https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=X0n55Mm89Oo
I suppose I should define that, right? The nuns, N-O-M-E-S, right? People who have no religious affiliation as opposed to like Catholic men. So when I was working on becoming truly human, you’ve seen it, obviously, I won’t presume that everybody who’s listening to this has seen it, but there’s a series of interviews with nuns, right? This group of nuns that’s supposed to be a representative sample of folks who are religiously unaffiliated. And in preparation for that, me and my producer, we went out and we screened, interviewed, I don’t know, 60 plus religiously unaffiliated folks with sort of standard form types of questions that we wanted to know where they stand on this, this, and this. And over time in that data gathering, there was this sort of odd data point that emerged out of the process, one that I, it doesn’t show up in the documentary, but it definitely made an impression on me, which was that 100% of the nuns that I interviewed believed in ghosts. And that was a surprise to me. And what was especially surprising was, okay, in general, the nuns are not atheists, right? So 90% of the nuns, in my finding, and that’s actually the same with Pew in their finding, 90% of them believe in at least God or a higher power, only 10% would identify as atheists. But even the atheists, right? Who were like, I don’t believe in God, science, science, science, my apartment is haunted. Right. And I thought that was so bizarre and so interesting that I thought, you know, even the atheists believe in the God, in God, or I’m sorry, maybe even the, that was completely incorrect. Even the atheists believe in ghosts. I thought, well, so this is, is this an anomaly, right? Of my sample. But then I saw this, this article, I think it was in New York magazine by Clay Rutledge, sociologist who had also studied the nuns. And, and the article was titled something like, don’t believe in God, how about UFOs? And, and the whole article was about the fact that if you think who the nuns are, are scientific materialist, mechanical philosophers, you know, or something like that, you don’t understand who the nuns are. And he talked about his entire study was about how the way in which as folks diverge from religion, there’s this increased interest in the paranormal and the occult. And that was what his entire study was on. And so looking at his research, I saw that he saw the same pattern there. And, and it’s interesting because one of the patterns that you began to see there was, well, there were really sort of two things that Clay identified, which I had also noticed. The one is that as the narrative of religion was diverged from, there was a different search for a cosmic narrative that began to fill in. There was, was a sort of ad hoc worldview being formed concerning karma or fate, right? The cosmos springing about certain, certain things to me, right? That are meaningful. There was a belief that the world itself is spiritual. There’s the belief that our world is haunted, right? And some of those spirits are good, some are evil. And, and then, and, and that was sort of that paranormal occult sort of worldview was what started to fill in that gap. And, and it wasn’t only, only just ghosts, right? In paranormal culture, there’s several subcultures, right? There’s alien culture, there’s cryptozoology, you know, culture, and, and what you’re starting to see if you pay attention to the subcultures is them talking to each other and starting to form new narratives based on the ways in which, well, maybe, you know, maybe there’s, there is a spiritual dimension to the mothman and it’s not just some sort of strange crypto creature or something like that. Anyway, you’re starting to see these new narratives emerge out of that from the dialogue between them. But, but one of the things that’s also interesting is in, in, in Rutledge’s research, what he was looking at specifically was also the connection between the subjective sense of meaningfulness and the delving into the paranormal and the occult. And what he found was there was an inverse relationship where the, you know, the more you went into the paranormal and the occult, the lower your sense of subjective meaning went. And that’s not surprising to me because I believe the occult is demonic. And so, so if it’s really true that that’s a spiritual vacuum of darkness, right, and the deeper you go into it, the less, you know, meaning you should feel, right? It should cause that sort of vacuum-like state. And, but what Rutledge also, you know, at least speculates about is that then the turn towards certain social issues like social activism or whatever it may be starts to become the new sort of phase on the heels of that, right, as the paranormal and the occult begins to disappoint and fail to provide a satisfying narrative, there’s a new narrative that emerges that, you know, sort of drives you in that direction. And then I also, I would point to, there was a dissertation, I’m blanking on the name, but I could dig it up, dissertation that I looked at in, instead in Grand Rapids, not in Grand Rapids, in Michigan someplace anyway, but on reconversion of non. So folks who ultimately ended up turning to religion and the ways in which ultimately their final turn, you know, when they finally discover a religion that they can embrace, they, they embrace it fully, much more fully than a lot of the folks who are culturally this or that religion. And with that, all of a sudden their, their beliefs, you know, adjust, right? So if they were, you know, heavily, you know, let’s say left leaning in their politics, all of a sudden they might abandon some of those things as they engage in certain religious beliefs, because those were actually symptomatic of the search for something else. It wasn’t that those beliefs were driving them. And so what you see is you see all these phases of, of narrative trading going on, whereas the religion is providing one sort of storytelling and way of looking at the world. Paranormal comes to fill in the gap when you abandon that. If that fails, you turn to a certain social narrative. And if you rediscover a religion, you quickly abandon that one too. And I think all of this really does go to the point that you’re talking about, the sense that the idea of having some sort of framework by which to understand the world, some sort of storytelling that holds it all together and, and places me within in a story, it seems to be something that humans just absolutely need. We can’t get away from, right? It’s, it’s, it’s part of our, our very essential nature to look at the world in that, in that way. Yeah, you’re totally right. You know, the, just, just now with it, Klaus Schwab just published his latest book called The Great Narrative. And so it’s like the World Economic Forum basically telling us the primacy of narrative and how the world needs a story, you know, in which to inhabit in order to kind of get through our, our problems. And it’s, and it’s like, yeah, they realize that this is necessary. Now, the question is, what will that story be? It’s interesting, like you said, that the, what we get, let’s say, as Christianity wanes, although at first it looks like atheism, it ends up being something more like a kind of confused or broken down paganism of all these stories and, and conflicting narratives. And the fact that people are obsessed with unexplained phenomena, right? So it’s like an unexplained phenomena can obviously not give you a unit of meaning. It’s the very name unexplained phenomena. It’s that you’re constantly peering out in the darkness, like with squinted eyes and trying to figure out what these, what these things are. You know, and so, so obviously it’s going to lead to this kind of, this kind of breakdown in meaning that people experience or that kind of nihilism, a kind of weird nihilism that still believes in ghosts and all these strange phenomena. Right. I mean, I do think this is an interesting mis- contemporary misunderstanding of mystery, right? Because oftentimes what folks who are interested in that, that sort of unexplained phenomena, it’s mystery is something that draws them in. And yet when you look at the concept of mystery in the ancient world, as I’m sure you know, you know, like this concept, you know, mystery, the word itself, you know, originally like muleen, it’s, it’s, it’s a verb that means to shut and it, and, and it refers to the mystery cults, right? The initiation into mystery cults where you check your eyes, your mouth, the initiation ritual. And that’s where Plato starts to use that to refer to the mysterious one, which is basically the initiated. It’s not the person who doesn’t see, right? It’s the person who’s been initiated. So they are familiar with the mysteries. And then in Christianity and Clement of Alexandria, for example, mystery then starts to be tied with people who, again, are initiated and are Gnostics in the good sense, right? They’re in the know and they all of a sudden are able to see patterns that were there before. So when you look at the Old Testament texts, they’re cryptic, strange stories about people drowning and giants and all sorts of bizarre stuff. And what does all this mean? And at least the way Clement and then, you know, Origen does the same thing, the way they look at it is that those stories, like in the icon of the transfiguration where Christ goes up on Mount Tabor and he’s transfigured and the apostles are there, certain apostles are there who see this uncreated light. And then Moses and Elijah are also there in the bathing slight. At least the spiritual reading of that was that the texts of the law and the prophets are just cryptic texts, the true meaning of which is evasive unless you actually see them bathed in the light of Christ. And so having been initiated, you being the initiated ones into the mysteries actually now are in a position to understand what the patterns are there. You can actually see them properly. And so the irony is oftentimes people today will completely misuse the term mystery because it means that stuff that nobody really knows as opposed to what it actually meant, which was you’re initiated to know the stuff that people otherwise wouldn’t. Yeah, and I mean, I think the fact that there’s a notion that it’s hidden or that it’s secret or that it’s a mystery. And even in this, there’s a little bit of the way we understand it now, which is that the insight you get is beyond rational discourse and it’s more experiential. And so once you have that insight, you can’t communicate it at the level of the insight that you have. And like you said, then through that perception and light, you can then see the patterns in the world, whereas the occultist and the cryptic zoologist is only obsessed with it. It’s almost the opposite, right? It’s almost the opposite. It’s like facing all these things that I can’t understand out here in the world, all these phenomena that are opaque and thinking that that’s the mystery. It’s like if I could understand the mechanical causality of Bigfoot, like if I could understand what species he is, then I would like what? Like, what would it mean? Actually, he would cease to be interesting, right? He would cease to be interested if I could understand the mechanical. Like if I could add Bigfoot to the encyclopedia, like, all right. But then, OK, like that’s very much the opposite of like you said, this idea of moving into the moving into the initiated mystery of the light of the divine, let’s say that you find in the ancient stories. It’s very fascinating to see the opposite. Like I have a right in my town, they opened a school of witchcraft. Like it’s like a two minute walk from my house, you know, and you can see it like just how just and it’s also it’s also the like the everything people criticized about Christianity, you know, is just there in your face. It’s all about application. It’s like, you know, can I get this? Like, what can I do to get this for myself? Like, can I get this some something that they want, like a lover or or something? And you think, wow, man, it’s all the things that people accuse Christianity of is all there in this weird, occult stuff. But it’s lacking the higher principle that unites it all together into like one coherent story. So that’s great. So Jay Grubb asks, what is the symbolism of Bigfoot? I mean, OK, so it’s not it’s not proper to answer the symbolism of a Bigfoot. It’s maybe a good idea to understand the symbolism of cryptids in general. And so all these cryptids that people see, whether it’s Bigfoot, whether it’s these different Wolfman that exist in different legends in America, where whether it’s also other types of cryptids, other other types of strange things that exist in the world, strange animals, you know, whatever the jackalope or whatever kind of cryptid that you can imagine, werewolves and all this stuff, they all have to do with the problem of the limit. They all have to do with the problem of how the margin presents itself. And so the margin always presents itself as hybrid, as mixture, but not just that. It also and it’s also aliens, by the way, if you want the the the article that I wrote, the last article that I wrote in the God’s Dog Secrets book is going to be about this, for those who are interested. So the. It’s also the way they actually manifest themselves to us, so they’re always not completely within the coherence of the world. So Bigfoot is always hearsay. It’s always a legend. It’s always someone who saw Bigfoot furtively. You know, nobody has an actual, no, like there are no nobody has, you know, sat down with Bigfoot, talked to him, you know, had a or shot him or has has a some kind of completely, let’s say, tangible proof of Bigfoot’s existence, because Bigfoot is this in between space. He’s part of it. And all like all these other types of creatures, just like aliens and all these kind of cryptid. And so there are all these images of how on the edge there’s a breakdown of identity. But that breakdown of identity happens in the very way we talk about it, not just in the monsters themselves, but in the fact that they’re unexplained phenomena. Right. It’s all unexplained. So the idea that something is unexplained is means it’s something that doesn’t have an identity, that it has a hybrid marginal identity. So so, yeah. So so the question is, does Bigfoot exist in the way that Santa exists? I would say that for sure Bigfoot exists, exist less than Santa, if you want to say it that way. Or he exists like he’s a monster. Bigfoot’s a monster. Santa’s not a monster. And monsters, you know, just like dragons exist, too. Right. They they are on they are this hybrid possibility on the edge of being. And so, yeah.