 All right. So mysticism, I mean, one of the great frustrations of all of us, I think, one of the great frustrations of anybody rational in the world in which we live today is the extent to which people are irrational, the extent to which you can argue facts, you can discuss science, you can present evidence, and it doesn't seem to matter. People are oblivious seemingly to facts, reality, evidence, science, reason. And this is shocking in many respects, given that we live in the 21st century. We live in a century where science is already well-established and is shown to be efficacious. We saw that in its application to the industrial evolution, to going to the moon, to the computers we have in front of us, to the myriad of gadgets that we all play around with. That's science in action. All of that is science in action. It's reason in action. It's rationality in action. It's our understanding of the facts of reality and our ability to change reality, but to manipulate reality based on scientific knowledge. And yet in spite of all that, in spite of the fact that everybody out there uses the technology and takes for granted the state of the world, the advanced technological state in which we live, benefits from everything that the industrial evolution have given us, and that in spite of all that, it seems like people are again oblivious to facts. And they're not really interested in facts. They're not interested in evidence. They're interested in whatever tribal disputes they happen to be engaged in right now and where you're on versus where everybody else is on. They're interested in their emotions. They're interested in their fears. They're interested in the latest hysteria and panic. They're interested in what their leaders tell them to be interested in. And their leaders could be anywhere from a conspiracy theory podcaster to the president of the United States to, I don't know, some guru at the World Economic Forum or Buddhist or their preacher on one of the televangelist TV shows. It's everywhere. And as I said, we're living a 21st century. It is surprising. One of the trends that we have seen since the Enlightenment, really, dominantly in the West is the slow decline in religion, certainly in Europe, but even in the United States. We saw for a long period of time the marginalization of religion, particularly from public life, but from many aspects of life to the growth recently in people who say that they don't have a religious affiliation. So for example, the share of America is holding no religious affiliation has risen from 6% in 1991. I think this is according to Pew study, to 28% in 2021. 28% of Americans say they have no religious affiliation. You'd think that would reduce mysticism. It also means that 72% of Americans in the 21st century have a religious affiliation. I don't even know if religious affiliation means their believers or what exactly it means. But in 2021, you'd think that this would be the era of science, reason, evidence, facts, but even this so-called secularization of America in this 21st century is a mirage. According to a Pew survey, 41% of Americans believe in psychics. 41% believe in psychics. 29% of Americans believe in astrology. And many of them seek astrological guidance. They're apps. It's got sophisticated, right? You don't just do like, you know, the astrology thing in the newspaper anymore. Now you've got apps. There's an app called Costa, which uses NASA data coupled with quote methods of professional astrologers, including algorithms to generate insights about your personality and your future. If you want to know your future, go to Costa. Mystical services market is a $2.1 billion market in the United States. Astrology apps. So even though Americans might be less officially religious, less affiliated with a particular church, and indeed church attendance in the United States has dropped dramatically over the last 30 years, by about a third. It doesn't seem to matter in a sense of they've exchanged Catholicism, Protestantism, whatever their particular religious affiliation used to be now with a bunch of supernatural mumbo jumbo nonsense. And even atheists, right? There's been research that finds that most atheists, most atheists in the United States, I don't know what this is like in Europe. Maybe one of you can tell me, in the United States, embrace at least one set of beliefs encompassing astrology, karma, supernatural beings, and other mystical phenomena among evangelicals. They combine their belief in a particular God, in a Christian God with one-fifth of Egypt, where Angelica's believe in reincarnation. Valduan says, I should become a psychic and tell people their future, and they will pay. I'm telling you the future. I've been telling you the future for years now. And some of you pay, some of you don't. Some of you listen, some of you don't. Some of you argue, some of you don't. Generally, Christians of all stripes are not just religious, but combine the religiosity with all kinds of mystical stuff. But also, one of the interesting things about, I think, Christianity in America is that because the Protestants believe in this relationship you have with God, and that you are in a position to interpret in a sense the teachings of Jesus as an individual, what you see is a complete fragmentation of the church, and a vast variety of teachings coming out of religion. All equally mystical, of course, but all kinds of fragmented beliefs. So, I often tell pro-capitalist Christians that they actually love Tom Shepson more than they do Jesus, and they love the Constitution more than they love the New Testament, so they take those documents, and they take Jesus, and they kind of squeeze and morph them into what they want them to believe, but they're stronger believers in America. That's the best of them, of course. But there's definitely a prevalence in our culture of mysticism, supernaturalism, and in a sense, what that means is there's a rejection of reason, the rejection of human consciousness, of the particular means by which human consciousness functions, and the embrace, the embrace of mystical means of knowledge. And once you understand the extent to which this is true, then it's not surprising then that you get cure-non conspiracy theories. It's not surprising then that you get the vast array of non-scientific approaches to COVID, all the way from people who, I guess, wear masks to the shower, and maybe when they're swimming, I don't know, all the way to people who reject vaccinations for everybody, no matter the evidence, and hypothesize about maybe in 20 years there'll be some damage to yourself because of the vaccine. It's not surprising if what we have is a populace that rejects, fundamentally rejects science. So let's think about what mysticism is, and here I'm going to refer quite a lot to Inran's writings about mysticism. This is primarily out of the Inran lexicon, so these are highlights from what she's written about mysticism, which she's written generally, these are highlights that relate to mysticism. So this is from the section on mysticism in the Inran lexicon, which is a great resource available, free, online. All you have to do is type in Inran lexicon, and you can get some of these amazing polls of wisdom from Inran. So what is mysticism? Inran writes, mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and one's reason. So mysticism is the acceptance of something devoid of proof, or that contradicts the evidence. I was just reading that somebody wrote this long letter to Trump complaining about the fact that he's had it, he's fed up, because time after time after time after time, the QAnon predictions are not coming true. I mean, how many of these predictions have to not come true before you stop believing in QAnon? Well, I know the answer to that, and you guys know the answer to that, because how many of the predictions of every religious sect in history didn't come true, and then yet people continue to believe in that sect, continue to believe in the ideology, facts. Don't let facts, don't let evidence ever interrupt with your mystical beliefs. QAnon being a good example of those completely utterly mystical beliefs. But that's true of, you know, you can take people and you've got all these smart people and, you know, they're arguing about what we need is to, you know, and you've got, this is in Europe primarily, but now in the US, we've got to stop using fossil fuels and we have to, we have to shut down nuclear energy and we have to cut emissions to zero and we can increase the number of jobs and increase the prosperity and everybody's going to be rich and we're not going to miss any CO2 and we're basically going to run the whole world on renewables, you know, which ones, well primarily solar panels in the UK and Germany and windmills in the UK and Germany. And you point out just basic facts about how this is clearly an impossibility. You can't generate enough electricity, what happens when there's no wind, what happens when the sun doesn't shine, which is most of the time in the UK and Germany and they just blank out. They're not interested in the evidence of the census. They're not interested in reason and facts and evidence. There's no, there's no communication going on. There is a dogma. There is an accepted truth that they have received from somewhere. We'll talk about where they get that in a minute. And they live by that and they're not interested in anything else. They're not interested in the facts. One of the people says pixie dust and magic beans. Yes, pixie dust and magic beans. And you could argue with them all you want. You can give them facts and evidence and numbers and drafts and statistics. And it doesn't matter because none of it actually registers. Knowledge for mystic is not accessible to me humans. It's not accessible to reason, to facts, to evidence, to our senses. Einwand writes mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as quote instinct, quote intuition, quote revelation or any form of quote just knowing. They just know. Now many of them present the guise of science because they just know that science gives them respectability. Science is legit. Science lets them pretend that they're in the 21st century and that they're pro-progress and pro-reason and pro- but as soon as you question them a little bit, as soon as you challenge them just a little bit, immediately, immediately they go all emotion on you. Immediately they go all just knowing who are you, 95% of all scientists, whatever, whatever. Is it 98? It's 98%. 95 is too low. 98 is a bit of number. There's no argument. There's no argument. And note what Einwand notes as mystical, you know, instinct, intuition, revelation. I mean it's interesting because I was thinking as I was reading this that to some extent the evolutionist psychologists are mystics. The whole idea of rejecting free will, if you reject free will, you're really rejecting cognition, control over cognition. It's all automatized. It's all inevitable. It's all just happens. It's all just intuitive. It's all just instinctual. So who are you to question me? Whatever, whatever. I know, I know. I just know. How do I know it? Because evolution programmed me that way. It's amazing when I read Einwand how much of what she says is so applicable to stuff today, even stuff that wasn't really being discussed. And in the end, the mystics will always say they just know they have expertise that is not accessible to others. And sometimes they use science as the guise for that. And you see that in the debate about abortion, light begins at conception. I mean, that's complete mysticism. There's no human being at conception. There's DNA. But it's complete emotionalism. Or we're all going to die from the climate. Or I mean, the whole debate about socialism, the whole debate about socialism is, you know, how do you know socialism will work? It's never actually worked when we examine the facts of reality. We don't see socialism working. They just know. They don't need the proof. They know. And then now they work backwards. They start with the knowledge of socialism being right and just. And now they will reinterpret all of reality to justify the idea that socialism, I mean, socialism used to be at least Marx pretended that it was scientific, right? So it was based on a scientific theory of a theory of history and the evolution of history and an observation of the world and the alienation of the workers and a certain understanding of how capitalism evolves. Yeah. And a lot of people bought into that. A lot of people bought into it. And then it was tried. And then it failed dramatically. And then they said, well, tell us science. Now we'll just believe in socialism and they're all with the past. They're all with trying. We'll just lie about it. We'll just make stuff up because for mystic knowledge and truth don't come from the world. To a mystic knowledge and truth come from another dimension. They come from somewhere else. I mean, in religion, it's fairly simple. They come from God. And for the critical race theories, the racist, the reject of free will, they come from your genes. Truth comes from your genes. You're programmed to be a truth detecting machine. How do you detect the truth? Who knows? So the mystic has to assume this other dimension. But how does he actually commune with the other dimension? Because we know there isn't one. So how does he fall himself into thinking there's another dimension? Where does he actually get stuff from? Where does he get the truth from? The truth in quotes. What really two sources? The two places in which the mystic gets truth from. Ultimately, it's only one, but it manifests itself in two ways. One is from other people, mistakes. And here, unfortunately, this is true of what seemingly is a majority of people out there. So end of their mind. They've given up on their mind. They're not going to challenge. As soon as they encounter other people, the majority, the people in power, the charismatic people, or the people that influenced them when they were young, as soon as they encounter other people, they suppress their own thinking and accept what the other says. A mystic is afraid of his own independence. How can he trust it? How can he know it? What would he do with it? He'd have to stand up against the mob. Much easier to join them up. So mystic usually at a very young age, and again, the sad thing is this is true of most people maybe. The mystic surrenders his mind at a very young age to others, to the authority of others, to the authority of the authoritarian on whatever topic we're talking about. The authority of the charismatic teacher, the charismatic broadcaster, the charismatic fearmonger that is on the news, or that is in is teaching the class. So Ayn Rand writes, and I love this, this is a great sentence, faith in the supernatural, any supernatural, begins as faith in the superiority of others. It begins in a sense with lack of self-esteem. It begins with surrendering your own mind to other people. And that leads you to surrender your own mind to the Almighty or to the fortune teller or to whatever. And what guides you in terms of which other people you should surrender your mind to? What guides you in terms of what you should believe in? What you should have faith in? Whether it's explicit religion or whether it's your political views or whether it's your views about generally the world, where do you get these truths from? Other people more broadly, but how do you choose which people? At the end of the day, once you give up on reason, there's only one other source and that is your emotions. If you're not going by reason, you're going by emotion. Even if you are complete second-hander and just doing what people around you tell you to do, you have to choose who to follow. How are you going to choose? Reasons out. Whoever makes you feel better, whoever makes you feel more secure, whoever makes, says something that sparks a more positive feeling in you or flip side of that, whoever generates the most fear in you. People are immensely motivated by fear, mystics have always been motivated by fear and the witch doctors who might present themselves as scientists, the witch doctors, know this and understand this and refine the skill of inducing fear in people because when people are afraid they're looking for solutions, they want to believe in something they want and out. And if they've given up on reason, they've given up on facts, they've given up on reality, they've given up on science, then what are they left with other than their emotion other than following the leader, other than in jumping on the bandwagon of the power luster of the moment? So one of the common ways in which to induce mysticism in a culture, and this unfortunately Western philosophy has done for the last 200 years, is to teach skepticism, it's to embrace skepticism, it's to pound skepticism constantly. How do you know? Nothing no absolutes, nothing is knowable, you can't trust your mind, you can't trust your senses, you can't trust, you know maybe the sun will come up tomorrow, maybe it won't. It's a skeptics by making people believe, by encouraging people to believe, by teaching people to believe in the unknowable that the reason is not capable of giving them absolutes, the reason is not capable of teaching them about reality. Well then how do we know what to do? How are we going to survive out there in the world? How are we going to achieve anything? How are we going to feed ourselves? How are we going to get anything? Well if not by reason then by emotion and there's always a witch doctor, there's always a witch doctor just waiting around the corner to capitalize on your skepticism, to capitalize on your desire to believe and your rejection of reason at the same time. Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. 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