YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Muraresku

lines on the record: 94
first: 2021-08-15
most recent: 2021-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“What you see there is the creation of these states of awareness in which, again, you identify with the God to become the God. There's theophagy. There's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity. Right back to how we started the conversation, right? So if we stop conceiving of God as something exterior to us, but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being, that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology, that you drink the actual blood of this Greek God to become that god. And there was a place for this in ancient Greek society.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Existential despair. Maybe it's a bit of that. We can't say that there wasn't recreational drinking happening. The Greeks also have the symposium, right? And they also were just getting hammered in some cases. But when it comes to the rites of Dionysus,”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a wine served there called Drima, and this is the wine that gives birth to Hollywood, I mean the ancient Hollywood was there at the theater of Dionysus. This is where comedy and tragedy and poetry and music come from. But rather than a hot dog and a beer, what they drink at the theater of Dionysus was this wine called Drima, which means pounded or rubbed. And Professor Ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the play come alive.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood, and before Christianity the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine, the sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted in classicist write about this, including Walter Burkert. It was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the God. This is where we get the idea of enthusiasm, because the language matters. Enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit of the God, so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine powers. Now, how does that happen? Again, he's not the God of alcohol. He is the God of wine, but he's really the God of madness and delirium and frenzy and his principal followers are women. They're called the Minads, and the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of this sacramental wine, even at the theater of Dionysus, separate from his outdoor church.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think the wine is absolutely essential. And so if it's impossible to understand paleo-Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it's equally difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopoeia or wine itself, right? Just think about wine at the time. I think that the ancient Greek audience would have heard that in a very different way from us. And so they're referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus, which precedes Jesus. And in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology, you think about him as the god of theater or the god of wine, which is typically what it is, or the god of ecstasy, you know, again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no concept of fermented grapes.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And after the life of Jesus, the word used for wine is farmakon, which obviously gives us the word pharmacy, it means drug. So in Greek, a Greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine. Ruth Scotel, the classicist, talks about this as a ritualistic formula. They understood wine as this compound beverage, a drug against grief, a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal, or just maybe a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're talking about a Greek speaking world, right? Know Jesus is born and does his public ministry in the Holy Land, but think about the early church. Think about where the church takes root. You know, Paul, the greatest evangelist of the time, writes basically half the New Testament. He's writing letters in Greek to Greek speakers in places like Corinth in Greece or Philippi, a defunct city just north of the island of Thassos. Or he's writing to folks in what today is Turkey, the Colossians, the Galatians. He writes letters to the Romans. These are Greek speakers in these pockets, these Hellenic pockets all around the ancient Mediterranean. And for them, again, ignore Dioscorides, ignore Pat McGovern's work, to them to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. And so the word oinos in ancient Greek does show up in the New Testament, but there was another word to describe wine, and it exists for like a thousand years before Dorian.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This massive treatise at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And Dioscorides, in just one of his books, talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things, like salvia and hellibor and frankincense and myrrh, these spiced perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful, and in book four hundred seventy four of his Materia Merica, he talks about black nightshade producing fantas non not unpleasant visions. What today we would say is psychedelic. So just looking at the literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists, I didn't really learn it, an undergrad, I came across Dioscorides later. But just a basic look at the literature supports what McGovern has been testing.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can read the entire New Testament in ancient Greek, and not once will you ever find a reference to alcohol because there was no word in ancient Greek for alcohol. The way the word sounds alcohol comes its Semitic, it comes from the Arabic means to enliven or refresh. It probably comes from coal, K-O-H, sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical experiments, in cosmetics. So again, that's much later in time when we're using alchemy, distillation, etc. In the first century AD, the power of wine wasn't necessarily tied to alcohol, right? Fermented grapes, the way we think about wine today. Pat McGovern found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with beer and with mead. But if you look at the literature from the first century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've been saying recently that, and I hope this doesn't sound obscurantist, but I think it's impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek. And I'll give you a very specific example of why I think that's the case.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Germany, Tanya Valamoti in Greece, Asunta Florenzano in Italy, I went all over the place asking one question and getting the same answer back time and again. And so the book is essentially my search for that data. And the eventual uncovering of two what I think are key pieces of data. One data, one data point shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity and Iberia, what today is Spain. And the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD at the right place at the right time when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Predates us. But what was lacking in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, I think was some of this technology and the hard scientific data. Now, for years and years, I went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around the world and I asked a very basic question. Is there any evidence for psychedelics in classical antiquity? And the answer would almost invariably come back no. I'm talking to an additional”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So that's the way to phrase it. So it's my 12 year search for the hard scientific data, for the ritual use of psychedelics and classical antiquity. So we're talking about amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Paleo-Christians. So the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known, Christianity today was two and a half billion people. The big question for me is, you know, we're psychedelics actually involved. There was a lot written about this in the 60s. John Marco Allegro, the book that I follow was published in 1978 before I was born. The Road to Eleusis by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already, Albert Hoffmann, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Carl Ruck, who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that renegade trio and now 85 years old. So this all...”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To pack a punch, rather than just drink a kind of watered-down budweiser, these people were interested in fortifying these beverages with whatever they could find in nature. And Pat, to his credit, found some of the initial data for these, you could say spiked wines and spiked beers. Not with anything overtly psychedelic, but just the fact that in the 16th century BC, at Graves Circle A in Mycenae, there's this Minoan ritual cocktail of beer mixed with wine, mixed with mead, is very interesting. It's even more interesting that you find that across the Aegean, in Gordium at King Midas' tomb, right? The same kind of ritual cocktail, which Pat and Sam at the dogfish head brewery resurrected as the Midas touch. So, I mean, the notion that we can go back, find this data, resurrect it in some cases 2,800 years later, I found pretty exciting.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work was some of the first hard scientific data that I saw for the ritual consumption of these intoxicants. I don't think he's ever found the hard and fast data for psychedelics, but what he turned me on to was this idea that alcohol or beer and wine specifically could have been used as vehicles for the administration of psychedelics. That's where it all started for me. Just the notion that ancient beer and ancient wine is very, very different from what we drink today, that typically they were cocktails. They were often fortified and mixed with different fruits, berries, herbs, plants, maybe even fungi over time, because this was all in the absence of distilled liquor, right? There is no hard alcohol, even in Russia, before maybe the 12th century it was in Europe, maybe a bit earlier. But the concept of distillation just didn't exist. And so”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're probably talking more dozens than hundreds. I spent many years trying to track down an archaeochemist who would talk to me. There were a couple, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania. And then my friend Andrew Coh at MIT, which you might know something about, Andrew really, you know, on his own time, on his own dime, has been gathering the data for this organic residue analysis. He has what's called the Open Archem project, which is this online open source repository for this data. But there's never been a center for this. No university has stood up, a dedicated center, a team, really, which is what you need, of archaeochemists looking at this stuff. But I mean, even despite that, there have been some remarkable discoveries over the past 10, 20 years. It's still a discipline very much in its infancy. Maybe it's becoming a toddler, but as the technology gets better,”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which in many ways sent me down this rabbit hole back in 2007. But even at the time when he was writing that and the year subsequent, it was still kind of seen as a kooky idea. Last fall, interestingly enough, the first archeochemical data for the ritual consumption of psychedelics associated with caveart was finally published. It's not that ancient. It's only about four or five hundred years ago, but it came from the pinwheel cave, a Chumash site in California. And what they found were Datura quids, like these chewed up, you mentioned, how did they ingest it? These chewed up quids like these bunches of datura, which contain these very powerful tropane alkaloids in what was believed to be some kind of chew mash initiation site. So we can say that there is initial archaeochemical data for the consumption of psychedelics and cavart. And so where else might we?”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it's not. It's not. So just last fall, as a matter of fact, so that notion's been out there for a while. The idea that hallucinogens and the ritual consumption of hallucinogens were somehow related to the great leap forward were somehow related to the initial cavein. And Graham Hancock wrote a beautiful book about this called”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, not psychedelic or psychoactive, but we kind of have the beginnings of the technology, and that was nine years ago, to begin figuring out the ancestral diet of these hominids.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Evidence of their diet. And you might not believe how old this was, but in Sadiba, Australopithecus Sediba, they found evidence of Sadiba's diet going back two million years. So through things like phytoliths, which are essentially fossilized plant tissue, they found evidence that Sadiba was eating bark and leaves and grasses and fruits and palm. So no psychedelics to speak of, but it just goes to show that through things like dental microware analysis and other techniques that were still developing, we can actually figure out what the diet was at the time. I'll fast forward to 50,000 years ago. There was another study out of El Cidron Cave in 2012 which found that Neanderthals, again preceding our species 50,000 years ago, were ingesting Yarrow and chamomile, which had been identified as”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of Botswana and Namibia. They have something like 164 consonants and 44 vowels. English by comparison has about 45. So I don't know what to make of this, but what you find in that part of the world is very, very complex language, language that could be an inheritance. Language that could be incredibly archaic. Together with this recognition of self-mortality, and when I talk to Lee Berger, we say, when you're looking at universals like that, language around all human populations, the recognition of self-mortality, the contemplation of death, just maybe you have pharmacology. And so maybe we can go out and test for this using gas chromatography mass spectrometry, proteomics, technology that doesn't even exist, but maybe we can actually test the stone tape theory to figure out once and for all if there's any merit there.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very strange. What's even more strange about Homo Nalidi at the Rising Star Cave system there in South Africa is that Lee believes he's discovered the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead. So there is a recognition of self-mortality and the practicing of rituals around death. We're talking about burials. And if you have burials, says Lee in an archaic hominid three hundred thousand years ago, maybe you have language. And I mention that because Terence McKenna was obsessed with language in the stoned ape theory that the ingestion of psilocybin in addition to enhancing visual acuity perhaps facilitating sexual arousal leads to proto-language. Now, isn't it interesting? This could be entirely a coincidence that the largest sound inventory of any language is the Koi San”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's famous, amongst other things, for the discovery of previously undiscovered hominids like Homo Nalady. And there's an interesting point. So Nalady is this archaic hominid morphologically archaic, but it dates to about 300 thousand years ago.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talks about the great leap forward 60,000 years ago. The species had been around for a couple hundred thousand years. All of a sudden, the cave painting appears. All of a sudden there's a phase shift. Did something like that happen millions of years ago? And I love the way Paul Stammons talks about this. It would be the ingestion of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi. Millions and millions of times over millions and millions of years. So it's not just a one-time event that cascades, but it's the accumulation of psychedelic experience. It's really difficult to test that hypothesis, but I've been talking with a paleoanthropologist in South Africa, my friend Lee Berger, about ways that we might test for this. And so Lee, amongst many things, is this National Geographic Explorer. He's the paleoanthropologist, paleoanthropologist at the University of Whitwatersfront.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You trace the intervention of divinity, if that's the case throughout human history, you have to bump up against the irrational. Merced Eliadi, the great scholar of religions and fellow Romanian, said that the history of religions essentially constitutes the point of intersection between metaphysics and biology, right? So that we are biological beings who do interact with our planet, with the natural kingdom. And you would think that as early archaic ecologists, we would have figured out what plants work, which fungi don't, and developed maybe language around that. And so this is another one of McKenna's speculative but very interesting hypotheses, the stone ape theory. Is it possible that psychedelics were involved in one of the several leaps forward? You mentioned the word leap. Jared Diamond.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a hypothesis worth investigating. How about that? Beautiful. And maybe not psychedelics in and of themselves, but I think our whole conversation is kind of wrapped up in these non-ordinary states of awareness. We start by talking about God, which is something unordinary and expansive. And I think that as you”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communication. And you can find instances of this throughout history, including among the Presocratics and Peter Kingsley writes quite a bit about this, but I'll save that until your next question.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Coaxed the human species into self expression in a very real way that at different times in history our relationships with these semi autonomous beings may actually guide the species. Now this is high speculation and Terence and Ralph and Rupert wind up talking about the early modern period and the scientific enlightenment and that even someone like Descartes reports a dream in which he came face to face with an angel who said that the conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number so even the hard minded materialist like Descartes is confronting these discarnate entities. John D. in the 16th century the high magician of the Elizabethan court he reports decades worth of what we would say is extraterrestrial communication or interdimensional”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going into mixed Olydian right So option number two, and this is what Terrence calls sort of the mentalist reductionist approach. And this is pure mechanical poetry. He says that these beings could be autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the controlling power of the ego. So in Jungian senses, these would just be pure projections, the projections of schizophrenics in some cases. So they're essentially unreal. And the third option, the most tantalizing, is that they're both non-physical but autonomous. In other words, they actually exist in some kind of real place, in some kind of real space, and that we can have Congress with them. There is communication. He talks about the whisperings of the demon artificers, and that it's just possible that our meetings with these beings have”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Develops a taxonomy for how to analyze this, and he says that number one, they're either semi-physical but kind of elusive. So think of the Bigfoot or the Yeti or things like this. Beings that exist somewhere between mythology and zoology, which isn't really appropriate here. So option number two, he says, is the mental...”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the big question is is it real? Is it really more real than real? The ancient philosophers were asking the same question and their means of attempting to answer that was by dying. So if you ask Plato the definition of philosophy, he will say that to practice it in the right way is to practice dying and being dead. Many people describe the psychedelic experience in sort of near-death experience terms. And the encountering of all this visual imagery tends to be something that is often described as more real than real. So how does Terence talk about this? So I was just listening to the trialogues, which folks should look up somewhere between 1989 and 1990. Terence sits down with his friends, Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake at Esselin. And they're trying to figure out the meaning of these discarnate entities and these non-human intelligences.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A well read individual from the mid 20th century has his premier psychedelic experience and out comes Plato because what he was witnessing was so sharp, so brilliant, so detailed, in some sense more real than real, this noetic sense that William James talks about, that when you confront something more real than real, these discarnate entities, these images, these visionary motifs, you're tempted to believe that you've tapped into the truest nature and the underlying structure of the cosmos. And that's difficult to escape from. Whether you're Plato or Terence McKenna or Gordon Wasson caught in between.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think through different techniques, it is, you know, I think a lot about, I think Gordon Wasson is the meeting point of the two. So Gordon Wasson, who I do talk about in the book, was this JPMorgan banker turned ethnomycologist. And he's largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin containing mushrooms, which kind of gave rise to the pop psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He visited Maria Sabina down in Mexico. In his wake went Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, and everybody else. And the way he describes his psilocybin experience is a bit strange because he thinks of Plato, right? And he says that, you know, whereas our ordinary reality is kind of this imperfect view of things, Gordon Wasson felt that on mushrooms he was spying the archetypes. And he talks about Plato and he writes about the archetypes in this famous article that's released in 1957, in Life Magazine.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The invisible world with which we seem to have some kind of symbiosis that has a higher intent, maybe even a purpose or a plan in mind for us. So, I mean, these ideas come across when you've had a heroic dose of mushrooms. They also pop up in the ancient philosophical literature, this idea of archons who the puppet masters controlling us flesh and blood beings. It's all a cosmic dance and there are no answers to this.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We seem to be at the center of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric. But the ancients thought about this too. I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of Lila, that the point behind existence is this play, right? It's ultimately playful, this divine dance. It gets awfully complicated in the Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from Godhead down to us, right? Some invisible, right? And we're going to get into Terence McKenna territory later on, but we can start now by talking about discarnate entities and archons and aliens and archetypes. I mean, there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism quite kindly. And that's in this...”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why the arts and poetry and music are so important because although I love astroparticle physics, it's another to kind of hear this same message across time.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we have no answers to this, which is why philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all. But I mean, so the physicists take a look at this. Have you seen the article that came out? I think it was this month in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, Robert Lanza, the biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe comes into being through our observation, right? The God equation. So not just in quantum mechanics, but in general relativity. The idea that we make the universe moment by moment, which is kind of mind-blowing, gets into ideas of simulation. Okay, so that's how the physicists, at least some of them might look at it. You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart once again says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me, right? So one sight, one knowledge, one love, another mind-blowing concept.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, listen to Rabbi Kushner. He says that the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality. In combatism, the true reality is what's called the divine nothingness, ayin. And so I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing. And then I'll give you Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic. He says that if you could not yourself, right? The same concept. If you could not yourself for just an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all. So again, you're seeing the same thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism. The way to identify with the divine is to peel back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mystic, but you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and Judaism as well. So Rumi, for example, the great Sufi mystic talks about if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you, that the face of the unknown would appear on the perception of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day contemporary mystic, talks about, because this stuff does continue, there's a continuity to that.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emotions, traumas, and experiences that have gone into the foss construction of our fost self, that behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion, is a part of us that once you can identify that begins to look a little bit different. In other words, it's one thing to foster a relationship with God. It's a very different thing to identify as God. And I mean that quite literally without being heretical. You can find this in the mystery traditions.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the eternal mystery This is why it's so difficult to talk about, and yet it could be the very center of our beings. The Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It's a very different creation myth, but the god of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves, pouring themselves into creation. Indeed, I have become this creation, says God. And there's a great line. Verily he or she who knows this becomes in this creation a creator. So, yeah, I mean, just our ability to engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff is partly our divine nature. This is what the humanists were talking about and in the Renaissance, by the way, and that it's not so much learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books. It's a process of unlearning is what some of the mystical traditions talk about. Unlearning all these thoughts amongst...”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ultimate paradox of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German mystic, says that the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew that she saw God in all things and all things in God. And so we can say this, by the way, without apology or lightweight theology or vapid speculation or even heresy. We can talk about this, including within the Abrahamic faiths, the mystical core of these faiths all talk about the encounter of divinity within. That's what I explore in the immortality key, this notion of techniques, archaic techniques in some cases of ecstasy that allow that experience of the eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we're still here as flesh and blood beings.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With God in a very real way, Lex Friedman, here in Austin, Texas, that in the here and now to touch that eternal principle, another way to refer to God, to touch that eternal principle within ourselves is to participate with divinity in some way. So not an external force, but that divine sense within.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're starting with an easy one, Lex. So, what is God? Well, God is a thought. God is an idea, but its reference is to that which is beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, beyond the categories of being and non-being. So how do we talk about that? To talk about it is almost to get it wrong, right? So Joe Campbell famously said that any God that is not transparent to transcendence is like an idolatry because it's just a mental construct and it can't possibly speak to the incomprehensible. So we use poetic language. We say the being of beings, the infinite life energy of the universe, the mystery of transcendence, boundless life, unqualified isness, but it doesn't quite get to the point. I think that if there's any great insight from mysticism, it's that you and I participate.”
2021-08-15 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #211 – Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source