05/02/2012
Tanya Luhrmann on Magic, God, and the Supernatural
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Watkins University Professor in the Stanford Anthropology Department. She also holds a courtesy appointment in the Stanford Psychology Department. She received her PhD from Cambridge University in 1986. Her books include “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft,” (Harvard, 1989); “The Good Parsi” (Harvard 1996); “Of Two Minds” (Knopf 2000) and “When […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison.
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We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Why don't we start today with a quote from comrade, "Hara Clitus."
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Though the logos is common to all, most men live as if they had a private intelligence of their own.
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It would take years to unpack that saying, "Here's another one.
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Man is not rational, only the surrounding substance is rational."
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I wonder about that surrounding substance.
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The hundred billion galaxies in our visible universe make up only 5% of the cosmos as a whole.
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The other 95% consists of inscrutable dark matter and dark energy.
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That's strangely similar to the universe of the human mind.
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I reckon no more than 5% of our mental life is governed by logic and reason,
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or what "Hara Clitus" called the logos.
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The other 95% includes our dreams and delusions,
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our most deeply held convictions, our varieties of religious experience,
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and our irrepressible subconscious thoughts.
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That's right, most of our psychic life takes place in the dark matter and dark energy of the mind.
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Stay tuned in titled opinions, goes for the roots.
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One of my cherished colleagues at Stanford,
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the professor of religious studies, now retired,
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said something in passing many years back that obviously made an impression on me,
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since I can still see him shaking his head as he said it.
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I never ceased to be amazed at what some people believe.
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He wasn't talking about uneducated gullible people out in some backwater,
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he was talking about fellow colleagues at Stanford and other institutions of higher learning.
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I'm sure that everyone would be amazed to learn what his or her neighbors really believe in the depths of their psyches.
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Fortunately, in our institutional and social interactions,
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we stick mostly to the logos that is common to all and never find out what an extravagant stranger,
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my closest friend or relative really is when it comes to their intimate beliefs.
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Of course, the next issue here is what we mean when we say that someone believes something.
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Just as there are more things in heaven and earth than our dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy,
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there's a lot more to the phenomenon of belief than merely subscribing to improbable, unverifiable, or absurd opinions.
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Belief is far too narrow a word for all that takes place in the swirl of dark energy and dark matter that agitates our psychic lives.
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The person who joins me in the studio today is devoted much of her career to exploring certain aspects of this swirl.
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Tanya Lourman is a professor in the Department of Anthropology here at Stanford,
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and her most recent book, which has just hit the shelves, is called "When God Talks Back."
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This book investigates, and I'm reading here from the catalog description,
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"How sensible people of faith are able to experience the presence of a powerful, yet invisible being, and sustain that belief in an environment of overwhelming skepticism."
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A couple of decades ago, Professor Lourman wrote another fascinating book about the widespread practice of magic and witchcraft among educated middle-class people in contemporary England.
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We're going to be talking with her today about those two books and what she has learned about how ordinary people engage with the supernatural on an everyday basis. Tanya, welcome to the program.
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It's great to be here, thanks. Before we talk about "When God Talks Back," which is obviously the new book that's been getting a lot of attention in the last week,
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has just come out, this book that you wrote in the 80s called "Perswations of the Witches Craft,"
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subtitle "Ritual Magic in Contemporary England." I think is a kind of in a continuum with the book on God speaking back.
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In the introduction to that book, you write the following, and maybe we can begin with that. You say that the broad question at the theoretical center of this inquiry is the nature of rationality and irrationality and the basic form of human cognition.
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You go on to say, one of our most comfortable assumptions is of the rational human, of our purposeful effective action and our logically consistent ideas and motivations.
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Most people will consciously acknowledge this to be an unnatural ideal, nevertheless faith in one's own basic rationality has a strong hold on this culture, and the way in which we are not rational is not well understood.
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Now, you're what you self-described kind of psychological anthropologist in part.
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That's right, yes.
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Would you, would it be fair to say that a lot of your work has been devoted to trying to figure out the ways in which we are not rational?
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Yes, I would say that I've been really interested in the domain of these invisible supernatural forces or beings and how people find that they have a lot of the same thing.
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So, find that they have evidence for their existence.
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So, beginning with your first study there, I don't take it that it's your first book, I don't know if it's your first field work as such, but you discovered when you were in England that a number of people, surprisingly large amount of people, were engaged in kind of Neil Pagan forms of ritual practice that we associate either,
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with witchcraft or with magic.
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So, these are people who call themselves witches and druids and initiates to the Western mysteries, but they all shared the idea that they were practicing magic, and what they meant by magic was that there were these supernatural forces in the world that didn't necessarily use that word, but that there were these forces in the world that many scientists might feel skeptical about,
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that you could use your mind to manipulate these forces and direct them in particular ways.
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So, people would do spells to get the house next door, they would do rituals to import truth into British politics,
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they would do these practices that seemed to have pretty concrete outcomes, and what interested me or the story of this book is that I began this project in the early days of cognitive science,
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and I thought that what I was going to do was to figure out the narrative structures that help people to interpret the presence of these forces, take a kind of agnostic approach towards these forces,
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I don't really have a horse in the race of what's real, but it's certainly striking that with magic many people don't believe that the magic is real, so you can ask why do some people report that they effectively use magic to organize their lives.
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And I have to say that I was kind of skeptical about whether the magical ritual really would change the nature of British politics myself.
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British politics.
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Yeah, so people did, when I was with anthropologists go native and then they come back, so one of the groups that I was with did a ritual to change the nature of political discourse in England.
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And when I found, so I expected to find a set of narratives, prototypes, cognitive concepts, ways of thinking about the world that people would acquire as they came into these groups, and that these new ways of categorizing would help them reorganize the way that they interpreted evidence, and that these new concepts would help them see that the magic worked.
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And I found that, but what I was much more struck by is that people would say, if you want to do magic, you've got to practice, practice is hard, some people are going to be better than others, and that people who practice and are good, they're going to change.
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And what I found is that I started practicing magic, and I felt the magical power. Now, again, I'm not like I don't have a horse in the race or whether it's real, but I can tell you that it was a physical experience.
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You could feel, I could feel something change in my body, I could feel what I was tempted to call force moving through me.
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And so that made me really, really interested in the practices and how the practices changed the mind and trained the mind in certain ways.
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Well, of course, the big question is, it can change the mind, it can change the person or the subject who practices magic, there can be a kind of spiritual metamorphosis within, and all that can be attested to by the experience of the person practicing.
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The other question, though, is whether the practice of magic actually changes anything in the outside reality, outside of the psyche of the practitioner.
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And here's where the claims of magic bump up often against the empirical, the kind of absolute "no," or what the French called, "lude non du pé," the "no of the father," who says, "no."
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So your practice is not actually bringing about a series of effects in the real world, it's not transforming the matter into gold and so forth. It might be transforming the soul, but not the world of matter.
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So I don't think that a social scientist can answer that question. I guess I put into the same domain claims about spirits and magic and God in the divine.
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These are impassioned domains of human experience, people have powerful beliefs and ideas about them.
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I don't think that I can answer that question. What I can say, or the way that I think about it, is that if the magic is real, look God is real, these experiences happen through the human mind.
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And a psychological anthropologist can say something about what the mind is doing, how the mind changes, and why people report these experiences.
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So it's important for you as a social scientist to undergo the experience within your own, let's say, psychic subjectivity in order to substantiate, or legitimate the claims that you make.
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As a social scientist, about the phenomenon or consideration.
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So anthropology is a particular kind of social science. And what the anthropologist does is to in effect learn to enter the world that he or she has come to study, to try to figure out what it would take to really enter that world, and to observe what people are doing, the practices they share, the concepts they share, and then to return to the
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to in effect learn to enter the world that he or she has come to study, to try to figure
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out what it would take to really enter that world, and to observe what people are doing,
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the practices they share, the concepts they share, and then to return to the desk and describe
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it.
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Now I don't think that my personal experience tells us very much unless what I see is
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what I experience is matched by other people and their experiences.
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So would I say that my experience of feeling force run through my body, is that what
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magicians experience, who knows, is it true that people talk about magical power, or
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when I knew them in London that they talked about magical power as if it was an electrical
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force that they felt in their body, absolutely.
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And I think what was so powerful for me is that I had gone into that project thinking,
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look, this is about ideas.
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You acquire ways of talking.
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So you talk about the world differently.
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And while that's true, I realize that these practices are far more powerful than that.
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In fact, you say in your introduction that the word belief is a highly vexed term and that
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you are going to try to avoid using it until the very last chapter and you do a good
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job of not using that, which I think is interesting.
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At the same time, you refer to this as an impassioned domain.
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And I guess if I understood you correctly, the anthropologist and you has to undergo this
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passion in the first person in order to go back to the desk and then speak about it with
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some kind of authority.
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I certainly think it helps.
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So that if you enter a world, it could glosses, religious or spiritual, which the folks
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in these magical domains would do.
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If you enter that world with the sense that these people are fools, I don't think you're
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going to write a very sympathetic or deep understanding of their experience.
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Oh, I agree with that.
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And here we're talking about a phenomenon magic which has a kind of universal extension
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in human cultures and it's not just the primitive cultures.
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And it's not just in our prehistory, but as you discovered in contemporary England among
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well-educated middle class people, it still has a lot of purchase.
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You have a note that struck me where you say that one might say that a central task in sociology
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has been to explain how the elimination of magic was ever possible and how it was that Western
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society moved into its rational mode.
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And I find that persuasive, namely that rationality, which we take to be the laws of truth
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and evidence and so forth is actually historically speaking and culturally speaking from
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a broad point of view now, a very radical exception in an otherwise long continuous story
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of belief in magic or practices of magic or some kind of commitment to the magical nature
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of reality itself.
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So I would actually use the word secularism.
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So I think that what has happened in the last 100, 150, 200 years, depending on the way
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you count, in Western settings and in Westernized settings is that people do not routinely
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reach for the divine or the supernatural of the spiritual as the explanation for events,
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at least in America we rarely see God as an explanation on national secular TV.
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And that is arguably an exception over the course of human history.
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I'm not sure we're smarter or more logical, but I do think that that domain, that explanatory
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domain has been sharply curtailed and any person who is religious or practicing whatever.
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In this kind of society is sharply aware that there are smart, reasonable people who don't
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take those ideas for granted.
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Right.
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Well, here are two remarks.
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I did a show recently where we were discussing Nietzsche's dictum that God is dead.
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And if you were to tell Nietzsche that 100 years later, or under 20 years later, that 95%
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of Americans believe in God or some kind of higher power, he would not say that that changes
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anything in the equation in the sense that it's one thing to believe in a personal God
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that is part of my own personal psychic experience.
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It's another to have God be the foundation of a society, of the geopolitics, of the age,
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of the art, of the age, of the philosophy and ideology.
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So it's yes.
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I agree that in the last 100 years or 200 years, the secularization has removed God from
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the institutional forms of embodiment of that.
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At the same time, magic as something that lives on in our own secular world is quite fascinating
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and I think it must say something about the human psyche that it must fulfill some desire, if
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not need in some people's psyche, that in other words, it may be sponsored by desire,
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which I believe is always a more powerful.
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In fact, I think knowledge is no match for the will of desire to that certain things
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be the case and is there a strong, willful element in the magicians that you were exposed
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to in your experience in England?
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I think magic like religion is fueled by fear and by hope and what happens developmentally
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we know is that children, young children, don't separate their mind from the world.
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They see they often experience their mind as affecting things in the world.
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They think that they, if they shut a two-year-old, if you tell a two-year-old to hide,
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a two-year-old will sometimes shut his or her eyes and believe that if the two-year-old
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can't see, the two-year-old can't be seen.
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And so very early on, there is a sense that human thought affects the world at large.
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So somebody like Jean Piaget, thought that the task of adulthood was to dampen down that
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experience of thought.
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And actually Freud and Piaget are both on the same page with this.
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And they talk about it as imagination.
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They see that the imagination is something very childish.
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There's a psychologist called Paul Harris who's now making the good argument that, in
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fact, the imagination is something different and that it is a source of great creativity.
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I mean, why we needed a psychologist to tell us this, I don't know.
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But in any event, the capacity to imagine things that are not present before us is part
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of the greatest part of the source of our empathy.
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It's part of the source of our ability to change the world around us.
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And that has a connection with this capacity to see one's thought active in the world.
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So I think that magical thinking has, which basically is the idea that you use your mind
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and you change something in the world.
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Has its roots in early human consciousness?
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It fuels our ambitions and our drives and our desires.
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It enables us to change the world around us.
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And it is a powerful response.
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It gives us hope when things look bleak and it gives us protects us from fear when things
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look scary.
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So it's not a question of using the powers of magic to exercise greater control over
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the world.
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natural between thought and matter or thought and the world and it may well turn out
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and I think it will turn out eventually through physics and science that the mind is actually
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a very active agent, when it comes to determining the nature of reality. In fact, a lot of Western
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metaphysics, traditional philosophy has already told the story of the way in which the mind
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is in many ways the shaper of what are the conditions of the possibility of perception
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and so on and so forth. The jury is still out on that.
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I mean, we also call that psychotherapy, the way that you change your mind, changes the
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way you are in the world. And so the thoughts, if you can replace fearful critical thoughts
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with positive hopeful thoughts, you're going to be happier, you can be more effective,
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the world actually will change more. Well, we're also in an era I think recently where there's
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this kind of dogmatic orthodoxy of the power of positive thinking, which I think is rather
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a trivialized degraded version. I actually prefer magic. The power of positive thinking,
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are you going New York City and all these ambitious people in the system of business
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corporations and things are all reading the power of positive thinking that is going to
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get them the next promotion and so forth. These magicians that you spent time with, and then
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we'll talk about the other evangelicals, but they therefore believed in a highly disciplined
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cultivation of the inner imagination in order to allow the forces of magic to be released.
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Right. And so what made them different from people is that we're off a lot of people
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will carry a special pen to write an important exam so there are people who do little superstitious
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things all the time to really throw your identity into sustaining that belief in magic.
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I mean most people who carry superstitious print pen into an exam will laugh about it
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that they doesn't really write. But you know, I just feel more comfortable with it.
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These refokes are putting on long robes and meeting in living rooms to invoke higher powers
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and directing them in places. So the idea of magical practice that I found in these groups
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was that you would use your mind to represent a mental image and that you would really
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focus on that image and you would try to use all your inner senses, your mind's eye,
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your mind's ear, your mind's nose, to really imagine that vividly in your mind. And somehow
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power would shoot through that image out into the world. So these ideas have a very long
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history. Most of these people would trace the writing that's often mentioned is Hermeas
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Trismadjustice. And this is his work is described as Hermeasic magic. He's a second century author
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borrowed, borrowed ideas from Christianity and Platonism. And the tools that he's describing
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are basically the tools that you find throughout magical practice. It's also you also find
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them throughout Christian practice and Jewish practice and Islamic practice. But so this idea
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that the mind can somehow change something in the world by imagining it vividly is at the
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heart of what these magicians did. And they would read Greek myths and Celtic myths and
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Nordic myths and Egyptian myths and they sort of weaved together originally a imaginative
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world in which I mean I knew people who had 100 goddess statues in the room that they
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had a side for ritual. And they'd organize these ideas in particular ways. And it was a lot
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of fun. Actually I mean people knew all of these, you know, they'd use tarot, they'd use astrology,
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they'd pay attention to their dreams and they lived in this symbolically rich world.
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In fact you say that there's a great deal of spiritual diversity or kind of promiscuity that
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can take their inspiration from all sorts of heterogeneous sources. Christian, pagan, Celtic,
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Egyptian, occult, yeah. So there's a way in which this, and this is interesting because
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it means that they're not particularly anxious about boundaries. Boundaries or porous boundaries
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are fluid and it's the same kind of relaxed attitude about the boundary between the mind
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and matter or the, you know, so therefore there's a syncretic, let's say, tendency that
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you noticed in most of these practitioners, these magicians, right?
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So these were folks who, I mean depending on their brand of magic, saw themselves as practicing
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a very ancient spiritual form, the witches in particular would see themselves following
|
| 00:27:41.040 |
an earth goddess who is represented around the world in many, many different ways. So
|
| 00:27:46.360 |
she has many, many different names and it doesn't really matter whether you go to an African
|
| 00:27:51.340 |
source or an Egyptian source or a Celtic source. You know, she's still, she's carried
|
| 00:27:56.120 |
when she's ISIS, she's in another form, she's hecadate and they would see so that they,
|
| 00:28:03.680 |
you know, there's this quaint book Edwardian treasure trove by James George Frazier called
|
| 00:28:09.920 |
the Golden Bough, which talks about all of these different nature fertility rituals
|
| 00:28:15.120 |
in which the sort of transformation of the world in the spring and the fall and the winter
|
| 00:28:22.400 |
are represented by different legends. And so, but the legends, the people acting, the
|
| 00:28:29.120 |
legends have different names anywhere you go. So this is, so people would build together
|
| 00:28:35.240 |
this, whatever story is about this goddess that spoke to them.
|
| 00:28:42.480 |
One of my favorite books on this topic is called The Great Mother, The Great Mother,
|
| 00:28:47.680 |
and it's called The Great Cosmic Mother. It's co-author and mine.
|
| 00:28:50.920 |
Like a zoo. Monica Sedu and the other, there's two authors. Fabulous book, I think it's
|
| 00:28:58.120 |
a great book. So I guess the question that we can start approaching now is this book of yours
|
| 00:29:11.120 |
out, which is called when God talks back. And here, you know, the, I know that early history
|
| 00:29:19.440 |
of Christianity, the church was extremely paranoid about distinguishing its own agenda
|
| 00:29:25.080 |
from all these pagan practices that involved a great deal of magic and so forth. And some
|
| 00:29:31.920 |
of the early Christians were just adopting Jesus as just another person of personifications,
|
| 00:29:39.680 |
and of course, that would draw into this kind of promiscuous, kind of rather chaotic world
|
| 00:29:45.800 |
of witchcraft and so forth. And the church was highly suspicious and when it gained institutional
|
| 00:29:53.520 |
power, it was extremely prosecutorial. I mean, it persecuted the remnants of these
|
| 00:30:00.680 |
in the opaque traditions quite forcefully. Also, because perhaps there was an anxiety about the
|
| 00:30:10.040 |
truth claims for its own doctrines that could easily be assimilated to magic. I mean,
|
| 00:30:17.720 |
some of the doctrines can be as unbelievable as some of the others. So anyway, now,
|
| 00:30:24.040 |
you know, 20 years later you start studying a completely different group of people in the
|
| 00:30:30.360 |
United States this time and these are people, these are evangelicals in the vineyard Christian
|
| 00:30:38.220 |
fellowship is at the name that has an evangelical church that has what about 600 chapters
|
| 00:30:43.680 |
around the United States. And can you tell us a little bit about the vineyard and these
|
| 00:30:49.520 |
people that you spent some time with?
|
| 00:30:51.480 |
So the vineyard represents, as I see it, the shift in American spirituality since 1965.
|
| 00:30:58.520 |
So since that time, since that great period of social upheaval, people have wanted to experience
|
| 00:31:04.680 |
the divine directly. They've wanted to touch God here on earth. They wanted to have, they've
|
| 00:31:09.960 |
wanted an intimate personal relationship with God. And the vineyard represents that reach
|
| 00:31:18.200 |
for experiencing God. It also represents it in the way that many of these movements,
|
| 00:31:25.280 |
and so there are thousands of thousands of churches like this. They barred some of the
|
| 00:31:31.080 |
spiritual practices of Pentecostalism and made them tone them down and made them sort of
|
| 00:31:37.280 |
tolerable and appropriate for the white middle class audience. So these are folks who might
|
| 00:31:44.360 |
speak in tongues, but at home, usually privately. They yearn to feel the Holy Spirit move
|
| 00:31:52.280 |
through them. They believe that God will speak back to them, that they will talk to God and
|
| 00:31:58.360 |
God will talk back. They also take, they are also evangelical. They treat the Bible as
|
| 00:32:07.160 |
nearly true, true in the all-letter to firms. They see that they should evangelize to
|
| 00:32:13.320 |
some extent to folks who do not know Jesus. And then that sort of central pillar of
|
| 00:32:21.360 |
the evangelical faith, they expected a personal relationship with Jesus. The evangelical faith
|
| 00:32:28.680 |
is I think the numbers are a little hard to understand, but sort of splits into or it's
|
| 00:32:36.960 |
splits into two halves. There are folks who regard themselves as evangelical and sometimes
|
| 00:32:41.700 |
are called fundamentalist, who do not expect to have an interactive relationship with
|
| 00:32:47.720 |
God. And then they are the folks who do. So the vineyard represents those interactive people.
|
| 00:32:56.120 |
God and Jesus is it always, it does God always take the form of Jesus for these people
|
| 00:33:04.160 |
when they have their personal interactions. One of the things that also happened in 1965
|
| 00:33:09.480 |
is that God became unconditionally loving, arguably for the first time in Christian
|
| 00:33:15.840 |
history. And I'd get some pushback from people who aren't bad this, but one of the big
|
| 00:33:21.560 |
shift in 1965 is also that there are other ways to have faith. They'll at mainstream churches,
|
| 00:33:27.840 |
start losing adherence, and the Christianity becomes what I think of as a buyer's market.
|
| 00:33:37.360 |
So people don't necessarily go to the church that grew up in. In fact, an awful something
|
| 00:33:41.840 |
like a third of the baby boomers, no, even toothers of the baby boomers start stopped going
|
| 00:33:46.860 |
to the church that they grew up in. That's a huge percentage. So the God that was imagined
|
| 00:33:55.320 |
in these churches was also a God that would lure people back to practice, would be a
|
| 00:34:01.160 |
pleasing God for people. And God has been a much kinder gentler soul since 1965. So there's
|
| 00:34:08.480 |
not a lot of difference between Jesus and God. John, Edward's God, terrible God. You know,
|
| 00:34:14.000 |
John, Edward's preached the sermon called the wrath of an angry God. Sinners, something
|
| 00:34:23.040 |
like that. And he has this image of the God with his hands holding a bow and an arrow
|
| 00:34:30.240 |
pulled back pointed right at your heart. And he's going to slay you. And it's only Jesus
|
| 00:34:35.240 |
who steps in. That's not the vineyard God. Right. So he's in the hands of an angry God.
|
| 00:34:41.240 |
That's right. Yeah, that's in the great awakening phenomenon. I'm interested in this.
|
| 00:34:46.360 |
If you don't mind, I'd like to engage you on a little bit of the, well, first the claim
|
| 00:34:54.760 |
that you make that in 1965 is when this, there's this shift in you get this buyer's
|
| 00:35:01.600 |
market parentheses with the show that we did with Deppressatz. I said that God is dead. And
|
| 00:35:08.600 |
it's the madman has to go into the marketplace to announce the news that God is dead, which
|
| 00:35:12.680 |
means that the marketplace takes over what the space that God left. And now that God is subject
|
| 00:35:20.000 |
to the market forces is quite interesting. I think it just lends confirmation to that.
|
| 00:35:24.360 |
However, when you say that these vineyard people want, or in 1965, the segment of people
|
| 00:35:33.240 |
wanted to experience the divine directly, I have studied for my own personal curiosity
|
| 00:35:41.700 |
quite intensely the early Puritans in the 17th century, early 17th century came. And these
|
| 00:35:51.880 |
people did not leave England and go through the travails of crossing the Atlantic and undergoing
|
| 00:35:57.080 |
hardships and uncertainties and so forth, just to be told by their elders and their pastors
|
| 00:36:04.080 |
and their seniors in the church that you have to have patience and patience and that nothing
|
| 00:36:09.680 |
has changed and they came to this new England called new, not because it was more recent
|
| 00:36:17.840 |
version of the old because of another order of a Christian kind of renewal. This is new birth.
|
| 00:36:23.280 |
They didn't come to these shores for the same old story. They came to have the experience
|
| 00:36:28.960 |
of God directly and so many of the controversies that erupted in the early church, the
|
| 00:36:35.960 |
congregations in Massachusetts. I'm thinking of, for example, the antinomian controversy
|
| 00:36:39.800 |
and Hutchinson and so forth. These enthusiasts, as they were called, wanted to walk in the
|
| 00:36:47.440 |
covenant of grace and not in the covenant of works and they wanted the world and they wanted
|
| 00:36:52.000 |
it now. They wanted God in their lives and they thought that their churches were conspiring
|
| 00:36:57.480 |
to, again, substantiate and so forth. And so I think it's an extremely American phenomenon.
|
| 00:37:05.560 |
This idea of wanting to close the gap between the self and God that Christianity insists
|
| 00:37:15.600 |
on. So more than American, when you find periods throughout the world in which people seek
|
| 00:37:21.240 |
to touch the divine directly, Pentecostalism is arguably the fastest growing religion
|
| 00:37:27.120 |
in the world. And so I don't mean to claim that 1965 is the first time that people wanted
|
| 00:37:32.800 |
to direct an audience. I was thinking of Harold Bloom, for example, as a book called
|
| 00:37:37.760 |
the American Religion. When he looks at all these completely different, apparently different
|
| 00:37:41.680 |
denominations, but he finds that there's a common core among them, which is that first thing
|
| 00:37:48.200 |
that God is going to be now located in the self. And that this self, that there's a
|
| 00:37:54.000 |
self within myself, which is, and that's why he calls it a "nostic" rather than a Christian
|
| 00:37:59.920 |
religion, this American religion, that this core of self within the self is antecede,
|
| 00:38:06.160 |
the creation of the world. It's not part of the contaminated or corrupt demyergic created
|
| 00:38:13.520 |
the world. And that if you can go deep enough into that self, you will find their God within
|
| 00:38:20.720 |
the self. And he traces that all the way through trans-American transcendentalism and
|
| 00:38:25.760 |
Mormonism and so on and so forth. Now, I take your point that maybe in 1965, there was
|
| 00:38:34.000 |
a new sort of liberation or a new chapter of this among these people, but it does have roots,
|
| 00:38:41.760 |
I think, in that I think are particularly American. It might not be only American, but it seems to.
|
| 00:38:47.360 |
Some people would describe our periods since 1965 as the fourth grade awakening. And I think that
|
| 00:38:55.760 |
it has, it may have different causes. And it certainly has a different context because it takes place
|
| 00:39:02.960 |
in a world in which it is socially acceptable to be an atheist or a Hindu for the first time.
|
| 00:39:10.080 |
And so that's the big change. I think that this very vivid God is actually a reaction to
|
| 00:39:20.640 |
secular modernity because it enables people to protect people in certain ways from the availability
|
| 00:39:28.640 |
of their own skepticism and doubt. Well, I don't want to presume to either judge or psychoanalyze
|
| 00:39:38.960 |
people who were the ones that you were living with studying their behavior and so forth.
|
| 00:39:47.040 |
I hope many of them will tune into listening to this show out of curiosity. But however,
|
| 00:39:55.280 |
what would you say to prevent me from assuming that the relationship with God that these people
|
| 00:40:03.360 |
are insisting on is an extremely narcissistic self-involved and ultimately selfish kind of relationship
|
| 00:40:21.360 |
where they want to turn God into their best friend that you have all these fascinating examples of
|
| 00:40:28.480 |
how people will leave a cup of coffee for God or someone goes into the park and imagines God.
|
| 00:40:35.120 |
God has his arm around her and is like the best friend or the boyfriend or some and that there is
|
| 00:40:42.400 |
a way in which God talks to me directly and he gives me advice. He's my bosom pal. This is from
|
| 00:40:50.720 |
a traditional Christian point of view about the kind of deus abscondi to us. So this kind of sublime
|
| 00:40:58.000 |
and often terrifying. God, this is really quite, well, let's say if I'm playing the devil's advocate,
|
| 00:41:05.280 |
I would say this is extremely trivializing of God because he's just you're reducing the
|
| 00:41:11.680 |
grandeur of God to the status of not a Facebook friend per se but someone who are relative.
|
| 00:41:19.280 |
So they would say that they weren't reducing God and that the attempt to experience God intimately
|
| 00:41:28.480 |
is not meant to trivialize his majesty and holiness. And in fact, I mean, I did certainly see that
|
| 00:41:36.640 |
people had very complicated understandings of God and what it meant. The truth state is of sitting there
|
| 00:41:44.880 |
in a park bench with God's arm around your shoulders. And people didn't treat that as true in the
|
| 00:41:50.240 |
same way that they thought about God as the creator of the universe. So let me make an argument to
|
| 00:41:55.760 |
invite you to think about it differently than you've just laid out. It's the way that you can
|
| 00:42:04.480 |
think about this practice is that it's making your conscience or your sense of the best part of
|
| 00:42:11.360 |
yourself come alive. So if you see what people are actually doing, they're using their imagination to
|
| 00:42:18.000 |
grasp God to represent this invisible, unknowable being in their mind. They, in order to do that,
|
| 00:42:26.480 |
they draw on their understanding of this of the wisest, most compassionate parts themselves to
|
| 00:42:36.000 |
represent who God is. And they're also drawing on their sense of God from the Bible shape by the way
|
| 00:42:41.920 |
that the social community of the church imagines God. So in these churches, typically God is not
|
| 00:42:48.560 |
the God of the Old Testament. God is a particularly kindly version of a New Testament God.
|
| 00:42:55.520 |
And so they kind of create this imagined representation of God as being
|
| 00:43:01.520 |
much better and kinder and more loving than they are. And then they imagine themselves as seen
|
| 00:43:09.600 |
from God's perspective. And so seen like that, it looks a lot more like cognitive behavioral therapy
|
| 00:43:19.600 |
looks much more like good psychoanalytic psychotherapy. It looks like a way of not treating what you know
|
| 00:43:28.000 |
to be right behavior is something that you kind of know in the back of your mind, but it's something
|
| 00:43:31.920 |
that's very present and sort of available to you and thinking about how to talk to your annoying
|
| 00:43:38.480 |
physical friend. So I certainly true that I was taken aback by these practices at first. I mean,
|
| 00:43:46.240 |
that's why I decided to study this. I mean, I was just, I couldn't believe that people were
|
| 00:43:50.160 |
talked about having coffee with God. But the more that I came to watch people using their ideas
|
| 00:43:58.000 |
about God this way, the more impressed I was by their thoughtfulness and the value of this experience.
|
| 00:44:05.600 |
It's kind of like, I think it enables them to comfort themselves and to decotastrophies and to
|
| 00:44:15.920 |
reframe the difficult events of their day. Well, you know, I have no doubts about that. And again,
|
| 00:44:25.040 |
I don't want to be in the role of the secularist to prosecutor. However, that's okay.
|
| 00:44:32.240 |
I have to say that what disturbs me about it is it seems to confirm some of the worst stereotypes
|
| 00:44:44.720 |
about the religious impulse that you get in people like Freud and so forth, which is that religion is
|
| 00:44:50.080 |
something but a projection of infantile desires where God is a father figure and what the child
|
| 00:44:56.640 |
wants more than anything else is the unconditional love of the father or maybe the mother. And that
|
| 00:45:03.840 |
the idea that God has all this unconditional love for me seems to be the primary narcissistic
|
| 00:45:09.200 |
investment in this kind of personalization of the relationship to God. And I'm not a big fan of the
|
| 00:45:16.720 |
wrathful God either who tells me I hate you. But I think there's something about God's rejection
|
| 00:45:26.640 |
or hatred for a certain kind of fallen humanity. And I'm just speaking here again from a historical
|
| 00:45:33.920 |
point of view. I brought along quote of the early Puritan, one of the early Puritan critics of the
|
| 00:45:42.640 |
Quakers, because Quakers now they believed Fox, the founder of the Quaker, things he believed in
|
| 00:45:49.120 |
invisible God that is within the self. And one of the early Puritans, Roger Williams has this quote
|
| 00:45:58.000 |
where he says that, let me see if I can, that for all their talk about this invisible place where God
|
| 00:46:05.840 |
resides in the soul, yet they disown not their own visible congregateings and assembling their
|
| 00:46:12.480 |
visible teachers overseers or bishops, their visible and audible performances and worships,
|
| 00:46:18.080 |
praying, preaching, singing, etc. And why then doth this poor notoriously visible cheater,
|
| 00:46:24.960 |
Fox, thus, Pratt of invisibilities. And the essence of his polemic is summarized in the sense,
|
| 00:46:32.960 |
the wound lies here in the soothing up and flattering of rotten nature from whence, from within the
|
| 00:46:42.000 |
Lord Jesus tells us, proceeds all the rotten and hellish speeches and actions.
|
| 00:46:47.600 |
So, and I don't think that these folks that have been your approved of rotten, specious actions,
|
| 00:46:54.800 |
they don't believe in original sin, that's right. In other words, some kind of people
|
| 00:46:58.800 |
that thought the way they would talk about it, or at least I think that they might use that phrase,
|
| 00:47:05.200 |
but the way that they talk about sin is actually not so far from the way Augustine talked about sin,
|
| 00:47:10.800 |
which is as a shadow between you and God. So, it's not so much the bad behavior you do,
|
| 00:47:18.560 |
but the inability to connect to God. And so, there's a couple of things to say. First of all,
|
| 00:47:26.400 |
I think if a non-Christian college student went into a church and found the thought about
|
| 00:47:35.920 |
converting to Christianity and found that the church was explaining about a thundering,
|
| 00:47:42.800 |
Helen Brimstone kind of preacher, a God that would destroy you with you or that you had to fear.
|
| 00:47:50.560 |
Not sure that that kid would come back. No, no, you're not going to sell well.
|
| 00:47:53.760 |
Well, that doesn't sell well. Second thing is that we do have, again, I think about this kind of
|
| 00:48:00.560 |
slightly dynamically in the way I use this idea of a self-object. So, I think that we carry with us
|
| 00:48:08.160 |
all of our personal relationships, particularly the important ones, and that when we bump into rough spots,
|
| 00:48:17.360 |
we are able to reach for people that we have good, solid, loving relationships with, and they can
|
| 00:48:27.440 |
make us feel more soot. I think that's what people are doing with this sort of,
|
| 00:48:33.440 |
this less, let's pretend dimension with God, making God into a self-object. And there's actually
|
| 00:48:39.840 |
increasing evidence that if you look at people who have a, who experience a loving God versus
|
| 00:48:46.640 |
people who experience a wrathful God, the folks, the loving God, have better immune response,
|
| 00:48:51.840 |
they have, you know, their T-cell counts are better, they seem to be less ill, internalizing a
|
| 00:49:00.400 |
wrathful God is associated with the higher risk of mental illness. So, it looks like, at least for
|
| 00:49:07.840 |
the, for Americans who have many different choices to think about spiritually, a loving God
|
| 00:49:16.560 |
serves you better in the world. But I admit, there is, you know.
|
| 00:49:22.400 |
No, that's fine. I agree with you just intuitively that those cultures which have been most committed
|
| 00:49:33.920 |
to the notion of an angry, wrathful, vengeful God probably enact that kind of behavior in history,
|
| 00:49:44.560 |
more than those who believe in love. So I think it's, we're far better off as culturally speaking
|
| 00:49:50.720 |
when we, when our divinity becomes more gentle. But there is just a long history, obviously,
|
| 00:49:58.560 |
of Christianity where God had, has a very different status than he seems to have here in this
|
| 00:50:06.720 |
kinder and gentler divinity that you've been describing. And the, again, to sell that God because
|
| 00:50:17.360 |
he's better for your health and better for your, your psychic serenity is kind of a weird, I mean,
|
| 00:50:22.720 |
it's perversion, right, because this conjugation between capitalism and evangelism that America is so
|
| 00:50:32.240 |
distinct for is, it gets very interesting from, from an anthropological view, it's really very interesting.
|
| 00:50:40.240 |
It is really interesting. Americans like happiness, they think they have a right for happiness and
|
| 00:50:45.520 |
they think they have a right to reach for it. And I think in that sense you are absolutely right,
|
| 00:50:49.120 |
there's a very American quality to this envisioning of God. We live in a psychotherapeutic
|
| 00:50:56.400 |
century. So what other forms would this personalization take? I mean, we talked about, you know,
|
| 00:51:02.160 |
leaving the coffee or a place at the table for him at the meal or walking, walking with him is
|
| 00:51:10.880 |
is it another big thing, no? I think that would be the most common. So people, what people are really
|
| 00:51:16.720 |
doing when they're praying is talking to God in their minds. And they are seeking to experience
|
| 00:51:22.320 |
God is talking back and they're seeking to experience this dialogue as not being something that's just
|
| 00:51:28.080 |
they're thinking about their own daydream, but something bigger and more external. So some people,
|
| 00:51:35.600 |
I've heard the term God dreams to talk about this process. Some people will use techniques that
|
| 00:51:42.960 |
we think of as more associated with the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises,
|
| 00:51:46.720 |
loyal Ignatius Loyola founded the Jesuit faith and they would try to go into the scriptures and try
|
| 00:51:55.760 |
to experience it as if they were there. So, you know, there you are at the Annunciation and you
|
| 00:52:01.360 |
try to see with your mind's eye what Mary looks like, whether she's scared, whether she's excited,
|
| 00:52:06.960 |
you see how young she is, you look at the weather or what does that, is she inside the house,
|
| 00:52:13.440 |
outside the house. And so they try to bring these biblical narratives to life in their own experience.
|
| 00:52:21.040 |
And that's can be quite powerful because that's sort of, not only does the biblical story become
|
| 00:52:28.560 |
more vivid, but you're fusing with your own personal memories of Palestine or the desert or
|
| 00:52:36.080 |
young girls. And so you literally craft your thought and this is actually something that people
|
| 00:52:42.400 |
would talk about in the, my gosh, and also talks about this in the medieval monastery. They wanted to
|
| 00:52:47.600 |
replace the human bricks of thought with scriptural bricks so that all your thoughts were sort of
|
| 00:52:54.160 |
saturated in these ideas of scripture. And of course this is part of the cultivation of the
|
| 00:53:00.480 |
mind and of the imagination that you've noticed in your work on the magic in England.
|
| 00:53:08.560 |
And how then do, because I take it from your book that there is, there are certain criteria where
|
| 00:53:16.160 |
they presume to actually verify when it is the voice of God speaking to them rather than some
|
| 00:53:22.800 |
other kind of imagined voice. Right, so there are really a couple of pieces to this story.
|
| 00:53:29.360 |
The first thing they have to do is learn what I call a new theory of mind. They have to think about
|
| 00:53:33.760 |
their mind differently, not as being private and walled off from the world, which is kind of the
|
| 00:53:37.840 |
secular American model of mind. But as containing this external presence God, so they have to,
|
| 00:53:44.400 |
they have to learn to pick out which thoughts came from God and which thoughts came from themselves.
|
| 00:53:50.080 |
And so they do that with what they call discernment. And there are, you know, nobody lays at a bullet
|
| 00:53:57.760 |
point list, but they do talk about looking for thoughts and stand out in some way. You weren't
|
| 00:54:03.200 |
thinking about the topic before, the thought felt loud or the thought felt different. It should
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| 00:54:09.360 |
be the kind of thing that God would say. And again, you had this representation of a loving God.
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| 00:54:14.320 |
And it should make you feel good when you had that thought, you should feel terrible.
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| 00:54:19.520 |
And then they talk about testing it against circumstances. So, you know, mostly, you know, when God
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| 00:54:30.160 |
sort of speaks on a very practical issue, like should you move across the country to Los Angeles,
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| 00:54:38.080 |
people are very attentive to, you know, whether they're right and they'll get a lot of people to
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| 00:54:42.720 |
pray with them and they'll ask people about how they think that God just becomes then about this issue.
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| 00:54:47.360 |
If it's something pretty small, like, you know, should I go to the watch at Shampu, should I buy?
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| 00:54:52.560 |
They're like not. So they don't take it so seriously, but they don't
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| 00:54:57.680 |
believe in ask those kind of questions. Oh, I have this wonderful Facebook posting of somebody who
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| 00:55:04.640 |
was really getting the sense of God as a live in her life and she was dancing in the hair products
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| 00:55:11.120 |
aisle and so excited and singing to him this shower. And it becomes, and people talk about falling
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| 00:55:17.280 |
in love with Jesus and they have the sense that it's this, you know, giggly, wonderful thing. And
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| 00:55:21.920 |
it's like finding your best friend and your best friend is really perfect and always with you.
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| 00:55:27.040 |
And it's a lot of fun for people. Yeah. There's another piece of this process, which is just
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| 00:55:34.320 |
training mental imagery and training sense, the inner senses. And I think that we know that we see
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| 00:55:42.640 |
the cultivation of inner senses throughout religious practice. And I think we also see and I have
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| 00:55:48.560 |
evidence to support that if you cultivate the inner senses, those inner senses become sharper,
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| 00:55:54.640 |
more powerful. They feel more real. They generate more unusual experience. They make God feel more
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| 00:56:00.960 |
like a person. Yeah. I don't know. I get annoyed when the undergraduates, you ask them, who's your
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| 00:56:09.040 |
best friend? They say, my parents are my best friends because we I come from a generation where
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| 00:56:15.760 |
at a certain point, your relations with your parents have to become antagonistic. Otherwise,
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| 00:56:20.800 |
you're not undergoing that sort of crucial initiation into adulthood and independence and there
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| 00:56:26.640 |
has to be a turn against. So in a certain sense, I think also the same thing would apply. I
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| 00:56:32.080 |
almost more comfortable that you turn against and you declare your independence. You don't make
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| 00:56:36.400 |
I ain't going to become my best friend. He's not going to be on a lover and the person that I speak to
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| 00:56:42.000 |
in the aisles of the supermarket. I think a little distance from, but that's me speaking now.
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| 00:56:48.000 |
So these folks will say things like it was when I began to yell at God that he became real for me.
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| 00:56:53.760 |
So people will talk about, you know, I had somebody you talked about, you know, she and God went
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| 00:57:00.720 |
off to silk in different corners at each other. She talked, you know, other people would talk
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| 00:57:05.600 |
about yelling with God. And it's not actually where does it end? They'll end up hand-pecking
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| 00:57:12.320 |
God like they hand-peck their husbands or they'll end up, you know, reducing things where it's just
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| 00:57:18.560 |
there's no distinction between the experience of the divine and the experience of the everyday.
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| 00:57:22.800 |
I mean, I think it's a dangerous path to go on. Yeah, I mean, I can see that, but it's again,
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| 00:57:28.240 |
it's not that people ignore that sort of more, you know, I mean, it's Sunday mornings are actually
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| 00:57:35.760 |
really interesting because the worship songs go back and forth between this very intense intimacy
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| 00:57:41.360 |
and the sense of, you know, holy majesty. And again, I think that people's, so sometimes when
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| 00:57:49.280 |
secular observers look at the evangelicals, they think that they, you know, hold this proposition,
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| 00:57:55.600 |
you know, I believe in God and it's really simple-minded. I actually think that these God concepts
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| 00:58:03.600 |
are really complicated. There's a piece for the best friend. There's a piece for the creator of the
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| 00:58:09.920 |
universe. There's a piece for magnificent otherness. There's a piece for utter confusion. And it's
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| 00:58:16.480 |
like there's this complicated set of ideas that loosely hang together and get used in different
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| 00:58:23.600 |
settings. Yeah. Well, that's fascinating. I just, because the show is called entitled opinions,
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| 00:58:28.560 |
my opinion is that I will take Kafka's God, who, where Kafka said that the reason God is
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| 00:58:34.160 |
completely inaccessible and hidden and perhaps, you know, you think he doesn't exist is because
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| 00:58:38.320 |
if we had any access to him whatsoever, we would overthrow him because that is a nature of human beings.
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| 00:58:44.800 |
And so this kind of easy access, I worry, not for us. I worry for God what happens when he gets
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| 00:58:51.920 |
that close to us. So thank you very much, Tanya. We've been speaking with Professor Tanya
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| 00:58:56.720 |
Lerman from the Department of Anthropology here at Stanford on behalf of entitled opinions,
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| 00:59:01.760 |
I'm Robert Harrison. Please tune in next week. We'll be back with you. Thanks again, Tanya.
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Thanks for being on.
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