing and if you don't forgive you're not like god and we force people to do unhealthy things with people who have abused them or oppressed them or hurt them let me be extraordinarily clear that is not what i'm talking about what i'm talking about is you kicking people out of your head whom you are offering free rent and you are doing it it is a spiritual thing it's a thing so that you can be whole and you can be healthy so that you can create peace in this world through your actions and your health do you see the distinction i really hate the force forgiveness thing i really encourage people to study the science of why forgiveness is necessary for you yeah i've got no counterpoint for that that's great yeah hi my name is david johnson from knoxville tennessee and uh when my grandfather was growing up in san angelo texas in the late 1800s he probably knew nothing about the world that outside of a 50 mile perimeter of his town and i just wonder with the internet and with instant communication if we haven't overstated the the state of the world and and as as bad as things are is it possible that things were just as bad in 1890 but we just didn't know about 99.9 of it i think it was worse it was worse yeah um 350 years ago people boiled cats for fun in bars you would go to a cat boiling they boil him in oil and it was hilarious it was like going to see stand-up comedy oh it's reprehensible it's disgusting today in 300 years people are gonna look back at us hopefully and say can you believe what they were doing so a lot of data points are encouraging others aren't uh i really worry about freshwater scarcity and a coastal flight from climate change erasing all progress we've made but for now we are in a period where global violence i'm not kidding i'm in a dark spot and it's real and i'm not doing my peacemakers off in the blow thing um so but within that potential snag global violence is declining and uh global behavioral moral disgust is increasing this is a wonderful thing because our moral progress moves faster than our social change but it's the engine that drives it right so one thing today we're realizing post-racial whiteness is a real bag of shit but post-racial whiteness is an improvement over active segregation and lynch mobs because what happened we started to advance morally so what's happening now people are seeing the shortcomings with post-racial attitudes and the way that perpetuates a system of white supremacy and they're going this is unacceptable how many white people know what to do about it but we're starting to get disgusted and that disgust hopefully is the engine that makes things better so i actually think that increasing expansion of knowledge about the world from the internet is good i actually think it's good that we're so grieved by so many things because we're seeing it's putting a light on how far we need to go we are not at a point of universal human flourishing and some people thought we were and thank god some of us are trying to realize that we're not thank god some people are starting to realize that we're not now the the thing that concerns me i think every human action makes sense inside a set of incentives every human action everything i think if you set the right incentives around a brain it makes a lot of sense to put people in a gas chamber from that perspective it's morally wrong but it makes sense for the individual for that structure so what concerns me right now is the degree to which our socioeconomic and societal incentives encourage white panic as a valid response a moral regression i've heard it said several times at wild goose i didn't coin this phrase but if you're privileged equality can look like oppression right so what concerns me now uh it's no secret i'm not a trump fan but what trump and brexit represent as a reaction to progress and a fear of loss of standing is for some people does the kind of brutality we saw against civil rights leaders in the 60s justified to perpetuate a system that their individual incentives align with that moral progress comes with a cost because sometimes pursuing that next level of freedom and justice involves waking the dragon right it's like we're literally like we're uh we're bilbo going into smaug trying to get the gold and smell goes wait a second that won't stand the dragon was there the whole time the dragon was dangerous the whole time but now the dragon's awake and afraid yeah the other thing about the internet that so i i agree that it has given us this ability to see more of reality to see some of the stuff that's been happening even though police have been brutalizing black people for a lot longer than the last five years um smartphones and the internet have allowed all of us to start seeing it which is horrifying but also awakening right so um but the one of the downsides of that techno technology i think and the internet and all the social media and everything in this move of progress as we're discussing we also find we build our own communities that can so easily become echo chambers for what we already think and so it seems like there's been especially with the rise of you know trump and all this that's been happening people are getting bolder about their racism about their overtly disgusting ideas um because they can create an echo chamber where there's like they're not alone in saying it and they it feels like normal to them now so uh you know before if you just live in a town and you're a neo-nazi you know kind of good luck finding another one maybe you can and you meet in some secret basement once in a while or something now you just do a couple you click twice and you have a community of neo4j neonazis.org like yeah and now and now you're in a community that's not only feeding that but making you feel justified in it it's like implanting it more in you so not that the enemies of progress are can be stronger as well with the internet and with technology and so i think that's one side of of the coin that's an interesting thing to think about and how how does that affect me and am i just creating my own echo chambers and you know i think that's an interesting conversation to have yeah i mean steve jobs said that computers would be a bicycle for the mind that would be this thing that made our minds so much more efficient and the internet multiplied that but i think the internet can also be a gun for the mind yeah it's just a force multiplier yeah and whatever you put into it you get back really really really multiplied we've never done a show on the internet yeah we should yeah i think you might have just inspired an entire episode another question come on up i was i'm so glad it's not another dude no offense fellas welcome to our egalitarian podcast with white men so as i've heard you speak i am a 60 year old woman my name is kathy i'm from northern virginia and i honor not a neo-nazi hopefully no yeah but i honor the lament and the experience that i've had and i felt the community has had tonight in your honesty and you're searching i have a granddaughter who's two oh wow and i think of all the children seven generations out i work in teaching mindfulness and yoga and i lead hikes on the appalachian trail in a very high stress area in the dc area [Music] encouraging people to non-dual awareness so what i've experienced tonight and what i want to ask you can you hear the lament and the hope the science and the art the multiple disciplines that you invited us to earlier mike in the earlier conversation as a hope for the future non-duality i've had the privilege of being in africa and east africa i was in rwanda at the 10th on the 10th anniversary of the genocide so the violence and the horror that one human can do to another is always alive in me from that place from the relationships i made there but as i listen to you and i look at the people here and the age of the people listening on the podcast it's seven generations out we're having this conversation for art and science multiple disciplines all inviting the spirituality of non-dual it's not this or that and holding them together what are the practices what are the questions and i want to thank you uh but also ask you can you see the non-duality in the pain and the hope that you're doing you are actually doing and sending out into the world now thank you thank you i i think i'm a real good uh professor of non-duality as in speaker of claimer to be and i'm a non-duality hypocrite uh because then i immediately oh that's a science idea that's an art idea like literally he won't really do it as much as i like to but i would prefer to split the show into three segments where we talk about science and then art and then faith and uh duality and categorization is a fundamental function of human cognition we have this sea of sensory data and it's too much so we our brains got to figure out what to throw away to build a cohesive narrative so that we can find food sex shelter fulfillment it is such a challenging thing even after you've read a lot of richard rohr to actually put into practice this non-dual thinking it's such a natural effortless tendency for the brand to go well that's a and that's b and that's a and that's b and that's b and that's a so easy to just words words towards words and i did this a lot i pat myself on the back and it's not actually like an ego thing it's a recovering fundamentalist thing so i'm literally just like training my elephant and giving it a treat because in my evangelical days the level of lament i'm expressing right now was totally uh forbidden so i last night i had to sit there i immediately started thinking of solution-oriented inspirational treats tweets in the face of dallas or treats uh instead i said nope i'm just gonna be sad and angry and know that for a season i can't see the hope that defines how i approach the world doesn't mean it's gone and in its own way sitting in this space will enable the hope to be genuine and authentic and real and living but i think that i think we try to embody that multi-disciplinary non-dualistic view of the world but for me at least i don't know about michael with my past it is a constant intentional effort the easy thing the default thing uh i had a friend recently we were in the car and he said you know i was talking to another friend and he was talking another friend about you and he said we were talking about how you once introduced yourself as a southern baptist atheist and how it's hilarious because you really still are a southern baptist atheist like you'll talk about all this mystic stuff but if you don't like concentrate you revert back into a dualistic framework and just reject one of the dualities i mean i think the reason we do our show the way we do it and the reason uh we start a program without a conclusion is to publicly live out for people who've had a past like we have um trying to embrace a greater fullness of life like they're i feel so bad for all my baptist friends and i'm not kidding this isn't pity but like they don't have a neurocognitive container for police brutality and systemic abuse it's not it's not there's no room for it in the categorization they can't accept the idea that god's ordained government is and us as we participate in it actively oppressing anyone who's not white anyone who's not male and he was not straight it's it's like we're talking about text written on the wall in blue to people wearing blue glasses and they genuinely go okay i'll look the wall's white there's nothing there what are you talking about and that's why we try to embody this stuff is to try to help people because it you know i don't know why but there are there are conservative evangelicals who listen to the podcast [Music] and like a lot and uh i want to i want to honor their opinions do it secretly really right texas downloads a lot but doesn't share with their friends and um that's literally true texas is the second highest download market but the lowest social share rate of any of the top ten states so um but we're trying we're trying to live this thing out to help people uh find their own path yeah i don't know it's funny our brains like we have a lot of similarities but then we have enough differences where it's a nice counterpoint because i really do see i mean listening to mike talk about gravitational waves is the same thing as listening to music to me it's like this one thing it's just this it's just reality frankly some of the ways in the last couple years um that i see all the lines blurring scares me a little at times to talk about it because it can be offensive to certain planes on some levels through that's that's what i was trying to get out earlier like seeing that what what happened and seeing the chaos from different perspectives because on some level it is me who is the shooter and it is me who was shot and that's maybe to me like the kind of the deepest truest level and [Music] you can't say that in all circumstances you can't say that to the family you know what i mean but for me in navigating reality i see myself in all of it i see all of them in me i see god in all of it it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists come on up is next my name is julia zaleski i am a student from boone north carolina um i've been very comforted by your guys's podcast over the last year i appreciate your thoughts and thank you um your freedom to explore faith um so i'm speaking as the next generation um she talks about seven seven years um you know that we are the people that are going to change what's happening and the atrocities that we've seen so i wanted to talk to you guys about kind of the contrasting just hope i know there's like so much lament right now and there's so much pain in this moment and i wanted to present that paradox the other side of what that looks like so as you guys were talking i was thinking about victor frankl and man search for meaning you know that human beings we orient our entire lives to find meaning and i was thinking about pain and how when we find purpose for that pain that the logo therapy that victor frankel presented is the biggest way that we heal as human beings um so in these moments of us healing as humanity across the board not separated by countries and nationality um i was wondering if you could speak towards the purpose and how does gospel um tie into where we're at right now you know so what does jesus say about where we're at because i know that if god is a creator that he didn't create he's not a bad one you know there is purpose that there's a place that we're going so speaking about the meaning and also the future as we create this new world like we're not being left here and as you guys are speaking you know there are so many heads nodding in this place and there is an entire people that stand together we stand with you in that lament so if you speak towards purpose and where we're going together as a people stand it standing in unity united for peace how does gospel tie into purpose for the pain so as we move to the future yeah what is it all about [Laughter] simple simple question well in 2035 okay google will become self-aware [Laughter] so you want to go first i feel like i go first the whole time and then i feel like a jerk but then it is you've got something queued up and i do have something this is conversation tree 1392b not that i have a prepared answer for everything just most things um when i talked earlier about my basic optimistic view of humanity most of that is people who were born after generation x so there's like this really fashionable thing i worked in a giant company and everybody loved to like talk about how millennials were the end of everything they don't get mortgages and they don't buy new cars they'll get married as often oh my gosh helter skelter cats and dogs living together economic calamity they go on vacation they don't buy as much stuff we've got to convince them to buy stuff i'm talking about very very successful powerful people and this is a panic conversation we had every eight minutes and then i look at data points on millennials and frankly millennials you're nowhere nearly as badass as whatever we're going to call the thing that's following you uh the most by the numbers moral human beings in american history it's not even close i don't care what metric you want to use right uh acceptance of the other fully embrace diversity drug use contraception use pregnancy abortion rates uh sex rates every measure you want to use i don't care if a conservative progressive whatever you value they're doing it better than you are if you're generation x or above right uh by the way generation x we were terrible terrible terrible especially on that drug use metrics [Laughter] like the boomers are horrible give me more of that um like young too so i get this against hopefulness because in one respect how do we fix the world uh the same way this story of moses and the promised land fixed it the old people die as long as as long as we don't corrupt you before we check out things are going to be pretty good because you're going to be like marriage equality i don't care what are you talking about the most conservative among us like conservative evangelical millennials like still majority are like i don't care because they're alive you know what i mean like what it when's monaro you know what i mean and but this value of lived experience over material possession which terrifies our capitalistic soul in this country i think represents a transcendence of a system of bondage affluent straight white men are also bound up in white supremacy and economic supremacy and capitalistic frameworks and you know how i know that because they kill themselves more than anybody else who does the most suicide affluent white men why because they were told they owned the world and they got it and it tasted like ashes right so that that that fills me with hope so what's meaning it does it does because we're re we're realizing the bill of goods we were sold was fraudulent it's fraudulent what we were told was success is shitty it's horrible and we're realizing it i quit a really really really really great ad job to podcast economic calamity in my home and i've never been happier why because what is this great commission go you therefore boy that sounds colonial that sounds really colonial especially if you read the king james version but there's this beautiful idea of what is salvation oh salvation is where there's a sacrificial lamb that protects us from an angry punitive god sorry i reached oh no no no no no no no no no actually it's a it's a it's a it's a ransom paid to the devil what god's got to pay a ransom to the devil that's your fix to like the evil angry let me kill my son so i don't kill you god here's an older idea which uh my beloved eastern orthodox folks talk about what is sodorology it is the christ the universal reconciling energy of god drawing a sick humanity towards healing and so then what do we go ye therefore you who were sick and have now started to heal you can stand again amen the first thing you do is put a wet cloth on the guy in the bed next to you that's how you make disciples you through your healing help others to heal and that is the redemptive perspective on suffering the reason i can justify the suffering i've had in my life do you know how my heart breaks every time someone tells me they were bullied every time that i can go there with them you know what i mean because i understand what it's like to be so angry you'd love to take a gun to school i know exactly what's that that's like and that hurt is like only because i've been there but that christ that story of jesus which i believe somewhat foolishly kept me alive and it healed me and now i can help others to find the same healing go ye therefore [Applause] 1392b if you search that number this computer a good chance something's going to come up um i thought there's a really good point about all of it was beautiful but i love how even when you think about salvation and healing how that might as as we continue to grow hopefully and as the old people died you can redefine because what is healing because for the way we grew up healing was making sure i go to heaven when i die right and pray on the gay away yeah and and and healing often in america is getting ever being successful i was healthy wealthy um winning the game and that somehow that gets associated with healing and so when somebody's in a wheelchair now and lost their health and lost their money unless they're are they thriving based in our sociology are they moving in salvation or is there something you know so to me at this point and it's not as cliche and simple as it sounds the end of the road the end of all the roads is love it's just that's when the ant when what does it mean to be free what does it mean to be healed means you are fully in love you are fully not in love with somebody something some story some one particular road you are completely engulfed in love and open and free and then the circumstances happen as they will and you can play the game and have money not have money be healthy not be healthy um believe all the correct and quotes things whatever i mean where does it lead and that's what so when you talk about the this question started with so how does the gospel fit into this and to me one thing a guy that we've argued about in the past on the podcast ken wilbur one i heard him make a point one time about religion that i thought was really fascinating and and good uh which relates to the spiral dynamics thing if any of you have listened to our podcast for purpose by the way we call this the green festival yeah um but anyway how religion and a story like the story of jesus how it evolves even probably for most of the people that are listening to this it started as something you heard about this guy jesus that you had to invite into your heart and that was like a literal picture in your head and that became some sort of ticket into the afterlife you know whatever and then maybe it got a little bit more sophisticated with like well he wasn't he didn't actually come live into my physical heart there's like a spiritual heart and as i invite him then i still have my st you know and it keeps growing and changing and then oh it's appeasing the wrath of god and then no it's not repeating the wrath it's abusing the love of god oh no it's and it keeps kind of evolving but it's almost like this conveyor belt that can move you forward and forward into love more and more and more and more more as your understanding of the world of science of philosophy of whatever continues to grow and shape and evolve the language there the mysteries the stories as much as i've deconstructed everything except there's still something about jesus and i don't think that would be the case if i grew up in pakistan or something probably most likely but i didn't i grew up with a picture of jesus on the wall and my dad telling me about jesus and told me that jesus loved me and jesus wanted to save me and so the gospel as it moves forward i don't know what will happen with the language of the future generations of will how will the gospel what will people 100 years from now will what will the gospel have turned into well jesus how will people talk about jesus what will people do with the bible i don't know but for me my faith and this story in the gospel has been a very helpful conveyor belt of sorts to keep moving me into love and the particulars and the mysteries in the language has evolved and shifted and shaped through the years but i think keeping that open hand as i'm going down the conveyor belt and and recognizing these languages words that i use like god and jesus and salvation they're meaningful to me because they come out of my past and my history and they have some place in my psyche that is apparently meaningful but moving through that towards love i think that's for me been the the most imp is it this current how do you define healing and to me i would define it as love i guess that's all i'm saying which is a simple thing but time for one more maybe we have five minutes so yeah we could do one more with brief our answer like yeah it takes us three minutes to like repeat the question back to you so one more anybody come on up yeah so uh i hate to take the conversation backwards but my question about something that you both touched on earlier where you were talking about a cynicism and how to protect yourself from it by avoiding the people that drive into mistrust how then personally do you guys avoid the silo and the echo chamber and then the flip side of that is what in your experience and your conversations with people of different ideologies um what has been most effective in opening up new categories for them understanding the world and and other people's experiences okay yeah i think coming to love tension on some as a as a as a mode to growth like we don't people have been worried at times when we've disagreed about stuff like is the podcast over and out what are you talking about this is how we love if we can find a place that we disagree which is not really that often but we can find it's like oh cool something to work out and if i move in here give me a better argument and i'll change my mind you know like um loving growth growth doesn't happen without tension without conflict with if so if i'm only hearing stuff that affirms what i already think all the time i'm only hanging out with people that think exactly like me all the time um i just get bored um it's not even maybe a good or holy thing i just i get bored i like i personally i like music that has dissonance in it i like you know um because i found that when and sometimes i was gonna say when it resolves but i don't always want it to resolve sometimes when it resolves it's a really nice feeling sometimes you're just like it didn't resolve and i like that too but i think loving loving dissonance on some level is for me how i avoid just a complete echo chamber all the time my affiliation with other people has nothing to do with agreement agreement is like the least interesting thing in the world to me uh my affiliation with people is based on a mutual recognition of each other's basic human dignity so i love it when people believe different things than i do i love it when they can brilliantly articulate them and challenge my thinking what i don't love is when someone who has been near and dear to me every time we have a conversation the only thing they can tell me is that my life's calling is sending thousands of people to hell a day and no matter how many times i have the conversation say i understand you believe that can we agree i understand you believe that and not just sit there and they can't this is when i set up a boundary it's not that i cut them out of my life but it is okay to tell others the terms by which you will be in relationship with them and it is okay for them to do the same to you that's how people are healthy now here's a caveat what boundary can a marginalized person set up to their oppressor [Music] this is why i talk so much about tone why i talk so much about being aware of systems in conversations sometimes the onus is on the privileged to give the marginalized the boundary that they need i have so many friends who would otherwise be amazing racial justice advocates who get really offended that they would not be allowed to go to a business meeting in a black lives matter organization but sometimes people just need their space right like i want to say to them well when you were 19 did you always want your mom in your room right it doesn't mean you hate your mom and i believe me i'm not saying like a a parental relationship between supremacy it's just a weak analogy but my point is sometimes people need room to grow and flourish and it's okay for you to set those boundaries it's okay for you to demand those boundaries in love but yeah agreement the people i'm least likely to hang out with are the ones who go oh i just love everything you say thank you i'll see you on the internet but the person who has the thoughtful critique the person who challenges me some of my my favorite conversations are with just really really theologically dialed in historically aware conservative evangelicals oh man like their traditional theist as hell and they can just challenge all my assumptions and i love it i love it i love it i love it at the same time i have no problem if somebody has alt-right white nationalists in their twitter bio just hitting the block button and moving on right i don't think that creates an echo chamber i think that creates personal help so to bring our beautiful experience level way down into a commercial uh we've had this amazing time together and if you out there and podcast lamb would like to do something very much like this we're doing the liturgist gathering in denver and chicago in september and october it will be like this us having a conversation with you only uh we'll interrupt uh the talking to have music from michael and lisa gunger and maybe some folks playing strings so we'd love to see you in denver or chicago you can find out more at the liturgist.com gathering of course we'd love to hear what you thought about this mid-season break episode at the liturgist.com podcast facebook.com solidus or twitter at the liturgist thanks for listening everybody i'm science mike i'm michael gunger [Music] peace [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you