Is It a Spiritual Path or a Cult? Mitch Horowitz Helps Us Break It Down

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_04] This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal, medical, or mental health advice. The views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business, individual, anyone, or anything. I'm Sarah Edmondson.

[00:00:25] [SPEAKER_03] And I'm Anthony Nippy Ames. And this is A Little Bit Culty. Cults are commonplace now. From fandoms to fads, we're examining them all. We look at what happens when things that seem like a great thing at first go bad.

[00:00:38] [SPEAKER_04] Every week we chat with survivors, experts, and whistleblowers for real culty stories told directly by the people who lived through them. Because we want you to learn a few things that we've had to learn the hard way.

[00:00:49] [SPEAKER_03] For example, if you think you're too smart to get sucked into something culty, you might be prime recruitment material. And who knows? You could already be in a cult. If you're not aware of your programming, you're probably being programmed. So keep listening to find out.

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[00:01:22] [SPEAKER_04] Welcome to season seven of A Little Bit Culty. Welcome back, everybody, to this week's episode of A Little Bit Culty.

[00:01:41] [SPEAKER_03] Our guest today is Mitch Horowitz, a historian, author, and podcaster who studies the occult and esoteric belief. His newest book is called Practical Magic, Ancient Tradition and Modern Practice. It simplifies the ideas behind magic and mysticism.

[00:01:56] [SPEAKER_04] That's magic with a K.

[00:01:59] [SPEAKER_03] Of course.

[00:01:59] [SPEAKER_04] We know that this episode might sound like a departure, and it is from our usual show, but sometimes we just need a little break from the straight-up cult content. And remember, this show is called A Little Bit Culty. So we're talking about something that might be a little bit culty, but is also very interesting to somebody who still wants to have a spiritual practice of some kind. That's why we were excited to speak with Mitch. He encourages people to define belief for themselves.

[00:02:26] [SPEAKER_04] He promotes personal investigation and individuality when seeking spirituality, and our conversation gets into how to do so and at the same time avoid those pesky little culty red flags on that path.

[00:02:38] [SPEAKER_03] We'll talk about toxic traits to look out for in leaders, including weaponized altruism and manipulative language. And of course, how spirituality and money are usually a bad mix.

[00:02:49] [SPEAKER_04] At its core, today's show is about being intentional in our mindsets. Human brains tend to get stuck in habitual thought patterns, and Mitch encourages us to examine those patterns in a mindful, constructive way.

[00:03:00] [SPEAKER_03] He's a very smart and intelligent guy. We think his insights will benefit believers and non-believers alike. Let's welcome him to our show.

[00:03:07] [SPEAKER_04] So, just to bring our listeners up to speed, please give us your seeking journey in a little nutshell so people know how you got to where you are today.

[00:03:32] [SPEAKER_02] Well, I describe myself as a believing historian. I try to be very transparent about my perspective on the occult and magical movements that I write about in history and in practice. And my perspective is a constructive one. I've been a lifelong seeker. I have belonged to organizations. And while I've never been in an abusive group situation, I certainly have seen the way that group and peer dynamics can weigh on the individual.

[00:04:00] [SPEAKER_02] And I have a great deal to say about the false intimacy, for example, that can get forced on people within the new age scene. And I have a lot of concerns about that. At this juncture in my journey, I'm really a sole practitioner. I tend to view spirituality or extra physicality as a very private journey. And personally, I encourage others to see it as a private journey because I'm all too aware of what peer pressure and group dynamics can do to an individual.

[00:04:29] [SPEAKER_02] At the same time, it's a difficult needle to thread because there are people who find congregational spirituality or group meetings, maybe if they're in the 12-step movement or some other movement in which group meetings are fundamental, those things can be very constructive. So it's a tough needle to thread. But I do encourage a great deal of privacy.

[00:04:49] [SPEAKER_03] That's somewhat congruent with what some of the conversations that Sarah and I have been having. I think it was about religion, wasn't it? Recently, the other day, we were talking about I think people's religious beliefs should be private. Similarly with spiritual. I think it's a personal thing.

[00:05:05] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, I agree. And I get uncomfortable when people rush to discuss their religious beliefs outside of an appropriately intimate setting. You know, it's very interesting, this question of religion and congregational spirituality. Mainstream faith, to a great extent, is based in a house of worship, we'll say. And with that comes the need for membership, money, and so forth. And there's nothing intrinsically corrupt in that.

[00:05:33] [SPEAKER_02] But I have seen spaces, as I know many of your viewers and listeners have, where within a group or congregational setting, walls of privacy are broken down. I'll give you a perfect example. And I'll be very specific about it. A friend of mine is Mike Murphy, the co-founder of the Esalen Institute, the New Age Center on the west coast of California. And in the late 60s, Esalen pioneered what came to be called Encounter Group.

[00:06:00] [SPEAKER_02] And Mike later came to feel, and fairly early on, probably by the mid-1970s, that Encounter was a real problem. That it encouraged the most aggressive members of a circle to bear down on others and force disclosures or accuse them of not being a team player. And I know this is very familiar to the folks listening. And he said to me that he felt, Esalen has done many great things in the world. I could rattle off one after another.

[00:06:27] [SPEAKER_02] But he felt that Encounter was a bad legacy. And I've witnessed that. I've been in group spiritual situations. And some of them have been very nurturing and positive. But some of them also just absolutely give themselves over to basically glorified bullying. And the reason for that is that disclosure is expected as testimony of one being on board, being a team player.

[00:06:53] [SPEAKER_02] And I feel that people who are not part of any organization, but who might be in the general alternative spiritual culture, they have to feel mature enough, secure enough, that if they find themselves in settings like that, even if it's just a weekend retreat, walk out. I learned that the hard way. When I was a kid, I remember I had just gone through a breakup and I went to some yoga center up in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. And the weekend, rather than turning out to be a weekend of Hatha yoga,

[00:07:23] [SPEAKER_02] turned out to be a weekend that was very heavily steeped in Encounter. And the instructor said, well, look, yoga is not just about having a flexible body. It's about having a flexible mind. But the catalog didn't say that. That's a disclosing line. And that's fine for people who want to join in on that. But the catalog didn't say that. And I don't want to have a flexible mind. I want to have a flexible body. And the retreat, I said it's weekend.

[00:07:53] [SPEAKER_02] But in fact, it was a New Year's week. And people cried. And people were pushed to emotional extremes. I was very unhappy. I was very depressed the whole week because I didn't feel that I wanted to share, so to speak. And yet, the peer pressure was such that if you didn't share, you were accused of not being a team player. You were accused of letting down your family group. Again, I'm sure this is all very familiar to your audience and constituency. And I was young. And I was in the middle of Massachusetts.

[00:08:23] [SPEAKER_02] I didn't have a car. And I thought about leaving, but I stuck it out for the wrong reasons. I stuck it out telling myself I needed to be a good team player. But really, I was just buckling under the peer pressure. If I had to do over, I would have walked out. And I encourage people to feel that sense of agency. Because even the occasional weekend seminar, it can get intrusive. And there's got to be transparency in advertising as well.

[00:08:48] [SPEAKER_04] Absolutely. That's actually been a big, over my eight years since leaving NXIVM, it's been a big part of my talking points. Is that Keith Raniere had put on the program or on the website, do this personal development, find your path to enlightenment, and also potentially join my harem of spiritual wives. Right. Then maybe I wouldn't have joined, actually. And some people may have joined because they knew what they were getting into. But the bait and switch is a real problem.

[00:09:12] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, they bury the lead. It's so true. And I have an article. Oh, gosh, I forget the name of it. But it's basically on when a spiritual organization crosses over into cult-like behavior. And one of the things I mention is the great need for transparency in advertising. The various growth centers across the nation, some of them do very, very good work. But the newcomer has to know exactly what he or she is stepping into.

[00:09:38] [SPEAKER_04] Key. Yeah, no, we definitely have our red flags for that. From your article, can you summarize what some of the red flags are that you point out to your listenership in those situations?

[00:09:48] [SPEAKER_02] I think one of the chief red flags is a sense of isolation, including time abuse, time abuse. The individual may not be living in a group situation, may still maintain his or her regular domicile, regular job. And sure, you know, there may be time allotted for seeing family at big holidays or what have you.

[00:10:11] [SPEAKER_02] But when you start to find that, I suppose, high-pressure volunteer opportunities keep coming up one after the other after the other, so that every weeknight, every weekend seems to be dominated by the small circle of the group, that kind of time abuse can be a nasty, slippery slope. And it, frankly, creates a kind of intimate isolation because if a person feels that they're being bullied

[00:10:39] [SPEAKER_02] or that there's something overbearing going on, who are they going to talk to about it? Their most intimate friends are in the group. And one's non-group friends feel the whole thing is sort of weird anyway, so they adopt an I-told-you-so attitude, which is not necessarily what the person in need wants to hear at that moment. What they need is a reality check, so to speak.

[00:11:03] [SPEAKER_02] And I find time abuse, intimacy abuse, any kind of an us-versus-them attitude, constant complaining about, oh, we're being misunderstood or what have you, and overbearing personalities. I have been in group situations, some of which I value insofar as really positive things did go on. But there were episodes where dominant personalities within the group could push the individual,

[00:11:33] [SPEAKER_02] and speaking up or speaking back was seen as a resistance to the work. And I feel people, they just have to go into group settings remembering what they were looking for in the first place, which was not to be a sheep. And sheep don't advance, sheep don't learn, sheep don't grow, sheep don't get places. And I just want people to feel some sense of self-assurance, self-agency.

[00:12:00] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, it's not their thought, it's someone else's thought. Exactly. They're an advocate for focused thought, so it seems to be somewhat contrary, to say the least.

[00:12:11] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. In the article, I do also touch upon the need for absolute transparency, and to just watch out for a sense that this organization is dominating your time. If you want to join a monastery, go ahead and join a monastery. You know, if you want to become a renunciate and go live at an ashram, these are noble things to do if these paths are mature and venerable paths.

[00:12:35] [SPEAKER_02] But if a new religious movement starts to dominate all of a person's time through religious entreaties, you know, that is a path to isolation in many cases.

[00:12:46] [SPEAKER_04] I'm glad you brought up the term new religious movement because in our cult survivor space, it's a kind of a semantic maybe bone of contention with some people. We're not academics. We're survivors trying to figure out what happened to us and share that with other survivors. But the academics and the cult experts, there's a whole historical argument that you probably know more about even than I do.

[00:13:12] [SPEAKER_04] But the term new religious movement has become perhaps a shroud for cult apologists saying, well, they're not cults. They're actually just a group that's not—

[00:13:21] [SPEAKER_03] Rebranding.

[00:13:21] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. And I'm not the expert, so I can't pull out all the different facts and the specifics on the people. But is this something that you're aware of in terms of how that term is used to perhaps shroud a group that is actually maybe a cult versus just a new religious movement?

[00:13:39] [SPEAKER_02] I have some awareness of it. My mentor, who's now dead, was a spiritual philosopher named Jacob Needleman. And he was the one—if he didn't coin the term new religious movement, he certainly popularized it. It was in a book of his from 1970 called The New Religions. And Jerry, as friends called him, was writing about the new religious movements that were growing popular among the Woodstock generation.

[00:14:07] [SPEAKER_02] And this could range from Zen to transcendental meditation, the thought of people who didn't have movements like Krishnamurti, or groups that were very movement-centered, some of which are no longer as popular as they used to be. He meant new religious movement in a benign way. You know, he was simply trying—the term New Age, for example, wasn't really out there in the culture just yet. Even alternative spirituality wasn't out there in the culture.

[00:14:32] [SPEAKER_02] So he was looking for the term new religious movement simply to be very literal and to define groups that actually might even extend to the 19th century, like Mormonism or Seventh-day Adventism or Christian science, along with some of the yoga organizations that had traveled west, some of the occult groups, esoteric groups. Anyway, he was just trying to provide a catch-all label that defined religion outside of traditional congregational spirituality.

[00:15:01] [SPEAKER_02] He never meant it to be used as some sort of a shroud or a perfume for abusive groups. In his footsteps, I continue to use the term new religious movement in a benign way. I will use the term cult very specifically when I mean an isolating, abusive community of belief. You know, that would be my definition of cult.

[00:15:24] [SPEAKER_02] And frankly, in my work, I use it sparingly only because I encounter people for whom everything other than Episcopalianism is a cult, you know. And I think we have to be careful with that too because we have, and I say this lovingly, I say this lovingly, we have weird groups in America, you know, from shakers to deadheads. And I want those weird groups to thrive on a voluntary level because that's what, I think that's the glue that holds our country together, that freedom of the search,

[00:15:53] [SPEAKER_02] that freedom of expression, that freedom of assembly. To my mind, whatever else is going down, as long as that's protected, as long as there's protection for the individual search for meaning, I think our country can keep it together. I do think sometimes people are, critics, are too accustomed to use the term cult to describe anything that's exotic or unfamiliar. And frankly, I find that a lot within mainstream media.

[00:16:19] [SPEAKER_02] I used to write a fair amount for legacy media on alternative spirituality. And I found it to be a drag because there was an unwillingness to understand that there could be a radically unfamiliar religious expression that's not cult-like, that's strictly voluntary, that's just weird. And, you know, Thomas Jefferson wanted us to keep our hands off such movements, you know. So I don't like them to get too readily grouped with groups that I would call cults, you know.

[00:16:49] [SPEAKER_03] I have a simplified metric. Every group can have an extreme version of itself.

[00:16:54] [SPEAKER_02] That is perfectly put. That is perfectly put. And you will find that, as I'm sure you've encountered, you'll find that sometimes within the same group. You'll find it, like, let's say there's a group that has a national or international presence. You might find an arc within that group that if you encounter that group in one neighborhood, so to speak, they're not so bad. If you encounter that group in another neighborhood, they can be very extreme. Needleman said something not dissimilar that I like.

[00:17:22] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, it's different in formulation, but it's getting at the same spirit of things. He said that a real esoteric group is very difficult to find and very easy to exit. A fake one is the exact opposite on both counts. Yeah. That's different language. The same thing. Yeah.

[00:17:40] [SPEAKER_04] That's great. I'm glad you said esoteric group, because one of my lists of things to talk to you about is Gurdjieff, who I know you write a lot about, who I didn't even know about until we did an episode on a group called School. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this. It's a secret society.

[00:17:54] [SPEAKER_02] I'm not.

[00:17:54] [SPEAKER_04] I'm sure you, if I mentioned Sharon Gans, does the name sound familiar?

[00:17:58] [SPEAKER_02] Vaguely, but distantly.

[00:17:59] [SPEAKER_04] It was basically this super secret, the top secret school in New York and across a couple other states, but the person we spoke with was from- San Francisco, right? San Francisco. Yeah. But basically took the teachings of Gurdjieff and made a very problematic community that you couldn't leave without being shunned, and it did a lot of abusive things.

[00:18:19] [SPEAKER_00] Did what we just talked about. Yeah.

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_04] It was the extreme version. But I'm so sorry. I lost my train of thought. Why was I bringing up Gurdjieff? Oh, just like-

[00:18:27] [SPEAKER_02] You have that mixed culture?

[00:18:29] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. The mixture, and even you look at every religion from Islam, Judaism, Christianity, there's benign and extreme and everything in between. But I guess where at least we're at, or I would say probably more me than Nippy, is that I've always been a seeker before NXIVM. I was- this is like the early 90s. I was reading Celestine Prophecy and The Artist's Way, and-

[00:18:51] [SPEAKER_03] Well, we're different.

[00:18:52] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah. Nippy was more of a jock. I was more of a theater nerd. My mom is Jewish. My dad is Anglican. Neither of them were religious. And actually reading your book, I think that I would describe myself as a hermetic.

[00:19:05] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, dig.

[00:19:05] [SPEAKER_04] Based on what you're- Yeah, which I didn't know. So thanks for that.

[00:19:09] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah.

[00:19:10] [SPEAKER_04] And then with NXIVM, it was like, it just took all these truths of the universe in this sort of hermetic, philosophical, pseudo-Buddhist way that made sense to me, you know? And it really landed for me and pulled all these different things in. But since leaving, now I'm still spiritual. I still want to go on this path. But I feel like a little bit hogtied with the fear of it happening again.

[00:19:35] [SPEAKER_04] But also in the cult survivor space, I feel like I can't even explore these things without people being like, oh, that's another cult. Like you said, it's overused. Right. It's overused.

[00:19:44] [SPEAKER_02] I'm so glad you brought that up. And I want to be very, very specific because the Gurdjieff work is a great example of how this conundrum plays out that you were all describing where there can be very different, radically different cultures under the umbrella of the name of that teaching. I was involved in the Gurdjieff work in a very dedicated way for about eight years. And I was part of a group here in New York City that met under the auspices of the Gurdjie

[00:20:11] [SPEAKER_02] Foundation, which I suppose you could say is probably the mainline group that traveled from Europe here to America that I think has, well, that certainly has authentic lineage to Gurdjieff's teaching founded by his direct students. And there are some other such groups. And I would say that that work is, it's a very intensive work. It's a very demanding work. And Gurdjieff as a teacher was in fact a confrontational teacher.

[00:20:38] [SPEAKER_02] And that's why that work is so sensitive. It's very intellectually intense. It's very emotionally intense. It's very physically intense. I had to leave at a certain point. And on one hand, I don't regret leaving for a day. But I'm also grateful every day that I was in that work. And my teacher in that work, who's now dead, was a great source of insight and help to me.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_02] I also witnessed firsthand, because it's a very astringent and at times confrontative work, that can be problematic. And you give some people a pinch of power and suddenly they turn into Napoleon. You've seen the drill a million times over. And for some reason, it's a wrinkle in human nature. I'm guilty of it. Napoleon always has troops ready to say, hey, good. I'm right behind you. And thank you, sir, may I have another.

[00:21:30] [SPEAKER_02] And people get led to believe that that's somehow a path to breaking down their barriers or something. Now, that work is a wonderful work. It is a work where there needs to be real good judgment. There are many groups who are not part of the Gucci Foundation, like the one that you were describing, just kind of out there in the ether. And that very quality of confrontationalism can very quickly and not infrequently does turn into some very serious hardcore bullying.

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_02] And it's wrong. Now, one has to be very careful because there are groups that I would describe as real trouble and cult-like. And I knew people who had fled some of those groups who were in the work, as it commonly was referred to. And they don't know they're in a kind of weird offshoot group. There's no one to tell them that. There's no advertising that, like, you know, we have nothing to do with the main line of the Gurdjieff work. Not that I'm orthodox in that way, because people are entitled to, again, it's a question of free assembly.

[00:22:28] [SPEAKER_02] But people have to be very careful in approaching that work. I love that work. And I love the ideas brought by Gurdjieff. And many people who I count as people who've made a difference in my life walked in the footsteps of that work. But again, it's a very tough work. And it can be confrontational. And I left, I allude to that in this article, I left for those reasons. If a group leader starts to lose his or her judgment for whatever reason, and there are

[00:22:58] [SPEAKER_02] exterior reasons why people lose their judgment. They may be depressed. They may be going through some deep disappointment in life. And they take it out on the, oh, how would I put it? They take it out on people who really are just participants in a group, but who get sort of transformed into underlings if the boss man starts to really come down on them. And I left that group for those reasons. And I stayed in touch with my teacher, who I loved.

[00:23:28] [SPEAKER_02] And he was a beautiful man. And I want to share with you a story. I've never talked about this publicly before. But this is what separates a real esoteric group from a fake one. Several weeks after I left, he emailed me and he invited me to, if I wanted to, to get together with other people, newcomers who wanted to join that group, just have a meal with them one-on-one, talk it over or something. He was demonstrating a trust. He was demonstrating a transparency. And I did do so on a few occasions.

[00:23:57] [SPEAKER_02] And these people who met with me, they had no idea that I had left. And I could see how enticing it was to be seated across the table from someone who saw me as the man with the plan. And I'm not the man with the plan. And I spoke to them about the work. And I spoke to them, I hope, as frankly, as I'm speaking with you. And I thought it was a beautiful show of trust. He died soon after that. And I think he felt remorse over some of the aggression that had gone on. And that's just a fact of life on the path.

[00:24:26] [SPEAKER_02] But there are groups where you don't find that kind of sensitivity, thoughtfulness, or true pursuit of esoteric spirituality who call themselves the Gurdjieff work. And the individual must be careful.

[00:24:39] [SPEAKER_04] I was going to send you Spencer Schneider's book about his time in the school and doing the work. And by the way, almost 90% of the groups we've looked at call the work the work, whether it's Gurdjieff or not. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even in the acting programs I did, like, oh, she's not doing the work. Like, the work has a different connotation. But it all means it's like you're not doing what you need to do to evolve. Can you just very quickly, for the people who don't know who Gurdjieff is or what the work is, kind of summarize the tenets of that philosophy or that type of thinking?

[00:25:09] [SPEAKER_02] G.I. Gurdjieff was a Greek-Armenian spiritual teacher who taught in the first half of the 20th century. His activity was first half of the 20th century. And he attracted a lot of artists, philosophers, intellectuals. His essential teaching was that humanity is asleep, that we are automatons. We sort of go through life in this very rote, automatic fashion, almost like people under hypnosis.

[00:25:38] [SPEAKER_02] And his idea was that we needed to be woken up to our true nature. And that's why, in fact, that work can be confrontative at times. And I love that work because it takes a very tough view of human nature. And I think that's appropriate. We look around the world today at the wars and the cruelty and the deprivation and say, why is this all happening? Well, you know, Gurdjieff's analysis of humanity was a grim analysis.

[00:26:06] [SPEAKER_02] And I think humanity has earned a grim analysis. I'm not rosy about human nature in the slightest. So it's a very tough existential philosophy. And yet, it's very wonderful as well because one of the things, and I experienced this firsthand, boy, you walk into that group as it's practiced responsibly. And all the fantasies of enlightenment and how brilliant I am, they go away very quickly.

[00:26:33] [SPEAKER_02] And I think those things should get dispelled because we are creatures of habit and rote behavior so much more than we know.

[00:26:41] [SPEAKER_03] You know, as I'm hearing a lot of this and read some of your work, and even hearing you, Sarah, describe your journey, a lot of things get kind of caught up in semantics, do you think? And how true is that? Because even reading some of your thesis and stuff like that, I'm like, what does that mean? Because it means something to me. But I don't know if there's like some objective thing going on.

[00:27:01] [SPEAKER_03] And I know that when I start whatever you might call spiritual or progressive or different for me, language is really, really important because those are your tools of thought. And how much of it do you think it's kind of bogged down in that?

[00:27:17] [SPEAKER_04] Like magic versus magic.

[00:27:19] [SPEAKER_03] The term magic itself, right? Like reading some of your work, I have to constantly replace David Copperfield with something that might be spiritual and kind of redefine it just to get through some of the stuff you've written, right? Yeah. And so talk to me about that and how you evolve through that and how... How do you navigate it? Yeah. How do you navigate that and getting your message through and it being effective?

[00:27:39] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. It's been a challenge. I tend to embrace a lot of the old-fashioned terms, occult, magic, ESP, even New Age. I mean, I realize many people use New Age as an epithet. It's supposed to be something... It's a term for everything that's fuzzy and unrealistic in spirituality. But I use the term... I think there's a more benign definition. I see New Age, frankly, as I defined it, as a culture of radically ecumenical therapeutic spirituality.

[00:28:08] [SPEAKER_02] So I might include the 12 steps in that, for example. Anyway, I guess I'm sort of making your point for you, which there are so many semantics and there are emotional triggers for people. Because one person who might use New Age in a benign way, another person might say, oh, my God, mom was a New Ager and she was using bee pollen instead of whatever antibiotic I needed when I had the flu. Yeah. And so I really do recognize the heat around some of these terms.

[00:28:37] [SPEAKER_02] And listen, when people have gotten burned in situations that are supposed to be situations of compassion and search and understanding, they never forget it. And they ought not forget it. And I try... You know, the only anecdote I have is this. I try to be really transparent. If I use a term, I'll define it. And I try to carry that transparency out into my career. On social media, I use my real name and I encourage people to use their real name. I put my email up on my website.

[00:29:07] [SPEAKER_02] Anybody can go look for it. It's the same damn email that the DoorDash guy uses. And anybody can write to me. And I get surprisingly little hate. But I am touched when people like voice hate. They use my first name. They're like, hey, Mitch, you're so full of shit. And I think it's nice that you use my first name. It's a nice kind of friendly thing. Anyway, the point is I try to practice transparency. If I use a term, I define the term. I might give its history.

[00:29:35] [SPEAKER_02] I'll say precisely what I mean by it as I just attempted to do for New Age, as I attempted to do for Cult. Again, email, social media. I am easy to reach. I dislike this quality where people, especially media people, kind of make themselves, oh, I don't know, they put themselves behind a wall or they put like a fake form to fill out on the website for an email account that nobody is monitoring. I try to practice transparency.

[00:30:02] [SPEAKER_02] So I guess my solution is that I don't necessarily know that I have a global fix to the very real thing that you're describing. But if I spell magic with a K, I damn well try to explain to people why I'm doing this. It's not just because I'm an emotional 12-year-old who likes heavy metal, which is true, but that's not why I'm doing that. And I think transparency, transparency, transparency, that's what I think we need to all bring to the table.

[00:30:29] [SPEAKER_04] I like that. And so given that, I thought, yeah, we thought that like kind of part two would be if you're game, assuming that people are still listening and haven't given up. Because like I said, the Medium episode was controversial. We also had Eckhart Tolle on, that was controversial.

[00:30:44] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, okay.

[00:30:45] [SPEAKER_04] Which was one of our favorites.

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_02] But unlike Eckhart, you can go to my website and tell me to go to hell, you know, and I'll get...

[00:30:49] [SPEAKER_04] Well, I have his number. I can text him, but he's not...

[00:30:52] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, please, yeah.

[00:30:53] [SPEAKER_04] Yeah.

[00:30:54] [SPEAKER_03] Part two is Convince the Skeptic.

[00:30:56] [SPEAKER_04] Well, Convince the Skeptic would be fun, but also I thought what might be interesting and definitely controversial is if you could like, since your book is practical, practical magic, for people like us who want to personally at our home not start a new program or join another group per se, dabble in some basic practical magic to get our lives back on track. What do you think?

[00:31:20] [SPEAKER_02] Sure. I'm happy to.

[00:31:24] [SPEAKER_04] Hey, Calti listeners. As you probably know, Nippy and I are working on a manuscript for our first book together. And as you probably also know, maintaining control is important to us. That's why we've decided to produce our book with the Self-Publishing Agency or TSPA. Unlike traditional publishing, where you're often left waiting for months or even years to get your story out, the Self-Publishing Agency lets you take control of your timeline. You'll have complete creative freedom with insights and guidance from pros in the publishing world.

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[00:35:47] [SPEAKER_03] So I look at why you would get involved, why you seek or anything like that, at least for me, is I want to figure out how I can make optimal decisions in my life. Assuming it's not based in some sort of malevolence and hurting people, I want to make decisions that actualize me, help me become the best version of me, which I think requires the capacity to make good decisions. And I'm assuming that's what magic is rooted in, your definition of magic is rooted in. And that's safe to assume, right?

[00:36:15] [SPEAKER_03] You're not trying to coerce people and con them. Right. So what are the tenets of what you do that would, if I were to adopt some of the versions of what you're promoting into my life, what would that look like?

[00:36:30] [SPEAKER_02] Like, how could I incorporate? I dig that. You know, I might use different language, but my definition of magic is very close to that or the purpose behind it. Self-agency, I suppose, would be the thing that I might define it as. It's the capacity to see things through in the world. I've come to feel at this point in my search, people always ponder, what is the meaning of life? I have no universal answer to that, but I do believe that the individual in self-expression

[00:36:56] [SPEAKER_02] is the individual in some state of happiness and relaxation with self. I think self-expression, broadly defined, that could mean very different things for very different people, is extremely important and magic should feed into that. So one of the things I write about in the book, and I ask people to listen to this very carefully because it's so simple that it can slide right by. I think first and foremost, a clarified wish is extremely important. We all tell ourselves, I know what I want in life. Of course I know what I want.

[00:37:26] [SPEAKER_02] But look again because we all have a habit of repeating things by rote to ourselves, and it can become a kind of internalized peer pressure, or those of us who have religious commitments always feel the need, even when we're just talking to ourselves, to kind of perfume our wishes as if they're service or they're helping someone else, and that may very well be. But what I ask people to do in private is come to a very clarified wish of what they're after in life

[00:37:56] [SPEAKER_02] and throw out all the rote statements because I think so much of what we define as conscience or ethics or what have you is internalized peer pressure. And I ask people to go back to their first cognizant memories of age three or four, first cognizant long-term memories, because that's before peer conformity really gets into us, and ask, what did you want then? Because you'll be very surprised. You had dreams and wishes then, and they weren't necessarily just little childish ones like,

[00:38:24] [SPEAKER_02] oh, I want to be a cowboy or a ballerina. I mean, there was something more than that. And keep it private. Keep it private. You'll hear me go into that again and again. And there are reasons for that that I think could be defined as spiritual, but there are also reasons that I think are self-protective. I don't necessarily want people to go barking their most intimate wishes to just whomever they happen to be around. And I think the clarified wish is just extremely important. I ask people to start there.

[00:38:54] [SPEAKER_02] Another of the things I talk about in the book, and there are other things that are more, I guess you could say ritualistically magical, that would more be associated with a cult practice, but I hope they're all as plain and as simple as this. I ask people to look about how they're dressing and how they're presenting in the world. Are they really functioning in terms of their outward adornment, gait, accoutrements, body art, if they're interested in that? Are they really functioning as they want to out in the world?

[00:39:24] [SPEAKER_02] And on the spiritual path, both mainstream and alternative, we very frequently hear, what matters is what you can't see. What matters is the inside. What matters is the unseen world. Everything else is illusion or maya or samsara. I think it's all one thing. I think it's all one thing and that the individual can work transformations in him or herself in small ways by first starting with a sense of,

[00:39:53] [SPEAKER_02] how do I want to present in the world? It might not always be possible. If you're a funeral director, you can't show up at work in flip-flops or what have you, but know what it is. Know what it is. And I also encourage people, and this is a, I would almost say this is non-negotiable, and I say this in every book. Get away from cruel people and burn your bridges behind you. And people frequently resist that

[00:40:18] [SPEAKER_02] because the relationships that people sometimes experience as cruel might have economic ties behind them, domestic ties, family ties, neighbor ties, whatever. And I recognize that. And there is a consequence to pay for that. But usually the consequence is a great deal less than what we surmise, a great deal less. And I see people who year in and year out will, for example, at a holiday invite the same nasty in-laws who they can't stand

[00:40:48] [SPEAKER_02] and then spend the next six months complaining about their in-laws rather than just saying like, yo, there's no way. You're not coming. There are other adults who can model good behavior for my children. And if my spouse won't have it, then my spouse is going to have to go take up a hobby that will soothe his or her feelings because nasty people, abusive people, insulting people are not sitting at my table. It's tonic for the soul.

[00:41:13] [SPEAKER_03] I have a little anecdote. About two years ago, I had a situation where someone was just totally inappropriate with me on the phone. Super toxic. And it was a business relationship. And I had some money that I'd put up for something. And Sarah wanted me to get it back. But the fight or flight that I got when I looked at my emails and going through it, I was like, I will lose this money to not have this feeling ever again.

[00:41:38] [SPEAKER_02] You're so right with that. And a person has to sit down and say that to himself because we allow emotions to take over. And this was something else I value in the work of Guru Chief. His teaching was that we think we're intellectual beings. We think we make decisions and have something called willpower, whatever it is. The emotions, the intellect, the physical body, they're all running on their own tracks and they all have their own needs. Otherwise, there would be no addictions. I'd say to myself, this substance is bad for me.

[00:42:08] [SPEAKER_02] It's too much. If I could make an intellectual decision about an addiction, boom, life is better. But we don't function that way. And so your situation with money, I've been in situations like that. And I needed the money. And that's legit. And the emotions take over. It's like, I need the money. What on earth am I going to do if I don't have this money? And who the hell is this person to hang on to my money and they're not being honest with me? And I feel those emotions like a biblical prophet.

[00:42:38] [SPEAKER_02] But then you sit down and you say to yourself, all the agony that this is causing me, and let's say this other guy is a crook. Let's say he's a crook. There are crooks in the world and it sucks. But how much is my life worth to me? And if I'm getting fight or flight, blood pressure going up, panic attack coming on, every time I talk to this person, maybe the son of a bitch gets to rip me off. And I hope that there's some reciprocity in life. I hope that karma is a real thing. I believe it is. I know.

[00:43:09] [SPEAKER_02] Complex question, but I believe it is. And every hit I've ever taken to get away from a cruel person has been more than worth it. I look back on joy with getting away and I never think about what I lost. Again, the consequences do exist. You lost money. They're real. They're concrete. And sometimes people find the consequences are just too much. But I would say to somebody... But I gained a summer of joy. You gained a summer of joy. Isn't that amazing?

[00:43:36] [SPEAKER_02] You know, I would say before we decide that the consequences are too great, really sit with that. Because frequently it's just anticipatory anxiety. They're not that bad, you know. Loss of money, this, that, the other. They're not that bad. And sometimes they're none at all. You know, I mean, I knew a woman who... And I think everybody can relate to this story. Her mother-in-law was very cruel to her. And once there was a power outage here in New York City and her kid was sick and they lived in a high-rise building,

[00:44:06] [SPEAKER_02] elevators weren't running. It's a serious problem. So she took the kid and she went to stay temporarily with her mother-in-law out in New Jersey until the power came back on in New York. And long story short, she described to me how unwelcoming the environment was. She was very, very, very upset about it. And I said to her, just, you know, cut the ties, man. Cut the ties, you know. If a person's not there for you when your kid is sick, how is that family, you know?

[00:44:34] [SPEAKER_02] And she said, well, I want my kid to be surrounded by family role models. I said, look, you know, he's got teachers, he's got coaches, he's got other positive role models. Is it really necessary? I don't know what she ultimately did, but I asked people to really think about it. I mean, we have so much more freedom than we permit ourselves. And yet we allow convention to disrupt that. If I could leave one legacy, getting away from cruel people would be it. You know, don't read any of my books, just do that.

[00:45:02] [SPEAKER_02] And the world will be, you know, a fraction better.

[00:45:07] [SPEAKER_04] And you, it was safe to say cruel, you could substitute with toxic?

[00:45:11] [SPEAKER_02] Oh, I think it destroys people. I think it destroys people. A person cannot discover who they are in an atmosphere of cruelty. And I use that word purposefully because I think that I see people, and I have been in situations where like a so-called best friend or a family member or your best buddy at work will send little cruise missiles over your desk. Oh, you know how it is. Backhanded compliments, damning you with faint praise,

[00:45:40] [SPEAKER_02] always maintaining plausible denial. You're too sensitive. It was just a joke. And that's all the language of bullies. Bullies always love to have plausible denial. No bully ever perceives him or herself as a bully or ever owns up to it. They say, oh, you know, come on. You're just, you're misunderstanding. Or what about the time when you did that? You know, whatever. All these words tie us into knots.

[00:46:04] [SPEAKER_04] Classic gaslighting.

[00:46:05] [SPEAKER_02] Classic gaslighting. And when I was a kid, you know, we didn't have the term gaslighting. Maybe it gets overused today, but I'm glad we at least have it. When I was a kid, terms like gaslighting and narcissist, they weren't part of the vocabulary. So it was very hard to describe somebody mindfucking you. Now we can describe it and that's good. But those words aren't just fodder for conversations. We got to move. So I feel super strong about that. And if it means, if it means walking away from your best friend

[00:46:34] [SPEAKER_02] because you discover that person's been bullying you for half your life, do it and see what happens. You know, see what happens. At least know.

[00:46:42] [SPEAKER_04] The plausible deniability is really key because I don't know how much you know about NXIVM, but it did have an element of the confrontation that you've been talking about from SLN and Sinanon and that type of confrontation. But it was done in a different way. It was done with a smile and a head tilt. You know, like what does it mean, Mitch, if you're unwilling to acknowledge that you're choosing comfort over your own growth? Like in a very soft way, right?

[00:47:08] [SPEAKER_02] That's brilliant. I mean, the description. Yeah, the description. Yeah, I'm going to go out and start a group. No, no, no. The description is so poignant.

[00:47:17] [SPEAKER_04] Right? So like making sure that people know that bullying and cruelty and toxicity can be also, you know, shrouded in it with a smile under the name of your growth, doing this for your growth.

[00:47:28] [SPEAKER_02] So important because what you have just described runs riot in New Age culture.

[00:47:35] [SPEAKER_01] Totally.

[00:47:36] [SPEAKER_02] And riot. And in one sense, I'm grateful to New Age culture because within that constituency are the people who read my books and listen to my podcasts and so forth. So I'm grateful to it. And as you all are pointing out, there's a scale. You know, there's a scale. But parts of that culture, and it's a sizable fraction, very sizable fraction, are exactly what you were just describing, that lilt of voice and tilt of head. And now this is for your own good.

[00:48:04] [SPEAKER_02] And it is comforting. And it can also be very deceiving and bullying, kind of placing a plush. Inauthentic. Inauthentic. And I've seen it, I cannot tell you how many times. I'll give you a story. There's a New Age magazine that I would say kind of gave me my start, published some of my first articles. And we had a contract, you know, in magazines, they undergo changes in management and such. And a change in management had occurred.

[00:48:33] [SPEAKER_02] And we had a contract for some articles I was supposed to write. And long story short, they didn't pay me. And I was like, yo, I do this for a living. And they kept dodging me. And then finally, the business manager, these were the actual words used, verbatim, said to me, I'm asking you to please have compassion for the accounting department. And, you know, it's like, it was so manipulative because if I want you all to keep your contract with me,

[00:49:02] [SPEAKER_02] I'm showing a lack of compassion for Mike and the accounting department. It was so manipulative. I think you could probably understand the many levels on which that was manipulative. And I just said, yo, I'm out of here. You know, keep the money. Goodbye. And I was very glad because, believe me, there were many such instances where I did not do that, you know, when I was younger, more insecure. And people will get manipulated

[00:49:30] [SPEAKER_02] into positions of, boy, I would say, a real, just really getting taken advantage of and getting walked all over by that lilting voice, tilt of head. The new age is filled with passive aggression. And not infrequently, that passive aggression masks a lack of accountability. I think one of the things that attracts people to new age spirituality, and I've experienced so much of this over the years, is, look,

[00:49:59] [SPEAKER_02] there are some of us who struggle with getting things done in outer life. The outer world requires things of us that not everybody is good at participating in, like showing up on time and getting up on time and keeping your word and doing the things that are necessary to maintain a normative workplace or whatever. There are people who have problems with that, and rather than deal with those problems, they sometimes flee to an environment

[00:50:28] [SPEAKER_02] that validates resistance to what I would call normative obligations as a kind of laid back, go with the flow, pseudo-Zen approach to life. Of course, a real Zen master is impeccable, right? Very responsible. But when you get into that mindset that I can flee a sense of failure or a sense of inability in outer life

[00:50:57] [SPEAKER_02] by gravitating towards a new age culture that seems to reward nonconformity, suddenly there's a way to perfume a lack of accountability. So that means I don't have to pay somebody. So that means I don't have to do this. The nightmare stories I have as a writer, as a speaker of not getting paid by people, they all come from new age culture. Every last one of them. And the excuse is always, sorry, I'm too busy saving the world. I can't take your call right now. There's a prominent new age center

[00:51:27] [SPEAKER_02] here in New York City where when I was younger, I used to speak all the time. I had a contract. It was signed. It was all very official. They would just never pay me. And I'd make phone call after phone call and friends or so-called friends, people I knew would not return my phone calls, et cetera, et cetera. And I realized it was a pattern. I suppose they expected newcomers to speak for free even though they had a contract with us and everything just as a resume builder. And I didn't think that was cool. I didn't like that.

[00:51:57] [SPEAKER_02] But I don't think it's ethical to pay Deepak Chopra because he's famous and then not pay the schmo from around the block because he's not. It's an ethical commitment. You have a contract. And so I stopped speaking there and it was exactly that culture. And they're holding conferences on green business efforts and kind of like heartfelt business and so forth and they're not paying their presenters. That is very common on new age culture. Kind of some faux higher principles are used to perfume corruption.

[00:52:27] [SPEAKER_02] And the individual has to be wary of that.

[00:52:30] [SPEAKER_04] Probably because those groups believe that they're out of the matrix and you're in 3D and they're in 5D so your reality isn't actually reality in their mind. Right, right, right. They're in the galactic or whatever. Have you watched the Love is One documentary with Amy Carlson who turned into Mother God?

[00:52:49] [SPEAKER_02] I've heard of that but I have not seen it. Oh, so the excuse is I'm at a higher frequency. Yeah, well they're

[00:52:54] [SPEAKER_04] operating in 5D and the rest of the world is in 3D and ironically some of the things that they say in the beginning of the group is that like you know the world is this matrix and you haven't woken up from it and it's all your indoctrination and this is just the things that are implanted in us and we're out of it. But you're right, it gives them full reign to do whatever the fuck they want.

[00:53:13] [SPEAKER_03] They weaponize altruism and hide behind it to justify.

[00:53:17] [SPEAKER_02] That's a great phrase, weaponize altruism. Yeah, beautifully put.

[00:53:21] [SPEAKER_03] And hide behind it to justify their behaviors.

[00:53:23] [SPEAKER_02] I feel that this is why within the alternative spiritual culture that I function in I do not use terms like realized or enlightened or notions of people being on a higher level because that, what was the term? Weaponize. Weaponize altruism. Altruism. The notion being that the boss man or whomever can do whatever he wants under the curtain of functioning at a higher level. And that is bullshit.

[00:53:53] [SPEAKER_02] I call outright bullshit on that. I believe that first of all we individuals, people are all going to have moments where they're more sensitive and thoughtful and they are looking at life in a more pensive way and at those moments every single adult is capable of making decisions for him or herself. I'll give you an example. There's a cult philosopher, writer, who's now dead. I love him. Manly P. Hall. He wrote a book called The Secret Teachings of All Ages

[00:54:21] [SPEAKER_02] in 1929. He died in 1990. I never knew him. But he's been a source of inspiration to me because he was the guy whose work persuaded me that documenting a cult or esoteric history could be a vocation in itself. And it's certainly proven true for me. And so I love him and he's been a huge impact on my life. There are people around him who described him as a realized man and enlightened man. I utterly and completely dispute that because he did a number of things

[00:54:51] [SPEAKER_02] that were very foolish. He welcomed people into his social circle towards the end of his life who were con artists who were trying to get their hands on his bank account and his collection of antiquities and so on and so forth. He wrote things that were outright foolish, just prejudicial, stupid things that may have sounded better in the 1940s than they do today but even for the 1940s they didn't sound that good. And it was foolishness. It was utter foolishness. But I love the man, I hope, the same way that I love another adult

[00:55:20] [SPEAKER_02] which is I realize that person has grave flaws as well as splendid and sublime qualities. But realized, enlightened, no way. The notion, and this discussion is also cut short within certain circles because people will say, oh, well, an ordinary guy, a one-dimensional guy like Mitch can't recognize a five-dimensional person like so-and-so. You can't see it, you can't recognize it. I call foul on that because the seeker must verify

[00:55:50] [SPEAKER_02] and that was something I'm hearkening back to Gurdjieff. You have to verify things for yourself and I'm always telling people that can't just be a pretty word. Verify has to really mean something. It has to have teeth and it has to sit right with the mature individual. I'm vastly more interested in that than I am in superlatives.

[00:56:09] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, you bring up a good point because there's a lot of these people that put out a claim about themselves, a boast about themselves. I saw this recently. I was listening to NPR yesterday and there's this professor from Yale who just left Yale and is going to University of Toronto because he's afraid of the fascist dictator stuff and people started challenging him on what was going on and he's like, I have letters at the end of my name. I'm a PhD and blah, blah, blah and he started,

[00:56:38] [SPEAKER_03] so he was basically referencing his claims as to you need to believe me and to your point, like, if I'm going to believe your claims as the person listening, you have to help me come to that conclusion, not just say, believe me because you have letters after your name. Yeah. To me, that's this movement of going on of if you don't believe me, you're wrong and I've got letters after my name that we see it in our kind of culture. Cult recovery space. Cult recovery space. You do.

[00:57:08] [SPEAKER_04] The expert. There's experts. Yeah,

[00:57:09] [SPEAKER_03] we just left this atmosphere and when we go into the atmosphere again and we see the same behavior, I'm not going to not call you out on it. Right. Because if you're trying to educate people and you're saying, believe me because, as opposed to just being an example and having an explanation and being transparent,

[00:57:28] [SPEAKER_02] you don't reach people. That's fascinating and what that professor doesn't realize is that the invocation of fancy letters at the end of my name is the thing that causes the public to distrust academia. They don't want to feel like they're being dictated to. They want to feel like, as you said, they're being persuaded fairly and justly and they might come on a different side. I think sometimes I've heard people call that credentialism

[00:57:57] [SPEAKER_02] and somebody, so how do you guys see that in your world? How does that play out?

[00:58:03] [SPEAKER_04] There's just, you know, experts that are more expert than other experts.

[00:58:08] [SPEAKER_03] Here's how I'll describe it. I think people need this space and they need to be authorities in this space because they're relating to this space as their profession and they're getting more out of it than maybe they're giving to it at times, not all the time. I think they come from a good place, but I also think this is their living. Yeah. And if they are not seen as the authoritative voice in it, there's a downside to them. Yeah. That's it. And I think it can be evolved through

[00:58:37] [SPEAKER_03] more conversations.

[00:58:39] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah. The thing that is so important, not only for the public to remember, but for the self-proclaimed experts to remember is that again, as with organizations, so with professions, there's a scale. You know, wouldn't everybody agree there are great dentists and there are dentists who are not so good? And there's a scale. You know, one of my kids every time questions arose, I was treated like I was somehow

[00:59:08] [SPEAKER_02] anti-therapy. And I'm not anti-therapy. My God, I live in New York City. You know, that would be like being anti-oil, you know, living somewhere in the oil fields of North Dakota, you know, or something.

[00:59:20] And so,

[00:59:21] [SPEAKER_02] I mean, that's what we do here. But the idea was that I was sort of like opposing the whole field or the whole principle or the whole practice and it wasn't that. I just didn't feel like there was rapport between the patient or the client and the caregiver. And, you know, we have to keep in mind there's scales with everything, every professor, every expert, every engineer and not get sidelined by somebody claiming they've got initials or a PhD or, you know, something of that nature.

[00:59:46] [SPEAKER_04] It reminds me a little bit of Teal Swan, if you followed her work at all.

[00:59:51] [SPEAKER_02] Again, I know the name but not the work.

[00:59:53] [SPEAKER_04] I'm surprised she hasn't tried to get you on her show or her YouTube channel or something because superficially...

[00:59:59] [SPEAKER_02] My inbox is, you know, it's bizarre.

[01:00:02] [SPEAKER_04] Because you're so easy to access. I don't know if she has magic skills. I even asked this and we did an episode on her, like, does she have powers? Like, she claims to have a lot of powers but she also is, in my belief and according to the checklist, definitely also leading a cult. But I was trying to figure out, like, are her abilities completely made up or does she have abilities and she's a narcissist? I don't know.

[01:00:32] [SPEAKER_02] Those are good questions. Yeah.

[01:00:34] [SPEAKER_04] And as somebody who is a believer, I think there might be something. In fact, a lot of these groups, I'm like, well, there's got to be something in the initial draw that pulls people in or gives them value to continue in the group. So,

[01:00:48] [SPEAKER_02] yeah. that's a wonderful observation, of course. Different things can be going on at once. A person could have a genius level intellect but be a narcissist and be absolutely bereft of empathy and it's huge trouble. It doesn't necessarily take away from their genius as a composer or an artist or a spiritual, you know, somebody who, if a person warrants belief in extra physicality as I do, a person might present themselves as a channeler or a medium or a psychic and that person

[01:01:18] [SPEAKER_02] might from time to time have insights. That person also might have a huge number of failed hits and lined alleys and don't warrant the pay-by-the-hour fee that they receive. I have a big problem with that in the New Age culture. Spirituality and money are always a tough mix. They're always a tough mix and I've never figured it out, I can assure you. I mean, my work, the paying work that I do is for television, books, narration, talks, you know, what have you, not spells, you know,

[01:01:47] [SPEAKER_02] by the hour. But I know plenty of people who hang out a shingle of psychics and they charge by the hour and I have gone to some of these people for advice and I have personally had occasions where sometimes they'll get a hit that's very intimate and I would even describe as almost uncanny in its insight and really quite remarkable and I know cold reading techniques, I practically wrote them, you know, and I recognize the risks there. but I've had intimate insights, intimate hits that I've gotten from a psychic that have been

[01:02:17] [SPEAKER_02] very helpful. I've also had disastrously wrong hits. In one case, I followed one of those hits and made a very big mistake in my life and caused a lot of pain for myself and for other people and the psychic, if in fact there is such thing as some sort of anomalous mental ability and I believe there is, it cannot be turned on and off like a water faucet and it's not dentistry where you're pretty much going to get the same outcome every time. It may occur but those occurrences

[01:02:46] [SPEAKER_02] cannot just be summoned in the same way that Thomas Edison summoned the power of electricity through a light bulb. It does not work that way in my experience and I would counsel people to be very cautious about that because a medium psychic channel, what have you, who charges by the hour, in one sense I want to defend that person because look, that's what a therapist does, that's what a life coach does, because people are entitled to earn a living, there's always been a complex relationship between spirituality and money, as long as everything

[01:03:16] [SPEAKER_02] is up front and clear, the mature individual can make his or her own decision but at the same time I also, I personally speaking, I would have ethical problems myself if I were charging by the hour for that stuff because I think the hits are uneven, they're just uneven and the person coming to you is almost by definition a person in need. People don't go see psychics because everything's going great, they go see a psychic because they are lost,

[01:03:45] [SPEAKER_02] they lost a relationship, maybe they got fired from a job, they're suffering and they're looking for an answer and so by definition the client of a psychic is almost always in a vulnerable spot in life and they want to believe what's being said and people have to watch for that in themselves, I have to watch for that in myself.

[01:04:08] [SPEAKER_04] For more context on what brought us here, check out my memoir. It's called Scarred, the true story of how I escaped NXIVM, the cult that bound my life. I narrate the audio version and it's also available on Amazon, Audible and at most bookstores. And now, a brief message from our Little Bit Cult-y sponsors and remember, when you support our sponsors, you're supporting this podcast. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, many of us are out here googling, why am I so stressed? Or is it normal

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[01:06:44] [SPEAKER_03] Break time's over people. Let's get back to this episode of A Little Bit CULTI. It's a good one.

[01:06:50] [SPEAKER_04] These seem like really important points that you've, I'm sure, had to craft and be aware of. I know that in our intake form for this podcast you wrote about the cultish nature of career skeptics.

[01:07:02] [SPEAKER_01] Oh, yes.

[01:07:02] [SPEAKER_04] Because I'm sure that there's so many people who you're combating on a daily level who are just so skeptical. I have an idea of what you meant by that, but what did you mean by that? Are you talking about the cultish nature of people who are us versus them and their beliefs versus yours and aren't willing to dialogue with you? Or what did you mean?

[01:07:20] [SPEAKER_02] Something very close to that. I am very interested in ESP research or psychical research. It's called parapsychology. And there are, in my estimation, and have been over the past couple of generations, serious clinical efforts in lab settings, often academic lab settings, to try to determine whether there is some anomalous transfer of information that goes beyond our five senses. So this might be called

[01:07:49] [SPEAKER_02] telepathy or clairvoyance or something like that. I'm very, very interested in this research and I feel this research has borne fruit. The emotions run really high around this topic because people who come to the table to scrutinize parapsychology very often are belief-based. I am belief-based. I had a belief in the extra physical when I was nine years old, when I was very incapable

[01:08:18] [SPEAKER_02] of studying or reading a statistically-based paper on behalf of the ESP effect. So admittedly, I have to confess my own subjectivity. And then there are career skeptics who come to the table with hardened, strict, physicalist opinions about the world, absolute materialist opinions about the world. And the discussion very quickly descends into pure emotion. It's just pure emotion. And it's us versus them, as you were saying.

[01:08:48] [SPEAKER_02] And the career skeptics, in my estimation, have done a very good job of discrediting a lot of this research. I mean, look at the you need to go no further than Wikipedia and you'll see next to every article that deals with a parapsychological topic is almost always flooded with negative references by the ad hoc editors who assemble Wiki. And it's a big cultural issue. And I find it very frustrating because some of this evidence does stand up and I don't ask somebody

[01:09:18] [SPEAKER_02] to sort of sign on board and say, yep, Horowitz is right. ESP is real. I think the crux of the matter is sustaining a question, sustaining a question and saying, look, we got these stats. They've been pooled. They've been meta-analyzed. There's no evident corruption in the methods. There's no evident mistakes in the math. So maybe we should do more research. This research that I'm describing, ESP research, it's inexpensive as hell. It's peanuts compared to the funding of most research on campuses.

[01:09:47] [SPEAKER_02] It's just peanuts. And I believe it should continue. I don't think it should be discredited as, oh God, you know, these guys are just delving into this woo-woo realm and calling it science. That's not accurate. And yet the career skeptics are so attached to a position of strict materialism that they rush to a kind of polemical discrediting of this data. I, for my part, hold up the other side, try to do a good job. And I find that there can be

[01:10:17] [SPEAKER_02] a culty mentality among some career skeptics where they just simply, they will not pay attention to the data, even to the point of sustaining a question, just sustaining a question. There's this passion to discredit it. I suppose they're worried that if headlines start saying, Princeton study shows ESP real, it will unleash this wave of irrationality on the world. And I understand their concern because I'm averse to conspiracy theories which usually end

[01:10:46] [SPEAKER_02] in very ugly places. And I feel some of that emotionalism, but there has to be a way, you know, that we can navigate data together. I love that. I find it very hard. You know, the scientific communities had that happen to them.

[01:10:58] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, that's right. So no field is really immune to this wave of whatever, vax, anti-vax, or, you know, whatever. So it's more a commentary on human dynamic than it is.

[01:11:11] [SPEAKER_02] Yes. And it's all emotion, you know, I mean, I think that we bring emotion to money, we bring emotion to, look, the whole thing, it seems to me, comes down to this. We are beings that seek safety. And it probably goes back to our, you know, primordial days as a human species and we seek safety. And if something violates our sense of safety, we go to a place that's very passionate very quickly. I think that's why nobody can ever change anyone else's mind about politics. You know, I've had lots of people say,

[01:11:40] [SPEAKER_02] oh, if only people could see things from my point of view, it's pure rationality. How can I persuade, you know, the guy in the other camp? And the truth is, you can't persuade him any more than he can you because it's emotion. We're using intellect to go up against emotion. It's also not black and white, ever. It's not black and white.

[01:11:59] [SPEAKER_04] Do you think the term woo-woo to describe a lot of this is part of that career skeptic world to discredit?

[01:12:06] [SPEAKER_02] I've started using the term woo-woo, you know, I guess I like to reclaim things.

[01:12:10] [SPEAKER_04] I'm reclaiming, I've reclaimed it too if I wanted to know your, so we're on the same page there.

[01:12:16] [SPEAKER_02] Yeah, it's so familiar a term that it's almost harmless. Like if a guy is an environmentalist and calls himself a tree hugger, you know, we're at the point where it's like, look, let's just reclaim these terms because they're gonna get used anyway. I mean, I realized that when I was very young, I was working in publishing and I was trying to explain my job to some guy at a party and he said, what do you mean? So like new age and, you know, I took great emberge at it like, aye sir, I'm interested in comparative religion, not new age, you know, but then I realized at a certain point I'm gonna get called it anyway.

[01:12:46] [SPEAKER_02] So woo-woo, new age, you know, bring it on.

[01:12:49] [SPEAKER_04] I feel like there's a resurgence of acceptance of woo-woo right now and people are kind of apologetically or maybe secretively woo-woo, just a little personal anecdote. Nippy was away or I sent him away because my girlfriend was in town and she's, you know, kind of witchy and she does a lot of little dabbles, you know, in a non, in a non-culti way that pulls from different, I guess she would be also hermetic as well. I'm gonna talk to her. I'm gonna give her, I'll give her your book for sure. She's gonna love it.

[01:13:15] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you.

[01:13:16] [SPEAKER_04] But yeah, so we were in the garden and we assembled some women. We may or may not have microdosed a little bit of mushrooms and there was some dancing and there was some chanting and there was, my neighbors for sure think I'm in another cult, right? Like, but I'm a bit aware.

[01:13:29] [SPEAKER_01] And your husband. And my husband.

[01:13:32] [SPEAKER_04] And I, and I like shared this with a couple of friends and they're like, oh, next time you do that, will you tell me? Because like, I'm kind of into that stuff too. Like, nobody was really, it's sort of like a secret thing, but maybe that's the personal thing you were talking about, you know, keeping these things private, which is good, but also there's this more of acceptance to the, I'm calling it like a spiritual smorgasbord of like dabbling in tarot and dabbling in, you know, understanding the chakras or whatever. Is that something that you feel has, like how does that affect your career?

[01:14:01] [SPEAKER_04] I guess is what I would ask you.

[01:14:03] [SPEAKER_02] I do find in private, there are people who will be very disclosing about maybe a non-traditional belief or physical practice or something, or, you know, take, you know, microdosing and, you know, getting it on at the picnic or, you know, whatever it is. And I'm very touched by it because I like the idea that there can be this inside outside approach to life where, for example, someone doesn't have to make a public declaration

[01:14:33] [SPEAKER_02] about anything or join anything or carry a membership card, but they can be, whomever they are, a computer programmer who is into psychedelics and who believes those psychedelics might open him or her to maybe some, even a kind of anomalous way of knowing or some corner of the psyche or the subconscious where there's a personal realization or something that's meaningful, whatever it is. I meet people all the time like that

[01:15:01] [SPEAKER_02] and I like people being able to pursue something and then just go back to their ordinary or outward lives. I think that's the best kind of seeker in a certain way. It's not necessary to kind of adopt it as a cloak of identity, you know, to bring me prestige or something. I think it's really cool. I think it's really cool. I mean, the whole idea, again, I suppose it goes back to where I was at the beginning.

[01:15:30] [SPEAKER_02] I really value people's privacy and a lot of the spiritual practices that I undertake are private. I'm with that. Meditation, you know, meditation, prayer, maybe different physical modalities and I define magic as causative ritual, causative ritual and I'd like to believe that somebody who maybe leans more on the agnostic or atheistic direction could also participate in that feeling like, look, you know, ritual can be very powerful. Maybe this is kind

[01:16:00] [SPEAKER_02] of a psychological exercise and I'm down with that. You know, I'm down with exploring that. As long as privacy is in place, I think the person is protected to a great extent and so I have found, yes, a lot of people who walk what might seem like a very mainstream path in life but they're very down with some very unusual ideas in private and that's part of what's great about being in a free society.

[01:16:25] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, I have a question because I kind of feel like I'd land there a little bit because there was a point in my life where I'm a slave to physics. If I can't see it, measure it quantified, you're self-indulgent and after my experience and after what I went through, it's for sure opened me up. I mean, it would have to be one of those things that happened to me after what Sarah and I went through and I called Sarah on the phone this morning and the wish thing that you spoke to was a parallel of something I read in the book Power Versus Force.

[01:16:55] [SPEAKER_03] David Hawkins, you familiar with that? Yes, of course.

[01:16:57] [SPEAKER_04] I think he actually referenced it. He did? Yeah.

[01:16:59] [SPEAKER_03] So in the intro to that, he's like, I'm writing to the left brain and right brain and when you read this, you might remember some of the things I'm saying. It's going to be a weird phenomenon. Like remember, like you're going to read this and you're going to remember thinking and feeling that and that's similar to the three and four-year-old wish and I went to bed last night thinking about like that's the second time I've read this in this kind of journey and it really resonates with me because I feel like I was ushered into a world of performance and I was pressured to perform

[01:17:29] [SPEAKER_03] from a pretty early age and I happened to be pretty good at sports and other things and then I kind of the three or four-year-old wish that I had was never nurtured in a lot of ways and then when I go to think about what that might be, I'm always comparing it to performance and I judge it because it doesn't have the, what I think societally, school-wise, I was programmed to do. It's not as glorious. It's not performance-based.

[01:17:59] [SPEAKER_03] It's really play and you know, I had brothers and I had what I would say a great childhood and I had great friends and play was like kind of where I always land in these things and it's not play like in self-indulgence, it's play like

[01:18:14] [SPEAKER_04] How do you get back to that?

[01:18:15] [SPEAKER_03] Yeah, and then I go well what career could I do with that? I'm like that's not the question. You know what I mean? So I'm so like I'm that way. Do you know what I mean?

[01:18:25] [SPEAKER_04] So your performance mindset is changing your wish.

[01:18:28] [SPEAKER_03] I can't not evaluate it through the filter of what do I do with this and I'm judgmental of like what are we just going to play your whole life? But like you know I said in a couple of interviews there's nothing more interesting to me right now than raising my kids and we have some opportunities in front of us but I'm also that's the opportunity performance thing versus I'm in the best years of my life. I'm raising my kids I have a beautiful I have an end I'm creating and I have a podcast Tell me more

[01:18:51] [SPEAKER_04] about the wife part

[01:18:52] [SPEAKER_03] but do you get what I'm driving at? I do, yeah. And the wish and the wish isn't clear because I don't think I can align my emotions and everything to be on board with it and comfortable with it if that makes sense.

[01:19:04] [SPEAKER_02] Right, I dig. You know my critics might roll their eyes at this but I'm very empirically based as well which is why I'm so attached to lab based ESP research and I've had friends of mine who are sympathetic and they say you know you are way too attached to this left-brained empirical data-driven psychical research there's much more exciting things much more remarkable

[01:19:33] [SPEAKER_02] dramatic and passionate things that go on out in the field like somebody has a clairvoyant dream or a crisis apparition or precognition or something and I know they're right you know but I feel I feel so attached that way William James lamented this in himself not dissimilar to some of what you're describing James really validated the actuality of religion but he said in his diaries I lament that I have the kind of analytic mindset

[01:20:03] [SPEAKER_02] where I'm not really fully able to let the psychic door so to speak fly off its hinges you know I'm always very very grounded and he lamented that in a certain way because he wanted to experiment with elements of Christian science elements of new thought which he did I think with some success he also took a lot of nitrous oxide which he felt was the closest thing that a rational person could get to epiphanic experience I'm not sure whether that's true or not

[01:20:33] [SPEAKER_02] but in any way in case he agonized over it and I'm the same way you know so I'll go on certain kinds of podcasts and they're like Mitch you know where are the ghost stories you know what's happened you know we want to hear about the bed levitating and I'm like very few strange things really happen to me you know I've got my stories but they're nothing that's going to make any headlines and that's just not really where I dwell so hence you know I tend to grok to lab-based research and with respect to the wish even if a person can't

[01:21:02] [SPEAKER_02] act on a wish at a given time or act on a preference at a given time it's still really helpful to know it you know it's still really really some strange directions some strange directions you know there may be people on the spiritual path who say to themselves oh you know I don't care about money they may care a hell of a lot about the money but they don't give themselves permission to at least acknowledge

[01:21:32] [SPEAKER_02] that because they're spiritual so when we really open up these preferences can be very contrary to the lives that we're living and I'm not saying act on them in some erratic way but just know them just know them that's

[01:21:46] [SPEAKER_04] good advice

[01:21:46] [SPEAKER_02] so don't be a rock star oh well you know the time may come you know who knows I mean you know

[01:21:55] [SPEAKER_04] I mean you have to learn to play guitar Nippy has a guitar you gotta play the guitar I play

[01:22:00] [SPEAKER_03] I would put my air guitar up against some of the best

[01:22:03] [SPEAKER_04] air guitar is very good

[01:22:04] [SPEAKER_03] it's epic

[01:22:05] [SPEAKER_02] there's probably like a cruise for that like air guitar cruise I know I've never been on a cruise I keep threatening

[01:22:14] [SPEAKER_04] I don't think it would be your vibe just knowing you briefly not a cruise no you'd be

[01:22:19] [SPEAKER_02] surprised the offers that come in were like hey Mitch join our esoteric cruise and I'm like no there is no way I'm going to Alaska with people like me I know yeah

[01:22:31] [SPEAKER_04] because you can't escape is really the challenge I know there's things like crime con and different conventions comic con des cruises and I just don't want to be trapped

[01:22:43] [SPEAKER_02] you can't escape yeah right I mean I think that's a very good point and that's also something people have to watch out for it growth centers spiritual centers if there is a residency component to it that can be great but just think about it because you're there all your meals are going to be there that's where you're sleeping and so forth and so on if I go to a program or something quite frankly I prefer staying at a hotel because there's somewhere to escape at the end of the day

[01:23:12] [SPEAKER_04] yeah yeah and also the more you invest when you're fully in then you're tending to want to make your decision good is another psychological thing that happens right

[01:23:27] [SPEAKER_02] totally and you know the poor people who died on that retreat with James Ray where he had that sweat lodge out what was it in the Sedona desert yeah they paid a lot of money James was very charismatic they wanted the approval of the teacher they're in the middle of a very rural desert area there aren't a hell of a lot of options again they've dedicated a lot of resources to this thing and they they want it to go right and that can be the path to grave unhappiness

[01:23:57] [SPEAKER_02] if the setting is flawed

[01:23:59] [SPEAKER_04] yep exactly we did an episode on that and one of the other things I didn't realize is that one of the main kind of tenants under the whole thing that you commit to right at the beginning is that you're there to play full on

[01:24:10] [SPEAKER_02] play full on and you know one of the things I James is now dead and do you know him no I never knew him I mean we ran in the same circles at work people tried to convince me to kind of sit in on a meeting where James wanted to write his mea culpa memoir but I didn't really want to maybe it's time to examine a different way of life but

[01:24:40] [SPEAKER_02] anyway imagine that but there was one thing that really hit me a survivor of James group said something and I was really bothered by this and I thought to myself man this is a warning sign James would this thing and there was one woman real estate lady who said

[01:25:10] [SPEAKER_02] she resisted it she didn't want to and then they were having kind of this heavy celebration towards the end of the workshop and she decided in a fit of enthusiasm to go ahead and shave her head and she came up to James said to him I I don't give a shit and the idea was there's that encounter group confrontation he's the big leader and you're going to have to do more to please him and don't come looking for a cookie and I thought to myself

[01:25:40] [SPEAKER_02] no one has a right to speak disrespectfully to not respecting these attendees and I don't know I was just struck by that story I asked people to just don't let yourself feel

[01:26:09] [SPEAKER_02] disrespected at any step

[01:26:11] [SPEAKER_04] great advice did you ever watch the kundalini documentary breath of fire was on HBO no okay so another example of where the teachers were very toxic and bullying but it was dismissed and normalized because they were called Saturn teachers or something so that great great advice also in reading your book I feel like Keith Ranieri dabbled in a lot of these things some people say he was experimenting a little bit with

[01:26:41] [SPEAKER_04] some occult maybe dark or black excuse my ignorance of all the terms but do you know

[01:27:01] [SPEAKER_02] there's no question what you find it seems to me among different spiritual impresarios is that they are eating off of a lot of different plates they're experimenting with an amalgam of things look you saw this in L. Ron Hubbard for example when L. Ron Hubbard first got out of the Navy he was for a time hanging around with Jack Parsons an occultist who I quote at the beginning of my book Jack for a time had been a protege to the British magician and occultist

[01:27:31] [SPEAKER_02] Aleister Crowley and there was Hubbard in their world and Hubbard collected a lot of data from a lot of different groups and organizations and distilled it into what he later called Scientology I have a friend whose dad was a kind of popular occult writer for a time in the late 60s early 70s and he said that when he and Hubbard were younger they would exchange letters all the time about reincarnation and he had no idea whether Hubbard was sincerely interested in the topic or

[01:28:01] [SPEAKER_02] not but there was a kind of information gathering going on and so you some of it at its heart might if it's practiced with ethics might have something good to offer the individual and yet everything gets despoiled when it's offered in an authoritarian way or with the desire to control and a lust for power but I not infrequently

[01:28:31] [SPEAKER_02] find that a lot of teachers some of whom are dangerous and problematic others who may be more innovative and worthwhile they're experimenting they're taking things from different columns and again it helps to dispel this aura of infallibility around the teacher which is always dangerous to realize maybe you should be reading into the sources that this person is using maybe you should know something about Crowley or Blavatsky or

[01:29:00] [SPEAKER_02] whomever realize a little something about this because it's not just some divinely given wisdom it's got a bibliography behind it and and it humanizes the experience to a degree did

[01:29:13] [SPEAKER_04] you see anything in particular like one particular person who I believe is you know on the woo-woo spiritual path called Keith a soul collector collector of

[01:29:26] [SPEAKER_02] souls

[01:29:26] [SPEAKER_04] and just somebody who wanted to sounds like an Iron Maiden album I think I have that I

[01:29:35] [SPEAKER_02] don't know him I don't know him collector of souls that sounds like a villain in the Marvel universe he's definitely

[01:29:42] [SPEAKER_04] a villain in our lives but he seemed to enjoy you know co-opting people's life force

[01:29:48] [SPEAKER_02] dimming people's light I dig no and I will really try to push this away if people come to me and they see me as the man with the plan I'm not you know I'm not I'm speaking in a confident relaxed way because I like our exchange and I love doing things like this writing speaking that's my happy place what they don't see is me screaming into a pillow because you

[01:30:30] [SPEAKER_02] good then we'll exchange together but that's as far as I'll ever go in definition

[01:30:35] [SPEAKER_04] any final words of non guru wisdom to leave with our audience about magic practical magic how to test its value how to put it in their lives how to live absolutely

[01:30:47] [SPEAKER_02] you know it's good to be cautious it's good to be wary of human nature because human nature is unbelievably problematic but with that caution allow far and wide consider all kinds of possibilities and theses and ideas the poison is when these things are used to control abuse take but there's a philosopher I like Paul Feyerbend and he said I am an anarchist in thinking

[01:31:17] [SPEAKER_02] not in public life give yourself that freedom and that can go very nicely hand in hand with an appropriately wary and cautious sense of human nature

[01:31:29] [SPEAKER_04] amazing perfect

[01:31:31] [SPEAKER_02] I'm

[01:31:32] [SPEAKER_04] glad that we did this interview and I learned a lot and I'm halfway through your book and find

[01:31:57] [SPEAKER_03] supporting us by giving us a rating a review and subscribe on iTunes cults are commonplace now and we're looking at them all and every little bit helps hit that subscribe button so you don't miss an episode

[01:32:25] [SPEAKER_04] I

[01:32:31] [SPEAKER_03] pick

[01:33:15] [SPEAKER_04] up a copy of Mitch's book audio engineering by Red Cayman Studios and our writing and research is done by Emma Diehl and Kristen Reeder our