SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to the cycle. Let's develop the interview coming in the command in the cycle of the cycle.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

So welcome to Solos, the December edition. And our 100 guests is Kyriakis Marquides, who you may have heard of. He's a great pioneer in the psycho-spiritual realm and a professor of sociology who was transformed by his encounters with mystics, healers, hermits, and saints. Anything else you want to say about your professional journey before we get into the personal one?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Well, the professional is that I came to the United States to study business and ended up uh finishing in sociology. Uh I got a job at the University of Maine, and I've been here since 1972. So I am an old man, and now I am Professor Emeritus after teaching 48 years at an American university. And along the way, I had all kinds of experiences that led me to question the kind of education that I received as a trained sociologist during the 60s.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Right. I'll get I'll get in the opening quote. Well, first, we we have an invocation we do every time to start the conversation, which is may the spirit flow freely through this conversation and gathering, allowing it to be both energizing and edifying. And Kiriyaku says he has about 10 books, two, is that it ten books or more? Oh no, not more. Two trilogies, and his life story is in this one, The Accidental Immigrant.

unknown 2:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:58

So uh in this little passage, she's talking about um the religious experience and the validity of it. So he said he says to summarize the religious experience, mystical, transcendent, ecstatic experience is an ever-present potentiality within human nature itself. And that's where it enters into counseling and therapy because within human nature itself, there will always be human beings who have such experience, and under certain historical conditions, this experience may spawn movements that culminate in institutional religions. Mystical transcendence could never be eradicated by secularization, and religion could never be annihilated from human history. So that's part of our theme this month, like uh in a really interesting way what we have been doing in psychology. Professor Marquitis has been doing in sociology in a parallel process, like bringing in the value of spirituality.

SPEAKER_01 4:12

We we made an attempt to bring spirituality into sociology, but it's a much more uh infertile ground compared to uh what is happening among groups of uh psychologists like uh uh people like uh Charlie Tart and uh uh Radin and you uh but mainstream sociology and mainstream psychology are still in terms of the worldview that they use to explain the world, uh, is still in the 19th century.

SPEAKER_03 4:49

Right.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

We haven't entered into the the middle of the 20th century yet.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

Well, okay, we're we're on our way. Yeah, so could you say summarize because it's a long story of uh starting in the 50s when you're a teenager, but um your journey and how how it turned you from a scientific materialist into being open to a lot of really astounding phenomena.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yeah, uh let me to make a long story short, uh let me say a few things about uh what brought me to where I am at this point. Uh I came to the United States in 1960 because I had relatives in Ohio, otherwise, I would never have been able to cross the Atlantic. And that was in 1960. And I came here with the understanding that uh I will get a degree in accounting and return back to Cyprus and make a living, right? But then it was uh I was challenged during my uh my stay in Ohio as an undergraduate uh with the kind of world that I found myself in, trying to adjust to a strange culture, American culture. Uh I was uh uh experiencing the diversity uh of uh of culture that I found myself in, meeting people from all kinds of spiritual or religious traditions. Uh and uh it was also the uh the upheaval during the 60s, uh the uh missile crisis in 1963, 62, uh the the Kennedy assassination, the other assassinations during the 60s. So I said, what am I doing starting business? I need to understand what is going on in the world. And that's how, as a result of some uh coincidences or uncunny coincidences, I ended up as a graduate student in sociology. When I came to the United States, I had a kind of I would say a naive belief in uh in religion, in the religion that I grew up in, meaning Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Because the only people that I knew were other Greek Orthodox. I grew up on the island. But coming here, I gradually, particularly studying sociology and being exposed to the kind of um uh literature that I was assigned to read, I became increasingly a reluctant agnostic, that uh religion is a creation of society, uh, there are no realities beyond the physical universe, all of the things that lead people to atheism or agnosticism. I was not an enthusiastic agnostic in the sense that I deep down I felt that uh there is chaos there. There is if if God is dead, then um what what are we doing here? Uh what is the foundation of our existence? And I tabled this issue and I plunged into sociology. Well, sociology made me more and more uh secular, because that's the field that I encountered, and most of the masters of sociology were people like um Durkheim, Marx, Max Weber, all of them were um secular intellectuals. There was only one window that opened for me when I came in contact with the work of Peterim Sorokin, a Russian emigre uh from the Russian Revolution. He uh he was sentenced to death in um uh uh during the communist revolution because he was secretary to Kerensky and he barely um he moved into the forest and then he surrendered. They sentenced him to death. And uh the day before his execution, he was let loose because a former student of his went to Lenin and implored him to save Soragin's life. So, anyway, he came to the United States.

SPEAKER_02 9:23

Dostoevsky, who was on the firing squad and led off the state. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

There you go. So he uh he made a name for for himself in the United States as a great sociologist, and Harvard invited him to study the sociology department there in the 1930s. So when I was a graduate student, I I had to take a uh a course in classical sociological theory, and it was uh a kind of a seminar that the students were um uh not only learning but also teaching. So I accidentally uh I ended up studying the thought of Soroggi, which really influenced me enormously because he introduced me to ideas that were very different from what I learned from all the other sociologies. He was saying, for example, in his great masterwork uh social and cultural dynamics that the religion is going to return back to the world, uh, that secularism is not a uh a one-way street, history is like a pendulum moving from religiosity to secularism and back. And during the uh the second world war, he's he was predicting the return of spirituality and uh and religion. Uh, I don't need to go into all that, but another thing that uh that stuck in my mind was his claim that we do we know the world not just through our intellect, namely philosophy, not through our senses, namely science, but also through intuition. That intuition is a a sui generis form of knowledge that uh uh in introduces us into realities over and beyond the intellectual and the sensate. And for me, that was an eye-opening. Uh I uh none of my professors knew anything about Soroki. It was an accidental encounter of my own. And uh, when I went to the University of Maine as a professor there, as an assistant professor at the time, uh I went there as a as someone who was beginning to open up to the spiritual because I was exposed to transcendental meditation during my first semester as an assistant professor there at the University of Maine. A colleague of mine was meditating, so I walked by his office one day and I saw a sign which said, Please do not disturb meditation in process. And I I never heard of the word but before that. I was in 1972, in the fall of that exactly the same time that I started doing TM. Yeah, so I went and I asked the secretary, What is Steve doing in there? And he said, Well, he's meditating, so I got very curious. I started talking to Steve, we became very close friends, and in no time, I mean my wife, Emily, we started meditating. And uh it was the beginning of my exposure to Eastern philosophy, to uh modern science in terms of quantum fields, etc. And one day I went to her and I said, Emily, I I think we are going to discover God in the laboratory. That uh God is not dead, it's very much alive, and science is going to really lead us back to God. That that's what I was telling her at the time. And from then on, um during uh during my 70s, it was I was beginning to become skeptical of my skepticism, that there was some problem looking back during the the uh my 60s education, I I felt that it was the kind of education that led people to existential anxieties, um, even depression, even suicide, yeah, because uh of the uh uh the void that I one I speaking for myself that I found inside me that if we kill God then any anything is irrelevant, and anything goes. I didn't have to read Dostoevsky to come to that realization.

SPEAKER_02 13:59

We see that in in therapy, sorry to interrupt, but the when a client is you know has a problem that we're assessing and treating, there comes a point where this the psychology can address the problem, but the solution becomes something more spiritual and the search meaning.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

I mean, uh Carl Jung wrote a letter in the uh, I believe it was in the New York Times, who claimed that based on his own um professional experience, he found out that most people's problems is how they define reality, that they are deprived of a spiritual foundation, which leads them to all kinds of problems. Anyway, so it was at that time when I I began to open up and I was start, I started reading books like uh Carlos Castaneda's books on uh Don Juan. Uh I started reading about uh shamans and so when I was ready to uh get my first uh sabbatical, and we were going back to Cyprus, and I had with me all kinds of material to write a book on international terrorism because my training was in political sociology, and that is a problem that I have experienced growing up in Cyprus. So I met Dascalos, a spiritual shaman or a Christian shaman actually, who lived only two miles away from my house, but we were told as kids to stay away from him because he uh he was in contact with uh with spirit beings, with the dead, and uh he was dangerous, quote unquote. So, as a result of an accidental encounter of an old friend, I met him after 18 years' absence from Cyprus, and I was very curious to find out about this man. So when I met him, I got very very impressed with his intelligence and his spiritual knowledge, and also I had witnessed things that um others told me he was capable of doing, like um, pretty alternative healing, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:18

Pretty unbelievable on the surface. Can you give like give us one example of something that sounds incredible? Like because you have a lot of stories in your books.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Yeah, I have many examples, but um some of the direct personal experience that uh I had on our life is when we came back to the United States. Um, Emily had a problem with her leg, and I kept telling her that she should go and see a doctor, but she wouldn't. And then suddenly we get a letter from Cyprus and said, We have noticed that Emily has a problem with her right leg. She should go and see a doctor. And we never said anything to anybody about this. But another one was when I got a that's one of the mild stories. Mild stories, yes, it's it's simple stories describing the inside of my house without ever telling him anything about my house. I got a um a call from New York City by someone who had read my book, The Markus of Strovolos. That was the first book that I wrote about him, and he was wondering whether I can take a picture, a photo of his wife who had problems with her health. And I said, sure, I'll be going to Cyprus this summer. I'll uh I'll be happy to uh uh to show him the picture. So when I did show him the picture, she he closed his eyes and he rubbed the picture and he said the problem of this woman is in her teeth. She should go to a doctor and take care of them because her whole uh mouth is full of um uh infection. He has infected uh uh uh uh teeth. Well, I I wrote a letter apologetically. I said, This is what Dascaros is saying. I thought it was crazy. 7,000 miles away to know what the problem of this woman was, because the doctor, she went to all kinds of doctors and they couldn't find out what was the source of her problems. So when I came back, I got a call from the same person and he said, You know, remember that case that I sent you the letter, uh, the picture of my wife to take to Cyprus? I said, Yes, I remember it. And he said, Well, when we got your letter, we thought it was nonsense and we threw it away. I said, Well, I I can't blame you. I'm sorry about this. No, no, no, he said, but you don't know what happened after that. That the front teeth of my wife exploded, an infectious puss was dropping from the holes. So we went to the dentist, and that was the source of her problem. So the woman uh got healed as a result. And there are many others. One of the most spectacular things that I witnessed was when a woman was totally paralyzed in bed because of her vertebrae, uh, and um he just barely went over her back up and down. Um she was in bed. His uh uh her uh her daughter was there. Uh Dascalos said uh take her, turn her face down and push her close up, and I'll work on her back. So he started telling us what was going on, just like this, about an inch from her uh from her body, and he said, There are porosity, there are uh the vertebrates are moving, but don't worry, we will dematerialize, we will dematerialize the uh the bad bone and we'll rematerialize a good one. So I and then he uh he asked uh her daughter to come and put her finger on the on her back to see that there is no bone there right now. The woman put her uh her finger in and she was shocked because there was no bone there. And he said to me, Come, why don't you try it? Oh no, I don't want to try it. So, anyway, he said, now we are going to solidify the bone. And he went up another 15 minutes or 20 minutes or so, and he said, Now she's okay, get dressed and get out of bed. And the woman came out of bed, he's she stretched her leg, her hands, and he said, Oh my god, I haven't been able to do that for for ages. And she was so excited, she went into the kitchen and made coffee for us. Still, she she didn't believe what was happening to her, so she went to her radiologist, took x-rays of her spine, and the new x-ray showed a perfectly healthy spine. So these are many, many. I went with uh Dr. Leonard Dupe. You probably you may know him, he was a very uh leading social psychologist. He uh he was a professor of psychology uh at Yale University and thoroughly a skeptic. Uh he was concerned about my reputation. He he took a fatherly interest in my academic career, and he was concerned about uh about his uh about me being involved with such strange stuff. Right. I I I was able to do this strange stuff because at that time I had tenure and I was not afraid that I was going to be fired. We're doing this work.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

So what do you think the implications are for helping professionals like in their practice to know that these things are possible? There's this whole other dimension. Yes. Beyond therapy for starters, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

They they need to get exposed to the reality of these realities.

SPEAKER_03 22:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Um, because there is plenty of uh of literature now. The work of Dean Radin is one example where he goes deep into this uh phenomena. Uh I witnessed them with my own five senses myself. I didn't experience anything beyond that, but I was I was shocked when I I noticed all that. So uh Leonard Dub, who published 18 books in social psychology, etc., I said, why don't you come with me? And I'll introduce him to him because I was working with him in Cyprus at the time, um uh peace work, trying to bring Greeks and Turks together on the island for reconciliation and so on. Um, so well he said, she's he scratched, he said, He said, You know, I am a psychologist and I ought to be interested in these things. I said, Yes, of course, you should, I said. So we went there and uh we had a two-hour conversation. He was very impressed with uh with uh his intelligence and uh the work that he was doing. Uh and but as we were going out, he says to him, Professor, you have an infection on your liver, you should not drink. Uh and Leonard looks at me and said, What on earth is he talking about? I just had a physical and I'm perfect. I said, Leonard, I have no idea. Um, and then jokingly, Ascalo said to him, and by the way, Professor, your psychology is at its infantile stage. And then Leonard, being a humble man, he said, Oh, that I agree with you. He said, I I don't think we have made much progress since the time of Aristotle. But here is a guy who has written 18 books, he was editor of the Journal of Social Psychology. When we went back to Cyprus, uh, to he went back to New Heaven, I came back to Maine. About two or three months later, he calls me on the phone. Do you remember what that uh healer of yours told me? I said, Yes, Leonard, I have it on tape. And he said, I said, Well, what is it? He said, I went to my doctor and I had a physical, and he told me that I had hepatitis type B. Um uh an infection on my liver. And this is exactly what Dascalus told him. And he said, Don't worry, it's not it's not infectious, but you should never give blood to anybody because you'll always be a carrier, but it's not life-threatening. Anyway, and uh the next summer, Leonard was in Cyprus asking questions to him. How did you know? And then he told him that I see auras, I have from experience, I knew that uh a dark spot at your um liver was uh hepatitis type B. And so there was nothing mysterious about it. He said, Um, I it's like having x-ray vision, and I thought when I was growing up, he said I thought everybody had that, but then my mother told me to to shut up because they will send me into a mental asylum. So, anyway, uh this is what really uh made me somehow notorious to some people, uh, in the sense that I was uh I was doing research that was not conventional. On the other hand, what rescued me was the fact that I used um legitimate scientific methods in terms of gathering the material and analyzing them. I was not trying to promote any particular worldview at the time. Uh so I they accepted it as participant observation, social anthropological work.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

It also launched you on the personal journey of like a can a conversion, if I can use that word, of your own.

SPEAKER_01 26:27

Yes, because I uh at a certain point you realize that you are dealing with something over and beyond the physical universe as we understand it. Uh, and during during the 80s, I spent it doing work with Dascalus. I wrote a trilogy about him and another book, which was a transitional book after Dascalus uh passed away. And at that time, I had a um uh an invitation by from a friend of mine to join him on Mount Dathos to meet some real sense, as he put it. And I was reluctant to go because I thought spirituality uh was outside of organized religion. I had this prejudice against organized religion. Uh the 60s made me an agnostic, the 70s made me questioning my agnosticism, the 80s I had empirical observation of someone who had extraordinary abilities. And during the 90s, I discovered Mount Athos. Mount Athos, the peninsula in northern Greece that has been set aside by the Emperor of Constantinople as a place for hermits and monks to go after Islam developed in the Middle East, and those hermits were moving away from that uh area. Um, Egypt had 800 monasteries, for example, before Islam came there. So all of these people uh had to move somewhere else. Well, uh I there I met Father Maximus, who was someone who um was very charismatic, and he introduced me into the mystical tradition of Eastern Christianity. Then I realized that there is a mystical tradition within Christianity that has been not hidden, but nobody bothered to discover. It was right there on Mount Athos. And then I I spent the after that all of my time studying. I wrote uh The Mountain of Silence, uh, which um uh is about my participant observation work with uh monks and hermits from Mount Athos. And uh it was my discovery that there is a mystical tradition that is parallel to that which led us into Tibet and uh Buddhism. And it is also it is also in the Western church, but it's more uh less uh pronounced as it is in the East.

SPEAKER_02 29:11

Yeah, well, every religion has that level, the as the esoteric level.

SPEAKER_01 29:16

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is another of my my personal discoveries that religion is not that which appears in the um uh uh externally with the rituals and the all of that is part of religion, but there is a mystical tradition that is also that is the foundation of anything that goes out at the top, so there is an esoteric form of religion, and there is an exoteric form of religion, right? And it's up to the level of consciousness development of the seeker what kind of religiosity is appropriate for that individual, yes, yes, and it's entered into psychology and therapy, yeah, and um Mother Maximus would Mother Maximus, Father Maximus. When I met him, he was 32 years old, but yet he was considered to be an elder, an elder of eastern Christianity. And uh, I became more or less his apprentice trying to to study him and study his world. And uh certain circumstances brought us together in Cyprus when he was uh he became an abbot at a monastery there, trying to bring monasteries into Cyprus, and I became his chauffeur for my following sabadigal, so that I can move him around the island. He didn't know how to drive himself, and that's that ended up as the mountain of silence. That's it. The what being a chauffeur is a tradition, chauffeur to the in itself, yes, yeah, but it it was uh I I was not so altruistic about it, but I knew that being a chauffeur, I would be close to him so that I can keep asking him questions, and it came as the mountain of silence, right? Which wasn't very silent in the sense that we had terrific conversations.

SPEAKER_02 31:27

Yeah, I was gonna ask you how it affected sociology, but you have like these four axioms in your book about how how why it's important to sociology, just like uh we had for psychology.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

So well, I I was influenced also uh by uh certain currents within American academia, yeah, such as uh the movement of humanistic psychology, which developed as transpersonal psychology, right? And um I um I was very excited to find out a journal like that and also the kinds of books that were written by renegade academics who left the old mechanistic paradigm and they were working within a wider, more spiritual framework. So I said to a couple of colleagues of mine, but uh we need to have something like that within sociology, because sociology is uh also very secularized, perhaps more so than psychology, because psychologists are dealing with phenomena that uh have to do with um inner experience, whereas sociologies view religion from the point of view of what it does to society and culture. Very uh and the kind of sociology we have inherited from the 19th century and all the way to the present, really, is very reductionistic that religion is simply a creation of society, and uh at best it keeps society together, at worst, uh religion can be a source of conflict and violence and so on. And uh and it's uh it's a it's almost like a um a um uh uh the machino line uh uh preventing any invasions from the outside. But I think even the machino line uh collapsed, and I think this is going to happen with time when more and more people begin to realize that there is more to reality than our biological inheritance and our cultural conditioning. And what we are doing, uh what we try to do with a colleague of mine was to uh develop certain principles that may help sociologists become aware of the reality of spirituality and what modern science has to show us in reference to what spirituality can do in terms of our more holistic understanding of reality.

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Exactly. So, at the risk of this sounding like a class or a lecture, do you mind reading the four axioms on page 116?

SPEAKER_01 34:33

Uh on page 116.

SPEAKER_02 34:35

I'm glad you told me about the page because it's been a long time, because there's a complete parallel with uh the psycho-spiritual uh perspective on you know on the minds, you know.

SPEAKER_01 34:51

We we develop these four principles as a guidepost, like axioms to keep in mind in terms of understanding human beings. And what we say, number one, there is a reality towards which religions point that is both non-physical and non-social. Uh axiom meaning uh we take it as true. Number two, people have an inner spiritual component, a facility for transcendence that enables them to reach towards this reality. In other words, we have the something within us that can lead us in that direction. Number three, this spiritual component may influence and sometimes drive human behavior and human values. That is, human personalities may be influenced by more than heredity and environment. We didn't uh use words like karma, for example, to make it generic. Yeah, and number four, human freedom lies outside of the realm of social and biological conditions, therefore, the explanatory power of the social, physical, and biological sciences is necessarily limited. So and we we wrote this and we we try to publish it in major journals, and we used to get a lot of no thank you. Uh and um finally we published it in a local literary journal, which was later discovered by a Polish sociologist who was putting together a textbook on um uh transpersonal sociology. What we wanted uh came later, even though we presented uh at the American Sociological Association meetings a uh a version of this uh article that we we uh but we got uh we got older and we didn't keep up with what we could have done in terms of organizing it as a movement, just like in transpersonal psychology. Maybe it's happening, but um I can tell you it's happening.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

The very the very fact that we're doing this podcast being means it's happening, all right. It's happening. Let's let's link to that. So I'll trade you the X the axioms that are like parallel. So the axioms from from my book about guidance. All right, um, same thing, four four bullet points to answer the question: why are you bringing spirituality into therapy? You know, same skepticism, same resistance, which is fading away as people understand these four uh reasons. Which is number one, spiritually integrated therapy is based on the premise that a sense of the sacred has always been a primary attribute of human nature and is a major positive force in the lives of many people. To spirituality is a natural normal part of life, whether expressed in healthy ways or not. It repr it represents the quest for the transcendent and the deeply human desire to experience something of ultimate value. Like these are all undeniable, it's part of human experience, right? So we have to assess it and in your world investigate it. Uh, three spirituality is fully woven into human experience and is a part of the therapeutic process, whether we attend to it as such or not. Yes, something is going to be going on if it's just a matter of implicit meaning, so it's always important to ask clients.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:56

So four spirituality, this is a good one for an academic like you. Spirituality is just as important as medical history, social relationships, and the range of resources for client well-being which need to be taken under consideration for the overall effectiveness, effectiveness of the therapeutic relationship. So these are these are givens, and it's just a matter of the slow acceptance as you discovered in your fields.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

If I write another book, I will incorporate them into that book too. Yours. Great.

SPEAKER_02 39:31

By the way, if anyone, if you have questions or comments, the chat you can put them in the chat and we can relay them to the professor. Do you have a daily practice yourself? Are you still meditating twice a day?

SPEAKER_01 39:51

I not as diligently, but I I learned how to chant in church, the Orthodox Church, and it's a form of wonderful meditation. Uh yes. And uh I I do med uh I do the kind of Christian meditations, but not as much as I ought to. I am still uh not vibrating at that higher level that I ought to.

SPEAKER_02 40:21

You use because yeah, the the background to that is that it's the eastern mantra method, right? With the western mantra method.

SPEAKER_01 40:32

I was doing I was doing the transcendental meditation uh TM before I discovered the Ascalos, and the when I discovered the Ascalos, I started doing all kinds of focus meditations on my different parts of my body. And when I found out about Mount Athos, uh it brought me back to my childhood when I was in the church, but now I see the church at a different level of understanding than I used to when I was a kid. And uh the the Byzantine music is very meditative. And uh I for example, I I was at an on-night vigil on Mount Athos. Uh it was Eastern time, and uh I asked the monk how long is this uh service going to last? It's going to last very long. They started at eight o'clock in the evening, that was before uh the uh during the resurrection service, and I thought by one o'clock in the morning we'll be done, but it went on and on and on until seven o'clock in the morning, so it was an 11-hour um meditative prayer, and I never felt tired. Uh, I I felt uh even revitalized, you might say. And I I didn't want to leave the church to go to the bathroom, even though I had to do so a couple of times and rush back so that I don't miss anything. I met a I met a German pastor there who came to Mount Dathos and went to the Great Lavra, that is the monastery at the tip of the peninsula, and he went on a service that lasted 18 hours of continuous chanting and prayer and meditation. And during uh um uh uh during dinner or lunch, whatever it was after 18 hours, uh he stood up and announced to every monk that I'm not going back because only a miracle could allow me to stand for 18 hours without uh without collapsing. And he he remained as a hermit on Mount Athos, and I met him. He was German. So that tells you something about the power of uh of meditation that one finds in all the great religions. So did you do you use a the Christian mantra? Yes. Um yes, when I I want to uh to enter into some minor alternate state of consciousness, it is relevant because that was my cultural background. Yeah, yeah. So I instead of repeating a mantra that I didn't know it was just a meaningless word for me, yeah. I I switched to the Jesus prayer, yeah, which is the code uncode, the um uh the um they they would never call. mantra but it's the equivalent as as a as a method of entering into the a relationship with uh the christ logos then it was popularized by the the salinger novel franny and zoe well also the the way of the pilgrim yeah of course the way of the pilgrim in in russia yeah yeah yeah so yeah it it it uh it can lead to certain phenomena and experiences that i've read in the work of yoga nanda when it came to his autobiography uh so this unusual phenomena uh that scientists dismiss a priori most scientists uh are realities in um in in people's experiences cross-culturally yeah but uh uh an increasing number of scientists are paying attention and they are subjecting those experiences to empirical observation of course that that is um another fallacy in the sense that the realities that we are talking about are radically over and beyond anything that can be subjected to uh scientific investigation because we are still with the notion that the only real truth is scientific truth uh and uh i i think this is a mistake and houston smith i don't know if you have heard of houston smith's uh world religions yeah one of his uh um insights he said that uh almost led him one time to run around calling euriga was this idea that lower things cannot study higher things higher things can't study lower things in other words um a dog cannot study a human being yeah someone said that's the problem with democracy that you're gonna not gonna elect a leader better than you are well this is what let uh uh Plato not being uh in favor of democracy but of aristocracy but by aristocracy not those who had the money but those who knew the good so what advice would you give to your 25 year old self my 25 year old self yeah uh that's a tough question because if I give an advice to my 25 year old self in other words to do something different what what I have been doing uh my life would have to be in a different direction i i never know where i would be if i would give that kind of advice however if i had to relive my life from the beginning without knowing how it was going to develop in the future i would say learn more music learn music and how to play a couple of instruments that would i i would have loved to do the the resonance of the heart yeah and of course pay more attention to meditation and spiritual uh spiritual uh activism and discover those inner truths that can bring you in in closer contact with fellow human beings and with the ultimate reality yeah in other words love love yourself love your neighbor and love god right so with 10 minutes left we we can talk about the big picture like the the phases that humanity at large goes through and where we are now because to summarize those you know from the archaic to the magical to the mythical and the mental irrational and now we're merging from the mental or rational into the more what the the integral yes this is Ken Wilbur's uh yeah well he lifted it from Gebser the yeah yeah the ever present yeah that yeah to me that was also a reinforcement of what so I learned from Sorokin in terms of realities over and beyond the um the the conscious level that we are um we are uh we're heading in what some call the omega point like uh uh the name of uh the Catholic geologist uh priest um Dale Hardjardan right that we are moving in in uh towards omega and a psychologist like um Kenneth Ring the Omega project right he he's he's also talking that um we are heading towards the shamanization of humanity yeah so do you believe that the individual development replicates the the human development of the species like microcosm and macrocosm I think so don't you think yeah well yeah yeah but I I mean the the more people become aware of this um uh the the the more we will reach that level so we are um we are being in the process of becoming yeah we are not end products and we assume that you know sociology itself uh developed uh along the lines of uh August comte when he first uh enunciated what are the principles humanity he said moved from the um from the um mystical to the metaphysical to the positivistic scientific yeah in other words from religion and mysticism to philosophy and from philosophy to empirical science and then what's the next one beyond the empirical science well he he didn't see any future other than the rational positivistic he was the product of the French Revolution uh during that that period of time and the way that they felt humanity would be liberated was to be liberated from the oppressive uh authoritarianism uh of the clerical hierarchy and they moved in the opposite direction only science can rescue us only science can lead us to to truth well science has been very very helpful and very important and I think science today is creating the conditions for the discovery of God at a higher level and um when um when all these philosophers like um Nietzsche like Marx uh Sartre um Bernard Russell the Atheist philosophers they lived at a time when the the uh the the cosmos was limited to the Milky Way that our galaxy is the Milky Way and um the dominant perspective was the steady state perspective namely that the universe has always been here and therefore uh life is like a cruel joke now since the middle 60s the dominant perspective in cosmology is the big bank theory of the universe which means that if it originated 13.7 billion years ago the question arises well how did it come about who created it and this is what led some people uh um uh very uh uncomfortable because they were ideologically committed to the steady state and it was uh what's his name uh Hoyle who dismissed uh the big bang what is this big bang he said he he gave its name big bang so that is one thing then you have quantum physics telling you that there are very very strange things happening on the subadomic level and that mind affects matter not the other way around right um uh past life regression therapies uh the study of uh extraordinary abilities uh that was even appeared on uh on nova some years ago all of these things lead to the conclusion that the universe is a great thought not a great machine as the that's a good phrase there's by the way there's a question uh yeah justina says thank you for this wonderful conversation and which of your books might be a good starting point for a non-academic non-sociologist interested in these topics well maybe maybe they can read the mountain of silence okay yeah the mountain of silence uh this is uh it's um yeah any of my books I think uh other than the political ones that I wrote uh okay but this you may it's very very accessible all of them are but I would say read the mountain of silence yeah and then from there you can be you may be interested in reading the others yeah one of your reviewers said it reminded them of Carlos Castanada but that he you he fell short compared to you and the way I heard the way I heard that is you you come off as more much more grounded it's the same I don't know he was he was referring to my previous trilogy the ma uh the magazine yeah so there's like the stories you told today the the uh there's unbelievable stuff like our uh like Castanata but you write you read in this very grounded way that makes because i i i looked at those phenomena as a sympathetic yeah academic like uh you really do the role of the participant observer yeah right when I read your books I feel I'm right there with you witnessing these phenomena and yeah you don't you just describe it you don't interpret it overly interpret it but you at the same time you include the I I only offer uh evidence based on my observations yeah and I let people make their own conclusions draw their own conclusions yeah and then you let the scalos and his uh cohorts like uh introduce their own theology behind the miracles yeah it it is I I find them the two of them very compatible the trilogy of the Magus of Strovolos and the trilogy on the on the the mountain of silence are very compatible and complete a vision of reality that I personally find very compelling and very gratifying as far as I am concerned.

SPEAKER_02 56:09

Yeah and can can Wilbur's model we all go from egocentric to ethnocentric to world centric right and then integral or just together yes yeah no he he he is brilliant i i hope he has many more books to write right yeah so yeah unless there's another question we can wrap it up we it it's it's been very edifying as per the opening prayer it's my pleasure i enjoyed it yeah uh so wait a moment in case there's anyone who wants to comment andrew saying he loved this and oh here's a good one what will your next book be my last book is is this one uh the accidental immigrant a quest for spirit in a skeptical age yeah that's your life story yeah yeah but I am continuing I don't know whether I will finish it before I exit this life but I I'm working on a book that the tentative title if I can keep it as such is uh the coming crisis of western materialism the coming I thought we already had the we're in the crisis we are in the crisis yeah maybe I will the crisis of western materialism yeah I think the title should be should refer to beyond the crisis you know give people a little hope I I'll think about it I'm good at titles so I can all right help you out with that one good yeah because you know there we're in a situation where there might be the collapse before the the next paradigm emerges I think the it's um these are parallel processes and just to give you an example I I had a a colleague of mine in psychology who saw me one day walking on campus and he approached me and said he's a professor of psychology he said you know me and my wife are reading your books of talking about the trilogy of the magazine and we love them and we uh but you know I cannot bring this material into my my my um my writing and my research well obviously because if you would do that he'll have to make such radical changes that may create problems for him academically right so so it um it it requires some time before things begin to really change when we see in textbooks the the textbooks are the ones that professors are using to so not only to convey to convey uh knowledge but also to convey ideology the ideology of academia uh to the students right but you don't have you're not worried about that anymore because you have a new reputation well i i'm not worried no because uh uh academia is opening up yeah and they are much more receptive to at least hear what uh it's not like what happened when i was uh working uh on on the magos of strovaros a a colleague of mine an Indian from India uh who was a mathematician and he gave up his Hinduism and be incorporated into his worldview Western rationalism he was so upset about me because well if you want to believe that the moon is made up of sweet cheese is you are it's it it is you are I mean he he he couldn't handle it how could a rational human being believe in this nonsense because he thought all of the things that the rishis of India are um talking about and practicing are nothing more than uh slate of hand that it's uh trickery and charlatanism right but that's there is plenty of that but yeah all your books say otherwise so and very brief very readable so thank you for being our honored guest in this uh it's been my pleasure and uh let me let me write your book down again uh well you can stay for stay for a few minutes afterwards it'd be brief and yeah um yeah my book for anyone's interested is psycho spiritual model in the helping professions which does does what professor markities does for psychology i had yeah i had to get it in a textbook like you said before going on to write more from the heart for a wider audience yeah yeah so the the closing blessing is i choose a different one every time is may we live in open openness to what will emerge next in the evolutionary pageant