Eric: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Platonists podcast. Today I have a great guest that I'm excited to talk to. It's Colin Conkright. And we're going to be talking today with him just about his spiritual experience, some of the work that he does, and also his new book, The Universalist, which I've been reading and ⁓ is absolutely fantastic. It's really good book. So we're going to go over a lot of that. So just to kick things off, Why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself, kind of the work you're doing and a little bit about you. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, well, Eric, thanks for having me on. I really, really appreciate this. Looking forward to our discussion. ⁓ So yeah, I definitely am on a different approach, right? Because I don't come from kind of a formal religious household or anything like that. And it was due to my own personal ⁓ experiences that really kicked off my curiosity. And I started diving into, you I wanted to go straight to the sources, right? and just started diving into the sources, kind of this personal quest ⁓ for truth and everything, and spent years reading the ancient Greeks, reading a lot of the classics, dabbling across different world religions, meeting a bunch of friends who came from different traditions, kind of putting myself in these different meditation circles ⁓ early on. And in tandem with all of this research were a number of other phenomena. experiences. I started getting exposed to parapsychology and seeing how, you know, combining religious studies and parapsychology can confer a lot of insights because they're often quite related. And inevitably I began coming across, ⁓ you know, throughout the timeline across cultures, the idea that there are these experiential origin points for a lot of the cultural beliefs that ⁓ thematically can be compared along similar lines, right? And that always ⁓ struck me as an insight that doesn't get enough attention, I think, that these things are experiential. And that's not to say that all religious principles, practices, and phenomena, and so forth, all of the beliefs in them have to have those experiential components, but... to a large part in my research, often do, often is an experience that leads up to these things. ⁓ And it has been a kind of convenience in our relatively materialistic and secular kind of self-centered culture. and scientifically minded at least. ⁓ We like to, I've seen a lot of scholars sort of paint this kind of cultural imagination. A lot of these shared beliefs are due to like a. common brain activity, know, shared psychology, this kind of thing. And they will also be the ones that will criticize researchers like myself for like comparing too much and trying to fit all these different things into one mold, right? And they'll say, you you're colonizing these traditions. And I'm saying, well, on the other hand, let's just listen to what they have to tell us about. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: their foundational beliefs and the stories that led up to them. And if we do that, we're not colonizing anything. We're actually just being open-minded to their experiences, right? So it was kind of all of these things over the course of 12 years of investigating this stuff. the Universalist title really struck a chord with me because in America, there's a lot of this kind of rootlessness, right? Eric: Hmm. Hmm. Collin Conkwright: And younger folks especially will have these experiences, wild experiences that can change the trajectory of their life and they don't necessarily have anyone to go to. ⁓ possibly even their local church, you know, isn't always, sometimes it is, isn't always the best place to go to because maybe they don't have those experiences or they don't know how to provide kind of the real answers that a seeker is looking for. But if you take this universalistic approach, you start to realize that, you know, you're not alone, we're not on an island with any of these experiences. This has been happening forever as long as we have records, right? And that is a key insight and it's a comforting thing to be able to provide people because it's like, ⁓ okay, this is normal, this is actually natural and fundamental to the human experience. ⁓ So I think that's like, it's ⁓ a good remedy to be able to provide some of those broader insights insights to the modern person here. Eric: That's great. So yeah, when you're talking about universalism, feel like sometimes that can maybe be a dirty word for some people. You know, they hear that kind of title and they think like, maybe this is what you meant by the colonizing thing of just like kind of flattening the landscape. Like we're going to make everything the same. And I didn't get that approach from your book, but I think you were really careful in how you describe universalism as not being this flattening of different traditions, but Collin Conkwright: Right. Eric: It's kind of just looking for the common points. Am I getting that kind of right? Collin Conkwright: Yeah, in a way it's, know, unity provides for infinite variety, right? ⁓ And we live in a shared reality, the same ontological parameters that apply to one of us somewhere apply to all of us, right? And even if it was discovered that each of us individually as a consciousness kind of lives in a universe on our own, that would then become the shared universal reality. So there's no escaping the universals. know, just objectively, you can't escape the universals. And so it's often said that when you sacrifice a particular, right, when Yahweh is no longer a storm god or something like this and he becomes the god of everyone, you know, when you sacrifice the, or when you create the universal, you sacrifice the particular, right? So this approach is embracing variety. It's a universally embracing variety because universe, you can't get rid of the universal. It's always kind of overarching, right? So I wanted to turn that criticism on its head a little bit because I think it's a little unfair. Eric: Mm. Collin Conkwright: because everything can be compared simply on the basis of a shared reality. So ⁓ I think we get lost in nebulous abstraction a little too much and bringing it back to these fundamentals. ⁓ That can simplify and it's like, my motto is when you get lost on the frontiers, come back to first principles, come back to the fundamentals and you'll be able to find your compass again. So I realize the universalism I'm discussing and I'm trying to, I would hope that this becomes the universalism that we can talk about now because it's a more true, it's true to the meaning of the word itself a little bit more. Whereas, for too long, universalism has been dominated by the critics of so-called universalism, right? So they are the ones that get to define this term, whereas no one's really even accepting this term really that broadly. I will gladly be the one that dies on this hill, yeah. Eric: You Yeah, it's a good term to recapture, right? Like it had some prominence for a long time. And I think, you know, maybe it just got too wrapped up in kind of new age and some of these other like very loose ideas about things. And, but what I see you're doing here is kind of getting back to those first principles with it, which is really the stuff that I think got lost in the more, ⁓ you know, earlier forms of universalism, let's say. Collin Conkwright: I lost you briefly there, can you hear me? Okay, I lost you at the shared principles. Eric: ⁓ yeah, I can hear you now. Yeah, just saying that, you know, with, ⁓ with your book, seems like you're moving away from the kind of Lucy goosey kind of idea of universalism and bringing it back to these kinds of universal first principles. And so there are, there is a more of a structure to it where I feel like most people, when they're thinking of universalism, they're thinking of this kind of, you know, buffet of religions, eclecticism, where it's just like, Hey, believe whatever you want. And it's very relativistic, but It doesn't seem like you're doing that with this. You're kind of giving it a little bit more of this structure and grounding. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, because I think you can compare religions on so many different fronts. ⁓ so I've chosen to compare. do this comparative work on that experiential basis because ⁓ dreams, for instance, if we just wanna use dreams as an example, there is really no human culture that's going to, you can't escape dreams. Every human being dreams and thus the same phenomena that occur in dreams, precognitive dreams and psychic dreams, they are naturally going to happen wherever you can find dreams. So if we start thinking about the soul, and spiritual reality as one or another of these common ⁓ factors, just like the sun, just like the sky, just like the grass, it's another common natural factor of human reality, then we can always compare and contrast. That doesn't mean we're always gonna be correct ⁓ with that practice. And people are often not correct. They're trying to find, well, you know, since they're saying something very similar over here, that must have passed physically or something, that must have been a migrationally passed to this culture. And there's a lot of great work that you can do there. honestly, there's a lot like Herodotus was sort of talking about that a lot. The Greeks adopted certain things from the Egyptians and so on. But we're not stuck at that. can always come back to this experiential and this very broad, Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: solution to that mystery there. do people seem to believe in the same things? Why do people have, they talk about the spirit world, they have these prophetic phenomena that happens. There's oracles and shamans that seem to be able to connect with the spirit world in a unique way ⁓ compared to the common population. So there's a number of these things that always stick out. And I think we can discuss those things without betraying the uniqueness of the cultures that we find them in. ⁓ we can and that's what I hope to to continue to do with my work with my YouTube channel and everything like that. Because it's fascinating and it's like this is like the end of this is like the the end game of humanism is really looking looking into this stuff right. ⁓ So I hope I answered some of your questions there. Eric: Hmm. Yeah, you did. And I love you pointing out that sort of fallacy of transmission that every single thing that's out there has to come from this other previous thing. And I've noticed that a lot. I mean, that's kind of a. I guess a basis point of a lot of ⁓ scholarship is we're always looking for what's the source of that, what's the source of that. But what you're doing is really saying, well, no, this goes back to this direct experience that people are having. And so. It's not that it's transmitting from this culture to this culture and moving around. It's each culture is kind of turning inward and finding these things for themselves. And I think you kind of coined this as a spiritual realism. Collin Conkwright: Mm, yeah. Yeah, yeah, this is all an approach to spiritual realism, which I would hope and I would imagine is what everyone in their different traditions is trying to get at. They're trying to get at the truth, capital T. ⁓ So spiritual realism, you're able to step away from dogmatism. Now that doesn't mean, like I'm not completely anti-dogmatic. Right? I think if you individually, if there are certain dogmatic things that work for you as an individual and that even you are excited about accepting, that means there's something there for you that has nothing to do with anybody else, right? Maybe continue to explore that, you know? So I don't necessarily advocate for the complete removal of dogma on that individual level, but it's no secret that dogmatism has plagued a lot of the established religion. since the very, since the very beginnings. Eric: I wanted to ask you about that because I do see the dangers of dogmatism in You you clearly can get to a point where you become so obsessed with the sort of written word or this particular belief That you actually blind yourself to the truth, you know If you you come and have an experience that is true You may go no I'm gonna retreat back to the belief in the book or this one line here because that's the dogmatism That's what I'm gonna follow And so it can become in a sense, the enemy of truth. And there's a, there's a real danger there. But then at the same time, I kind of looked at, look at the difference between mystics and the common person. And the common person I think is helped out in some sense by dogmatism, ⁓ maybe more so than the mystic, right? The mystics are able to go out and have more of these direct experiences, but the average person in some sense fails. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Eric: to do that, or maybe, you know, they're just not going that deep and I to no fault of their own, like people have jobs, kids, and not everybody's spiritually inclined. And so I can kind of see dogmatism helping them out. So I was curious to just get your thoughts on maybe that balance between the exoteric and the esoteric and how those interplay with each other when it comes to things like dogmatism. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Yeah, I agree with that. it's, think if we had more religious literacy in our culture right now, we would be able to, people would be able to accept that dogmas for themselves and not pretend that they have to. ⁓ impose those onto everybody else, which essentially would mean taking that literally, that people who are never exposed to certain books and certain prophets and so on, their soul is at risk of peril in some regard, right? And so that's where those extremes, you can take it to the extremes. And I don't think the kind of esoteric community, in some regards though, I'm wrong here, but, ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: Some people are beyond the dogmatism aspect and we've kind of progressed beyond that, but clearly not everyone has. And I think the antidote to that would just be a little more religious literacy. And by that, mean, let's get back to reading some of the ancient Greeks who definitely influenced the early Christians, admittedly, right? Yeah. Eric: ⁓ absolutely. Yeah. And you you, you pull a couple of great quotes in here that were from the ancient world where, ⁓ ancient Greek philosophers were arguing with early Christians about the nature of God, the nature of reality, the nature of the divine and making these pleas that we can't collapse the divine into this particular dogma of this particular mystery called there's just too much to the divine for us to do that. And I can kind of see our culture getting back to that a little bit where, you know, we've collapsed into this singular dogma, mostly Christianity in the West. And to me, it seems like it's just not a big enough container for the wealth of divine experience. And this idea of a sort of broader universalism where we center in around a couple of core principles, but you know, Christians still have their particular dogma. The pagans are going to have their particular dogma and hermeticists and Kabbalists and all these other people have their particular paths, but we all kind of come together and agree on this spiritual realism that's there at the background of everything. And I think there's a huge benefit to that. We kind of need to get back to something like that, or it's always going to end up being this fight for who's got the truth. Collin Conkwright: Yes. Eric: and ⁓ the capital T truth and at the exclusion of everyone else. Collin Conkwright: Yep. Yeah, yeah, there's. I see this kind of universalism as it's not a religion in and of itself. It's more of a philosophical orientation to the mystery. So ⁓ I would hope that people could see a humility there where you're not professing to be the custodian of the grand truths of the universe. You're rather sitting there and observing the fact that there are all of these unknowns and all of these mysteries and you're saying that, in order to try to get at some basis of the truth, we might as well spread our net pretty wide. that's, mean, that would be a basic scientific reproducibility kind of practice there. Let's spread this net really wide and lo and behold, you know, we're gonna get some positive confirmations there. We're gonna realize that the soul is not, you know, I mean, it would be... even more challenging, it would be way more challenging if you only found these common threads in singular places. And it's like, but why did no one else have psychic dreams? Why did no one else interact with the spirit world? Why did no one else leave their bodies? But that's not the case. These are universally occurring. you know, and I actually think that this, even though this seems to be, Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: quite a nuanced discussion in this day and age, I think it is very elementary. I think it's like it's an introductory ⁓ approach. you know, what I hope happens is that we're able to, especially I think America has a unique opportunity here to... ⁓ Lay out these broader parameters this kind of more spiritual realist approach because that can that can kind of be a bomb to dogmatism on one end and be a bomb to kind of atheistic scientific reductionism on one end because so you're bridging those and you're building a bridge to parapsychology so Because we need all of those things so that in that way. It's like we can actually progress We can learn more we can approach more of the unknowns and Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: and we can make, you know, we can gain new insights. And I think it's like, because it's like this, as the sphere of the known increases, the unknown doesn't shrink. The unknown exponentially increases as the known. And that is like, that is real infinity. Right? the more we know, the less we know at the same time. It's this very bizarre thing. And I don't think, I hope, honestly, I hope we never escape that. I hope that that's always what's happening. But yeah, so I think touching on these kind of ideas, like you said, it's going to be fruitful, especially for this day and age, where we don't know what the future is for the more rigid religions. Eric: Yeah, and I love this idea that does bridge the gap between the sort of materialist atheist worldview and the more dogmatic religious view. That's a huge influence for why I got into Platonism in the first place. I kind of view Platonism as a sort of version of the universalist idea, you know, the looking for these core principles in reality that we can all agree on and we can test rationally either through experience or through logic. I see a lot of those things in that and perhaps it gets a little bit dogmatic over time. We have our particular beliefs, I guess, we're dug in on, but in a sense, so is the Universalist. It's like there are still those core principles that we arrive back at. And I do think we need to push towards that, but I also wonder how we get there at some level. I look at the materialist atheist side and I do think they're ignoring a lot of realities. that are out there, like the parapsychology that you're talking about. And I'm glad to see in the last few years, that's really gotten some credit where people are saying that the evidence is overwhelming really that parapsychological things happen. know, things like ESP, things like remote viewing, like these things are real and they're very well documented. And so the materialists have to just kind of deny that out of hand and their position is getting more and more untenable as time goes on because they're sort of blocking out big parts of reality. But you see the same thing on the dogmatist side too, where with the big name religions, it's like they have a very narrow view of reality. And I think it's gotta be hard for even a lot of Christians to take the position that Every other religion in the world is the work of Satan and is demonic and it's all just trying to like deceive you away from Jesus. Like I think if you really think that through it, it doesn't really make any sense. And you made a great point in the book too, about how many galaxies there are and the likelihood of life in the universe and the likelihood that any one of these like highly dogmatic confessional religions is the absolute truth is effectively zero. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Eric: I've made that argument too. I think it's kind of absurd when you just think about it. But I guess the question is, you know, what does that mean for the future of those religions? I think in one sense, maybe those religions could sort of come into a more universalist position themselves and start to say, hey, Jesus is one of the gods, but not all, you know, the only one. But I also, don't know, my, have my doubts they're going to do that. I wonder how that happens, you know? Collin Conkwright: Yeah, yeah, we're in for an exciting time on many fronts. ⁓ You know, I don't proclaim to have like all of the obviously the total solutions, right? It's really a time will tell sort of thing, but. ⁓ at the very least, even some of the most dogmatic proponents of the different religions can start to have a better conversation with each other and maybe even leave room for the idea that, maybe, I'm not saying that I necessarily personally believe all of this, but a lot of the, I would say good Hindu teachers in the last few centuries, Swami Vivekananda and so forth, they always leave place for Jesus and the other traditions, even accepting them as an actual reality. Like the idea that Jesus as a spirit, Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: still exists in the astral realm, if you will, and can literally visit people when they pray to him, because he's kind of this bodhisattvic, almost like this Buddha figure, just like the White Lotus School of Chinese Buddhism's with the Amida Buddha that comes to them specifically, right? So, know... Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: It's not to say that none of these separate things don't have a kind of phenomenological reality to them and an experiential quality. mean, certainly in... ⁓ out of body and near death experiences, people do proclaim that they see a particular religious figure that is in line with their beliefs. Then again, there's the exact opposite there. There's people that see, that don't see a particular religion reflected in those experiences. Rather, it's more of this archetypal situation, right? Where it's simply, there's this guiding figure. He's not associated with an earthly religion. There's unification with the light. There's kind of this ⁓ omnipresence Eric: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: of divine love and whatnot. Now, when you see those archetypes there, you can fit them into the different sects. You can say, ⁓ well, that's the Holy Spirit. This is kind of the Virgin Mary coming through. You can fit all of them into those sects, which people have done. But I would say it's a more scientific, it's a more grounded, and of course universalistic approach to kind of figure out where those common themes are. And then, you know, we can dress them up in our own language right now, right in this day and age. And so this is the spiritual realism. It's recognizing the reality of what it actually is and not projecting what we want it ⁓ to be onto it all the time. And, you know, Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: to maintain that projection, some people on the extremes are gonna have to say, I can dismiss it because it's the work of demons or I can dismiss it because they were just hallucinating. They have brain damage and this or that. Whereas, for instance, a good thing about the spiritual realism is that you can't discount the things that are happening right here and right now. Like, you know, for instance, all of the stuff that's coming out with ⁓ non-speaking autistic, altis, yeah, with the telepathy tapes and so on, yeah. Eric: ⁓ yeah, like the telepathy tapes. ⁓ my God. Yeah, that is it. Just plug for that. If you guys haven't watched any of the telepathy tapes, it's mind blowing stuff. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, and some of these individuals are essentially like, you could imagine them being set up as an oracle of the modern age. And they are, they do leave prophecies, they do have poetic license and have little riddles and whatnot. We just don't, we just, as a society, we don't have like... We weren't even ready to accept that anything was going on inside their heads, but they just, know, some of them have dyspraxia. They just can't control their bodies. That's why it's sort of jarring and whatnot. But internally, they do have the same kind of language ⁓ capabilities that we do. They can spell things out. They just have to narrow their focus down to these like. Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: motor controlled, you know, one decision actions and that's really difficult for them. It's almost like they have access to, I don't want to say a hive mind, but to more of a collective consciousness. So you can imagine if you're existing in that, it's super disorienting to have just a linear conversation, just like me and you are having. So, you know, it's like, let's include these mysteries into our spiritual investigation because they're just as valid and they're Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: way closer to us right now than the Oracle at Delphi ever was, right? you know, it's also bridging that gap between like romanticizing the ancient world and having always to go back there to find out what's relevant to us. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love nerding out on the ancients, you know, with the best of them, but ⁓ I don't discredit ⁓ kind of the modern phenomena that's going on as well. Eric: Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah, I totally agree. We should really look at those things that are happening today and treat them with a similar interest at least about what was going on in the ancient world. I think sometimes we get trapped in a bit of this scholastic mindset that you see in the Christians in the Middle Ages where they're kind of looking back at the scripture and things that happened in the past. And it's like, that's when revelation happened. That's when God was acting with people, but that's over now. That's in the past. And all we can do is kind of look over the bones and see what we can figure out. We do that sometimes even on the pagan Platonist side. It's like we end up getting dug in on these, you know, obsessing over the history part. And it's like, we completely forget that the telepathy tapes is going on. have these kids who are basically telepathically communicating with people and there's a boatload of evidence of it. And, know, we've been doing tests on it again and again, and it's happening. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eric: We maybe don't know why, but that's I think what you're saying is we should be digging into this. We should be looking at this and using it to sort of grow our understanding of spiritual realism. Collin Conkwright: Yes. Yes, that's why it's like, you know, collecting these kind of fundamental principles, practices and phenomena that are universal, timeless across cultures and so on, that... You know, these are just fundamentals. It leaves room for infinite mystery. It really does. It just establishes these kind of universals that have always been with us and that in some ways people just naturally do. ⁓ It's like in Marchia Eliade's sacred and profane book, it's that even in a secular culture, even in an atheistic culture, We're gonna have holidays, we're gonna have sacred places, we're gonna have these things that kind of resemble religiosity, but you know, in everything but the terms and the definitions, right? ⁓ So yeah, think that this is, there's never been a better time to do this kind of work. And I think it's more useful than ever as well because we can see what has happened by everyone just fixating in their camps. and not including any of these other teachings. And there's a big hubris there. So in the rigid forms of sectarianism, they want to proclaim that they are actually universalists because their religion applies apparently universally everywhere, right? And that's why they would like to fit you into it. But it's simply not the case. I mean, if you arrive in some indigenous area that is barely touched by the modern human beings, they're gonna have some of the Eric: Hmm. Collin Conkwright: fundamentals in the background and it's likely that they're going to have a spiritual leader ⁓ figure and that they're going to have certain practices and that they're going to have some kind of folklore about ghosts and interactions with spirits and so on. They might even have a much better grasp ⁓ than we do because they don't necessarily separate and categorize things as much as we do. And when you start to do that you form these belief systems that can start to short circuit when you're confronted with something that you disagree with there. And I do think reality reflects our belief systems to a certain degree and to different people differently for sure. the problem with building too much rigid beliefs about particulars is that there's way more room for error in particulars as Archytas the Pythagorean discussed. Whereas back at the universals that apply totally, you can always fit the particulars into them. ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: So I know I'm sketching a lot of areas here, but yeah, this is part of the challenge and it's really about... just bridging the gap in all of these different niches and having that kind of general conversation. ⁓ And then when you want to take that unique approach, there's probably gonna be something that for each individual speaks to them a little bit more, whether it be Platonism, whether it be Christianity. And in a kind of universalist approach, that's all well and good. That is welcomed. ⁓ So yeah, so we can do this and that at the same time, no problem. Eric: Yeah, I think it's a good to point out that the universal is not opposed to the particular and you know, that's one of those core principles in Platonism that they're they're sort of nested within each other. It's like it's the universal that makes the particular possible and you know, the particular obviously goes up into the universal. So it's it's really you need both of those and if you collapse too far into one or the other, that's where you really fall into some kind of error. There is a I think an error in universalism of Collin Conkwright: Yes. Eric: sort of like total universalism to the point where like the particulars are illusions, that kind of viewpoint, right? But then you can do the same thing the other way where it's like, it's just the particular and you end up in a kind of almost like a solipsism where it's just like, only my thing is real. And so, yeah, I see both of those, but you know, part of the title of your book is Experiential Religion and Theology. And... Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah. Eric: it, you know, can you talk a little bit about the methodology there of, you know, experiential? Like, it seems like a lot of this really boils back down to kind of looking at direct experience then. Collin Conkwright: Yes, yeah, so, you know, let's say if we take some of these universal... ⁓ practices and principles and so on, like prayer, like sacrifices and offerings, like the idea that the spirit world exists. ⁓ The idea here is that it's not so much cultural imagination or speculation or the shaman teaches it and that's why, that's why we accept it. It's the idea that each of these commonalities can be, maybe not solely, but they can be traced back to actual personal experiences and direct encounters with the phenomena in question. And so those are experiential origin points that can explain why these common threads exist. ⁓ Whereas other explanations would be geographic or cultural diffusion, which is like, ⁓ you know, the reason that shaman is the same shamanistic practices exist in North America, existed in North America is because they were brought over from Sybil. So they kind of have to play that, you know, cultural or geographic diffusion game. Whereas that's there is credibility in many cases for that. That is an entire study unto itself. But that is not the one and only. And I would honestly think that the experiential origin point ⁓ is possibly more fundamental there. So ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: when you bring it back to these experiences, you're not only discovering potentially where these commonalities first arrived into a culture through these experiences, but you're also saying that right here and right now, individuals, you and me, can have these experiential encounters to draw on the same insights. So the idea is that, It is a living religion always. We are already living in a shared reality. So it's always progressing and developing and adapting and renegotiating and so on and so forth. I mean, in the longest existing living religions, whether they be in Greece and ancient Egypt, you your gods could change, like for instance, in Egypt, just because of political changes and so on. We could adopt new gods for the city and whatnot. ⁓ I think they had a little bit more of a realism understanding here and they weren't so dogmatic. And that's kind of why in ancient Egypt, the local god inside of the temple was a universal god. They weren't saying that in the next province over, their gods are totally wrong and everything else. They were understanding that they were using these deities as permission slips. Right? As kind of they're fitting their hands in certain clothes that work for me, that you know, these are the deities that speak to me uniquely and that's why I'm going to bring them into my practice. Eric: you Collin Conkwright: And then suddenly when you have an encounter, lo and behold, when you have an encounter with one of these very specific kind of deities, which I'm willing to credit the idea that that has been experienced across cultures, then that actually verifies the particularity, that verifies the embrace of the uniqueness there. But that is happening universally as well. You see what I mean? So there's no way to escape that there. And I think the experiential factor is crucial right now because we're not lost in this kind of. worship of the book and worship of the words and it's not fossilized back in, know, only Jesus can have these experiences. Only Jesus can be around when someone is phenomenally healed or of course one of the saints. So, you know, you're willing to extend this to the saints and so on, but why not extend it to Joe Blow down the street who might just one day spontaneously, you know, do something that's very phenomenal that you would otherwise encounter. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: in some ancient anecdote or something somewhere. So yeah, let's bring back the experiential components to these principles and try to consider them, ⁓ especially when scholars are investigating, for instance, something as profound as the origins of religious belief itself. Eric: Yeah, what you're saying reminds me a lot of ⁓ scholar John Osmond's work about the Mosaic distinction. Yeah, he writes about that in the Price of Monotheism, that the thing that really made the revealed and confessional religions that we're calling the dogmatic religions, what made them what they were was this distinction between truth and falsehood, where they declared themselves, we're the true religion, that's the false religion. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Mm. Eric: And that was really a big contrast to what he calls primary religion, which we're kind of calling, you know, universalism here, which did have this very experiential component. kind of organically grew out of a people's direct experience with the divine over centuries or thousands and thousands of years. And so with that though, I'm curious, you know, experience is obviously valuable and we can all have these different experiences, but is there, do you think there's a risk of us? getting lost in illusion with that, that maybe the experiences we're having are false, not in the sense of like a true false dichotomy, but maybe we misunderstand. Maybe we're, maybe we think we're experiencing one thing and it's actually something different. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, there's always gonna be that risk there. Wherever humans are, human nature follows. ⁓ we are capable of any number of falsifications and so on. ⁓ So there's always that risk. I guess, though, the risk in... I think the risk is greater if you're doing the opposite, if you're either denying that the experience happened or if even the individual is so lost in the idea, was it real, did it actually happen, this or that, can't talk to anyone about it, that they shove it into the background of their own life and don't possibly get whatever insight was actually there. So let's... say like dreams for instance, right? Because this is ⁓ the common experience that is most likely to be misinterpreted, I would say, because we could have the most bizarre dreams and then wake up in the morning and proclaim that they meant this, that, and that, when really, you know, who knows, right? And so all of the great dream investigators in the ancient world, i.e. Amblichus and so on, even Homer, you have these kind of... They put the dreams into these two categories, false dreams and divine dreams. And often how you understood ⁓ what a dream meant and that it was divine is that it proclaimed that something would happen in a very definite or a symbolic way and then it does happen. So it's kind of this hindsight confirmation, aha, that was unique. There was a truth there. And those seem to be more rare than the opposite. ⁓ So for instance, I would say one of the most profound experiences that can happen for someone is like an out of body experience, simply because of the implications that are in there. And with some of those, you might be literally in your bedroom, outside of your body and looking at yourself, right? Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: So in that regard, there would appear to be an inherent ⁓ objective thing going on that you are now outside of your body, but your vision is retained in your awareness where it is at that moment, right? So there is a risk in projecting what we want these things to mean and getting lost in the symbolic vocabulary of things, but... If we reduce these experiences to their most basic descriptions, even in that case, we can take away something of value from them. we don't necessarily need to proclaim that they are wholly true or that they are derived from the sphere of ontological truth itself, but we can see that there is something unique and meaningful there for us. So it's like, you kinda have to, and this is what we would need to develop to develop better language around this stuff. You would have to be able to parse. ⁓ In each of the categories of experiences, the ones that are the most challenging to interpret an inherent meaning in, and then the ones that are like the meaning is inherent and known almost immediately. There's something very specific there. Maybe something will even come in and give you a literal instruction. ⁓ For instance, one of the most broad parapsychological phenomena in the ancient world is ⁓ is like a spirit interaction with an instruction. And in one case, it would be like someone has an OBE or someone has a dream or someone has a waking vision where a deity or a spirit or an unknown or an ancestor can come in and say, hey, you your mother is sick, go out and grab the specific root that's under the red flower that looks like this. And they will go and do it, bring it back and then heal the person. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: Right, so that is a high stakes circumstance and the meaning is clear not only in its experience but in the result of it, right? So. So how I separate these things is high stakes and low stakes. Okay, so you have a dream one day and something crazy's going on in the dream and you're doing something that otherwise you would never do in real life. ⁓ It's like, whoa, you know, that was weird. You're not going to do that in real life. So it's kind of, the meaning there is kind of low stakes, right? Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: Whereas if you were to have a dream that one of your family members that you haven't seen in a while is like pleading for help, you know, and you wake up with a feeling, with an intuition that like, whoa, that was something specific was there. And then of course you might actually call your uncle and like, yeah, they just admitted him to the hospital or something like this. I'm saying that because these are, those things actually happen. And if we develop a better language around this stuff. Eric: Hmm. Collin Conkwright: the stakes are pretty high, you know? mean, I just learned, I just learned, had a story yesterday come to me. ⁓ One of my buddies met a friend, his son, non, you know, non-speaking, autistic, and his son did something very strange one day and was pointing to an area of his dad's body, and his dad got this feeling to admit himself into the hospital, saved his life. His intestines had ruptured, right? Eric: Wow. Collin Conkwright: So, you know, the more that we're able to proclaim a reality to at least some of these and figure out, you know, what are the distinctions that allow us to, ⁓ observe like those specific ones, those divine dreams or those profound moments of intuition, then the stakes are pretty high sometimes. We can actually make decisions that affect our lives or the lives of people around us. And in this case, if we're to be open-minded to it, the idea is that there are more signs than we know of around us. There are synchronicities, there are indications. and the ideas, the more we learn about this and the more that we're open-minded to it, we can start to see that spiritual language embedded in the natural world itself and embedded in our interactions. Wow, I bumped into this person that had the answer to the exact thing I was thinking about yesterday and it's like, well, there's a reason there. And that experience, I don't think you should just say that that experience was just some. you know, meaningless coincidence. There was something actual tangible of value there. Eric: I think I lost you again. ⁓ there you are. Sorry, I thought I lost you there for a second. ⁓ You know, you were talking about, you know, bumping into somebody and these kind of synchronous experiences. And I was just agreeing with you that, yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's it's incredible how common those stories are. You know, if you're talking to people, especially if they're at all kind of spiritually aware or paying attention to those things, you'll hear these stories all the time. Collin Conkwright: Okay, where did you lose me at? Okay. Yes. Eric: of, you I was thinking of somebody and then I look at my phone and they're calling me, you know, or, yeah, I was, was thinking of that person. I bumped into him at the grocery store, you know, two hours later. It's like, you know, we write a lot of this stuff off as just coincidence or, ⁓ just whatever, you know, it probably means nothing, but you know, I think taking the spiritual realism idea a little more seriously is to say that these, these really aren't coincidences. They happen far too often. There's far too many. Collin Conkwright: Yes. Eric: of the examples of these things to just write it all off as coincidence. And maybe that's part of the answer to that is that, you know, if we look at all of these experiences as, illusion, coincidence, happenstance, that's an error, but also we're wrong to confirm every single thing that happens to us. And we have to have maybe a more scientific attitude about it where we try to come up with some better methods so that we can verify them. Collin Conkwright: Mm-hmm. Eric: And that is really what we do see in the ancient world. Like you said, with the yamblichus, we had some methods for how to know whether we should take these seriously or not. And it's not ⁓ a situation where we just have to either believe everything or nothing. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, yeah, and ⁓ it's also interesting in a couple of different sources. I believe it's in the Amplicus as well, but like Pseudodinaceous and so on. They will talk about how like a spirit or a daimon or an angel will appear to you as it suits your capacity to. actually observe what is really going on there, right? So it's like, and then if you extend that, this is where this kind of work comes in. If you extend that to everything from haunting phenomena, ghosts and apparitions, right? ⁓ You you might see an apparition or a ghost. Eric: Yeah. Uh-huh. Collin Conkwright: of someone who was recently deceased, but they look more youthful. They might resemble a state of health that they never actually achieved in their life. Or they might look in a different way. And you have some teachings, for instance, ⁓ I would say Shriyukta Swar and so on from the East also teach along these lines that astral beings can present themselves in any number of ways. And then you can, dare I say, extend this into the UFO phenomena a little bit, right? And of course, in each and every case, there's always that risk. There's always that risk there of like, Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: what actually happened, what was really going on, did this actually occur? But the sheer volume of testimonies, personal experiences, memorates about all of this stuff, that is scientific data of the highest degree. And I would say it is reproducible because it's continuously still happening today. And the more we understand that, the more we're capable of realizing it through like regular everyday interactions. know, like I always tell people you might be really surprised by like how much your neighbor has experienced or just some random stranger you walk into and you ask like, you know, have you ever seen this? You've ever seen that? And you might get immediately, you might get a story, right? And so if, so that requires some open-mindedness, right? And that requires some lending of credibility Eric: Sure. Collin Conkwright: the phenomena in question and you know you would be very surprised at how often people speak to this stuff but maybe they never had a chance to speak to their family about it or maybe they never their friends circle because of course they would say that they're crazy you know so yeah this is this is why it's that spiritual realism Eric: Right. Yeah, there's so many instances of that. I mean, there's so many just ghost stories, spiritual phenomenon, kind of miracles that happened that it's not like they get recorded because a lot of the people who experience them, they don't know what to make of them either. They just know they experienced this thing that they can't really explain, you know? And if you ask people, like you said, it's, it's far more common than most people realize. You can go to a lot of different people and get these kinds of explanations from them. Even ones who Collin Conkwright: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Eric: aren't necessarily believers in it. They still just go, yeah, I experienced that. don't know how to explain that. ⁓ But you mentioned aliens, so I got to talk about aliens. So I just feel like I've been seeing a lot lately about ⁓ theories on aliens. And I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the sort of dogmatist position lately is that they're all demons. But you had some stories in your book about Collin Conkwright: Right? Yeah. Mmm. Eric: sort of UAP phenomenon, seeing like kind of lights and orbs in the sky and things like that. And I was curious what your spin on is it it is because I could see you I could see it being both ways, right? And you kind of mentioned maybe these are sort of spiritual beings presenting themselves to us in these particular ways. But curious what you think. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, yeah, well, I would, ⁓ you know, part of the discussion right now around this is like, Is it this nuts and bolts, they're coming here in craft and they're from a different place or even they're ultra terrestrials, they're already here and they're coming. But I would say even if they are beings, intelligent beings and so on, they still exist under the spiritual parameters that apply to all of us anyway. So it's kind of a both situation on that front. ⁓ As far as my own experiences go, don't project a rigid conclusion onto what is behind the orb phenomena, for instance. But it is prevalent right now. And I've talked to very... regular folks that have encountered this stuff, but you can also have encounters with it that cross, they cross the border of just simply witnessing something in the sky. They're synchronistic. They show up when you are talking about something related to it, or ⁓ they show up when you are praying, or when you are in a kind of an emotionally ⁓ charged point in your life. And you know, sometimes they can show up, whatever it is, light phenomena can show up quite close to you. And it will test your ontological kind of... Eric: you Collin Conkwright: architecture ⁓ very closely. And you know, I mean, I had one encounter, I believe I mentioned it, I had one encounter where I saw something in the woods right behind me actually, that lit up the entire forest. And the light was of a certain nature that it appeared to bend around the obstructions or shine through them. Okay, I've never experienced this twice or since that night, but it happened in the flash and it lit up the entire forest as if it was high noon and the shape of this horizontal disc or oval was above the ground, but it was like 70 yards from me. And even though it was in the forest behind the trees, it conveyed its exact shape. right at the tree line, as if it was shining through it. And that happened, and my first thought was like, this time I'm actually going crazy. did not, I did not actually experience that. And then it happened right again, almost as if it was sort of, you know, no, you did, here it is again. Eric: You Mm-hmm. Yeah. Collin Conkwright: And I don't, you know, I don't claim, I don't know what to make of that. is still like, it's these, a lot of these experiences are fresh on my mind and I'm kind of always looking for people that proclaim something similar and whatnot. But you know, this is all to say that the orb phenomena is very current and it is most certainly real. And ⁓ it shows up even in ancient descriptions, know, orbs and spheres in the sky, ⁓ even beings and angels taking on this kind of shape. And currently I'm wondering, is a sphere the most basic and default shape that a spirit in general takes? Eric: Yeah. Collin Conkwright: You know, and I'm kind of leaning more and more ⁓ in that direction. So, you know, I can entertain the idea that these are like energetic probes of other beings that have always kind of been monitoring us, especially now after the nuclear weapons and so on. That makes sense, right? ⁓ And I can entertain that these are spirits in general interacting with us as well. And you know, ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: You'll find little nuggets that are like, kind of start, they're very provocative in this investigation. Like for instance, in one of Flammarian's ⁓ reports on a phenomena, this guy's friend had recently died and in his, he wakes up, he didn't know his friend had died, he wakes up in his bedroom and there's like a disk of vibrant orange light in his bedroom with him. And it didn't take a ⁓ particular appearance, but he knew and felt, almost like in this synesthetic kind of way, he felt that it was a very specific friend. And then of course he scrambles, wakes up, you know, like. Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: calls and sends a letter and realizes his friend had just died in that very hour. But his form was represented in that kind of shape that if it appeared in someone's backyard this day and age, you would say, aha, it's one of the ET craft or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so it's, know, all these phenomena are like, overlapped with one another. So it's difficult to figure out which, right? Eric: ⁓ wow. Ball lightening or yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, I, that's something you mentioned in the book was about this sort of spherical, ⁓ beings, know, spiritual beings that are spherical in nature. And I was trying to remember there's a, there's a platonic work that talks about that as well. ⁓ the idea that the soul is a sphere and there's even one of them where I swear it talks about it being like a blue sphere of light is the soul. I'll have to find it. Cause I was trying to find it. Collin Conkwright: Whoa. You have to please find that, please find that. Eric: All right, I will find it because I was reading it. was hoping maybe you knew the reference, but I was like, it just called to mind that. And I just think that's so fascinating because you had so many examples of these kind of orbs and you do hear about orbs and spirituality all the time. And I, it makes me look back at some of those Platonists and go, these guys were experiencing some stuff and I don't think they were talking about it all the time. I don't think that they were writing down their exact experiences. They probably put it in the category of Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Eric: Mysteries and things you don't talk about in public just very much like we do today, right? but it there's no way that they didn't have some kind of analogous experience because That was immediately present in their minds and obvious that souls are spheres Collin Conkwright: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, and in some of Iamblichus' kind of taxonomy of beings, he discusses that you can differentiate them on like degrees of power or something or intelligence based on like the variations of light that they give off. know, light is witnessed, it is observed. So clearly there is this, ⁓ these are experiences, you know, that are going on. Eric: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Collin Conkwright: current day and age, you hear this discussion of welcoming in this light phenomena. Even people have, you know, this one group that maybe I don't want to mention specifically, but they have... ⁓ They're made up of like private contractors, former intelligence guys and stuff. And not far from my farm in Virginia, you know, they use these like mechanical devices that they turn on and they emit a certain frequency. They haven't disclosed like what it is yet. They call it this dog whistle or whatever. Very kind of, I don't know, maybe an inappropriate way of phrasing that, but they turn it on and stuff shows up, right? Stuff simply shows up in the air across a variety of different takes on a variety of different appearances, right? ⁓ Eric: Yeah, this is like the beginning of some Netflix series where they break a dimension and a bunch of beings come as this is just stranger things basically. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, well, know, hey man, we dropped, I say we, but the nuclear bombs were dropped and, you know, not long after that, you get the Roswell incidents and so on. And I recently spoke at a Masonic conference, I recently spoke to a nuclear engineer who's been around quite a while and he's worked at three of like the biggest nuclear sites Eric: Hmm Collin Conkwright: ⁓ in mainland America and at each of the sites he told me and I vetted him right there on the spot at you know his information everything at each of these sites there was a protocol in place for when the orbs specifically showed up above the nuclear sites right Eric: Yeah, I've heard about that phenomenon that it's happened many, many times that it sounds like they had to make some sort of protocol for it that these orbs would show up around, I think in like the silos themselves, like where the warheads and missiles or whatever are. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yes, so this isn't just, and this is why like, you know, it took me a while also to bring this out of the sphere of like, you know, this wild thing happened to me and maybe it may or may not actually be real or whatever, bring it out of that kind of nebulous sort of thinking and it's just time and again and again you get these confirmations. like, in one case, excuse me, in one case, He told me he was on a nuclear carrier and ⁓ him and 15 guys right there on the deck saw this very bright, I believe it was like a white and gold colored sphere, deep in the water, shooting upwards and then it broke the surface of the water without making a splash and without a sound and goes straight into the atmosphere, okay? And. They all saw it. They were like, ⁓ my gosh, you know, and he tries to send an email to his mom from the ship to describe the experience and the server on the ship blocked the email and then he got a little slap on the wrist, right? Eric: Yeah, like, no, no, no, no, no, we don't talk about the orbs. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, so that is literally how these kind of experiences don't come out, at least in the military intelligence kind of sector, right? And then they don't come out in the regular day and age because we don't have enough language developed around these common phenomena. It's either they'll think I'm crazy, maybe I am crazy, what's gonna happen if I talk about this? So I've decided like, Eric: right Well, that's what's so damaging too about the whole demon narrative. It's like, you know, the only language that a lot of people are getting about it is like, ⁓ these are demonic beings that are, you know, and so it makes us not want to go investigate them because it's like, ⁓ well, you don't, you don't want to look at the demons, just, just ignore them and keep praying to Jesus and they'll go away or whatever. And it's like, nah, these things have been around forever. They're not demons. They're something. And maybe, maybe they're diamonds in the Greek sense, right? Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Eric: but it, it needs more investigation. need to be able to look into this more and start to at least, like you said, build some terminology around what these things are. Collin Conkwright: Yep, yep. And you know, ⁓ they're not going away anytime soon. Obviously more more things are being released here. And I do think it is related to the spiritual, ⁓ you know, the spiritual ontology as well. It's like, for instance, ⁓ like in the out of body state and even in lucid dreams and so on. there's this kind of movement at the speed of thought, right? Movement at the speed of thought. We can go from place to place as they say, as it said in the Hermetica, know, believe that your soul can be in India and without time passing, it will be there as if already being there, okay? And then we get this kind of, you know, ⁓ the quantum physics, everything's connected, you know, in time and space kind of ideas. ⁓ And then you get into the how these... crafts or energetic craft travel, they seem to travel at this speed that is not a speed at all. It is sort of a holographic, you know, they're at point A and now they're at point B, right? So that is that is one area where the terminology that has been developed to discuss the themes in the NDE and OBE state Seem to also be able to apply how these beings or intelligences or what-have-you move around in general ⁓ Clearly they're using consciousness as part of the thing that seems to if you believe in the reports and stuff Seems to steer these these kind of crafts. There's not this propulsion situation going on Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: It's actually the idea that there's this bubble around the craft that is blocking it from the g-forces. Otherwise, you would just turn into ketchup if you banked around at these high speeds. You would just vaporize. So they have to be able to shield themselves from, I would say, the commonly accepted laws of physics. Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: in order to do this kind of stuff ⁓ in such a way that it's comparable to descriptions of moving around in a spiritual dimension, in a spiritual plane. ⁓ So it is going to test our vocabulary to its utmost limit. we might wanna get ahead of it all. Eric: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was, you know, you were mentioned about the Egyptian God being kind of a universal God in the temple. And I think there's some questions around when we're talking about universalism, the gods, you know, all the same or are they different? And to me, I think there's there, we shouldn't be one or the other. I think it's probably a mix, you know, part of me looks at it and goes, Obviously, some gods are universal, but other ones do seem to be particular, regional, cultural at some level, or like bound by particular groups of people and things like that. But I'm curious if you've got some thoughts on that. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, I'm more and more, I'm open minded to the variety of suggestions here simply because like, for instance, even in the ancient Greek world, they were always, these are the people that were at the temples of their gods, unlike. most of sort of us Americans, I'm speaking for my culture here, They were actually worshiped the gods in question. And even they range from these things are just internal psychological traits that we can interact with at this archetypal level. Or they were once kind of the euhemeristic, maybe in the more rarer schools, the euhemeristic, like these are deified kings and queens or kind of demigod beings, right? Or these are omnipresent, all-pervasive, like specific and distinct intelligences inside of all nature all at once, know, the all things are full of gods kind of approach. And then there seems to be people who adopt all of these and say they're all sort of true, right? So... Eric: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, is a difficult one to pin down what a god is. And this is why Hermes in particular is the god I'm most like, I feel called to Hermes, for instance. And that is Hermes across all of his own masks that he wears throughout time, from the cave in Arcadia to the Hermes Trismegistus kind of Thoth-Hermes amalgamation, right? Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: And Hermes in particular, he goes through a variety of changes depending on the people that are discussing him and worshiping him and so on. He's the God with the most attributes of any deity that ever existed as far as I've been able to tell. So I think he uniquely speaks to that variety of belief here. And the variety of belief in itself speaks to the idea that... ⁓ that we maybe don't know what, you know, we don't know exactly what's going on, right? It's like, I do, I hold space for the idea that the ancient world, there was things in the ancient world that, like, for instance, like, you know, giants are described by so many different people, what's going on here, right? Eric: Yeah. dragons. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, yeah, there's so much. And then of course we see like, if you have a tumor on your pituitary gland, you can form gigantism and you can literally be like eight feet tall. So physically, scientifically, we know that that kind of thing is possible. I don't think though that that was what was happening. Maybe there was another hominid that was different than us. I don't see why that's so crazy to believe in. We get very rigid. The neo-Darwinists don't like that. ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: But you can imagine in that case, like, you know, if a blue skinned giant at one point existed in that ancient Vedic world over there. ⁓ you can easily imagine why these people proclaim them to be a god, right, and worship them. And then of course you get down to the idea of ancestor worship. That's one of the most primitive forms. And ⁓ if you lend them the credibility that you can interact with the deceased ancestor after they're dead, right, and... Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: then that could explain why people have an altar to their ancestor, or they have a day out of the year where they pay blessings and pay homage to their ancestor, or why there's rituals in ⁓ some civilizations to tell that soul, hey, you're no longer needed here, everything's good, you can move on, et cetera, et cetera. ⁓ Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: And then I think Vivekananda has a quote that's pretty interesting here. It's like, millions of souls have died on the world and they are all still here. They are gods, they are deities, they are spirits and so on. They are across a range of things. And then you have some of the neoplatonic sources, even in Plato, I believe. You can become a daimon after death, ⁓ Hermes, Trismegistus. You can even become a god if you want, right? ⁓ So there's those things as well. So, you know, what are they saying? Well, they're sort of saying that souls and spirits can exist across this range, across this range. ⁓ And then, of course, if you melt back into the one, you are not a individuated thing at all. You are now partaking of this greater, greater essence that can't, no language exists to be able to describe, right? But between oneness, Eric: Mm-hmm. Right, right. Collin Conkwright: and everythingness, everything that you can fit in between there seems to be able to exist, you know? Eric: Right, yeah, at some level, God's maybe too narrow of a term, sometime where it's kind of like you're saying, it's like the the hierarchy and range from, you know, a demonic spirit that is in a particular place all the way up to some God at the highest point of the intelligible realm on the sort of, you know, surface of the one, so to speak. You know, they may have some similarity, but there's a lot of difference there, too. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Eric: in, in them. maybe lumping them all into one thing is not going to work out. And I, and I see that too, even in what you're talking about with Hermes, it's like, there's a hermetic quality, but maybe these are multiple things that are all sort of sharing in a hermetic essence or mercurial essence, so to speak. But yeah, who knows? I mean, I think, I think this is all part of that thing that these things are worth speculating about and not becoming Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eric: too dogmatic about because there's still a lot more for us to learn. And, you know, I think that curiosity is something that should be exciting to us, not necessarily a detriment. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah, and the fact that there's so many opinions going on, even in contemporary windows of the ancient world that people living in the same society, it speaks to the fact that we don't know. We don't know so much. There's so much that we don't know. ⁓ But... Where's the fundamental here that seems to be known? Well, the divine hierarchy or a functional plurality. And the idea that the spirit world and these different divine beings simply exist, whether or not we know how to categorize them, distinguish them, that's another question. But that this fundamental thing exists, that these other beings exist and potentially can interact with us, potentially are already interacting with us and may be involved in certain creation processes. That is a ⁓ universal that I'm comfortable just believing in wholesale and then figuring out where we can go from there. Eric: Right. Yeah. And you mentioned, you know, that's that functional hierarchy being one of these core universal. So in the book, you've got 17 of these universal principles, starting with sort of the supreme God, the one Brahman, however you want to look at it, ⁓ the divine hierarchy, there's the soul, a bunch of different principles. ⁓ So Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Eric: ⁓ But you mentioned one other thing in there too, which was about these sort of universal laws or laws of Universalism and I was curious kind of how you came about with those I think I can see how you got to these universal core principles and they do when you read through them if you're familiar with Platonism or or most most any spiritual tradition You'll be like, yeah for sure like these are present in everything with very little exception But then the laws I was kind of curious what Collin Conkwright: Mmm. Eric: what those are and how you came to those ideas. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, and I want to caveat this by saying like, this is an approach. This is just a sort of, you know, I'm not proclaiming that these are, that I know the laws of the, know. ⁓ So this is just an approach that I think would, it helps us navigate this space. So it's like, you know, the law of one, right? That everything that exists partakes in a unity and can always Eric: You Sure. Collin Conkwright: be discussed as being a part of that unity no matter how distinct it is and the source of all infinite variety goes back to a unity. And that's not only like numerically seems to be very true, but it just, I think it's true materially. There's literally materially when you get down to underneath all the different substrates, it's essentially vibrating wave particles that are all one another. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: they're all doing the same thing, it's just to different degrees. ⁓ And then we have the kind of law of here and now. And so this is the idea that when have you personally escaped the here and now? Well, never. You're always here and it is always now. ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: So I really do think time, my personal perspective, time is simply a measurement, a relative measurement of celestial bodies in association with one another. The movement of celestial bodies as compared to one another. And since our physical body is tuned into that, on the world that we live on, our physical body is sort of guided by this local aspect of time. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: But ontologically, at the level of consciousness, time is illusory. There is only now. So it's like, and this, you have to apply this to things like then reincarnation and so on, right? Because then suddenly you're not a soul that has this linear birth and you're just constantly coming, dying and being reborn in this linear timeline so that all of your lives are either past lives and then you'll have future It's the idea that, well, you're actually incarnating in all of your physical representations simultaneously. And this breaks our brain because the brain, the brain, yeah, the brain calculates time and does, you know, it needs time. We need some kind of time filtration mechanism to operate in this reality. Eric: Spirit temporal. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: So that's useful and functional for us, but I think at this overarching level, it's always here and it's always now. And that obviously comports quite well with this kind of law of oneness, right? Eric: Yeah. And I, you know, I, I like that principle and then it, also makes me wonder at the same time about, ⁓ the past and the future, you know, what that means, I guess, as a consequence for the past and the future, you know, do you see that meaning that almost like a fatalism, like everything's already done, or is there still the possibility for things that haven't happened? I don't know. Like, and this may be one of those things that it's just paradoxical. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Eric: but it's hard to think through what the implications of that are. Collin Conkwright: ⁓ I believe that, I don't believe in like a pre-death scenario kind of thing. I do think that ⁓ there are sort of like... like if we're talking at the individual level, that there's like a theme, if you will, that an individual, there's like certain themes and certain, maybe even like appointments that you might, ⁓ you know, I know we're getting into some speculative territory here, but that you might like set up prior to your incarnation. And Plotinus discusses this, choices made in the overworld, right, before the voluntary, the voluntary descent. So that brings free will into, Eric: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right. Collin Conkwright: into this. And it's not just some crazy tragedy that we're, you know, we're on this material world, but free will was with us at this kind of spiritual level prior to our incarnation. I tend to lean more in that direction. So I think that you can have both like a theme and a kind of, you know, I know that I'm going to be confronted with these challenges due to whatever actions I've done, you know, Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: Previously or whatever thing I'm trying to learn or what have you it could be very simple stuff to even very specific Stuff that you can set up for yourself and so I do think that you can either deviate from that or you can sort of answer your calling if you will and follow you know, your intuition, follow your excitement, take, you know, these things that come to you in these mysterious ways that you're drawn to, like innately, in a way that you can't explain, maybe that's an actual compass needle that's connecting you to your over soul, if you will. ⁓ So I think there's a balance between those, yeah. ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Right. And it also seems like there's a possibility that maybe when we think of past and future, we're just thinking about it far too linearly. And the reality of it, if you, you take that principle of the here and now to its full conclusion, you could get to a point of seeing that all possible things that could possibly happen are happening now, but we're only experiencing this one particular thread of it, but Collin Conkwright: Yes. Eric: It's like every single possibility that could have ever possibly happened is it's all there at once, so to speak. Not, not that it's happening, but it's there. If that makes sense. Collin Conkwright: Yes. Yes, yes, it is. It is a potential that may be carved out of the clay of collective consciousness. You know, like it can exist whether or not we will ever know if all of the different, you know, variety of things will exist. Well, we would have to be there with them to sort of know. So it's like time is is time is is like. Eric: Right. Yeah. Right. Collin Conkwright: We're basically shifting our points of view of the here and now, let's say a billion times per second. And time is simply that shifting. That's all time is. It's ⁓ just simply your shifting. The shifting between here and nows. And so, you you have to posit a kind of collective agreement situation, I think here, where it, on some collective level, if we all agree in a way, unconsciously or consciously, that we live in a world bound to, you know, time and space and these kind of things, then that is inevitably what we're going to get in a very concrete way. Whereas, and I would say an example of this is like, if you're in a local culture that has more exotic beliefs, you're probably going to get more exotic experiences or you're going to be able to accept them more, et cetera, develop better language around them. know, ⁓ so I think it's. Eric: I wonder about that even with us today in the West. It's like, at some level, there's this question about the sort of disenchantment of the West that we live in this sort of disenchanted world. And I wonder how much of that is because of ourself, like that we are just blind to it in a way. It's not that there aren't these sort of enchanting, mystical and amazing, even miraculous things that happen. We just sort of intentionally blind ourselves to it. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Eric: and confine ourselves to a much more secular materialist worldview. And so we just kind of block that stuff out. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yep. it's, it's so it's essentially, you know, if someone has totally blocked it all out, it's like, well, you know, go back into your childhood and find where it wasn't blocked out, because children don't block it out. Eric: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: ⁓ That's innate. The imagination is running quite wild and the ability to be anywhere in a positive state is a lot easier for the child who hasn't accepted all of the societal restrictions ⁓ on these things. And an example of this kind of thing is when Westerners went in to try to figure out how the Amazonian shamans made ayahuasca, right? Because you're in the Amazon. and there's so many plants, there's hundreds of thousands of ⁓ variety of plant species out there. How did y'all know to combine the root of this plant with the bark of that plant? And they say, without fail, the plants told us, right? And then we're like, ⁓ so you mean you experimented 10,000 times? No, no, the plants told us. And this is where it's like, you know, this is where... Eric: Right. You're like, no, the plants told us. Collin Conkwright: You can accuse the universalist of colonizing things, but we're the ones saying, listen to the people's experiences, right? At least that's what I hope we can grow to. Eric: Right. Sure, So you had another thing that you talked about in here that I thought was really interesting. I want to get your thoughts on, which was the fall of the soul being, I don't think it was one of the universal principles, but it was something that you had talked about being a somewhat universal theme that occurs over and over again. And it does seem again, that there's a lot of different opinions about what it is that causes the soul to fall. And you gave a couple ideas and Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Eric: One of the ones I really liked was this idea that we're allowed to be ignorant and we're allowed to put ourselves into illusion. And that's somehow part of the structure of the cosmos, so to speak. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, yeah, and this is a realistic approach because guess what? We are allowed to be quite ignorant on a great deal of things. So this is the idea of taking reality as you live in it right here and now as a first principle and using that like there must be something that. Eric: Right. Yeah. Collin Conkwright: ⁓ allows for these things to happen, right? And of course, you know, the idea of why are we able to forget the River Lethe and so on, there's all of these different explanations for this. ⁓ So, you know, think the brain itself is, it ⁓ is performing this very adequate reducing function, this compressing. Eric: Mm-hmm. Right. That's like kind of like Bernardo Castrop kind of has that idea. If you ever read him, he's, ⁓ talks about how the brain he thinks is, ⁓ like a localization device, essentially, like it's localizing your consciousness and actually filtering your consciousness down to like a very specific time and place. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Yes, yes, and so in that way it also operates like an antenna. ⁓ just because you break a television or break an antenna doesn't mean the channels that that antenna could pick up on stop existing. No, you can still pick up on those kind of channels. It's a great analogy. But as for the fall goes, it's like... Eric: Mm. Mm. Collin Conkwright: You know, imagine you are a spirit that exists in infinity, right? ⁓ You are not only going to be able to produce an experience where you have the illusion of forgetting, the illusion of like very fixated individuation into a material ⁓ form. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: But you're also, you might want to present yourself with an experience of like radical forgetfulness, of literally starting fresh as an individual being on some plane, ⁓ because there would be benefits for that, right? And they would be like, you're able to feel surprise, you know? You're able to like go through... Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: something that maybe in other lives you've already gone through a million times, but now you're able to go through it in a unique way and possibly find your way out of it in another unique way. And so it would be a way for a greater consciousness to like fast track its own learning and its own experiences in a number of different ways. And I don't think we can present some limitation on a spiritual and saying that they couldn't do this. Maybe there's realities where that memory, we still get to retain a bit more memory. And there are certainly individuals on earth here now that do retain more memory, as Ian Stevenson and his reincarnation research definitely showed. you know, imagine if we, as children, grew up in a society that was way more welcoming of some of these more fundamentals. Perhaps, as a child, you would be like, aha! Yeah, I remember that. And then it's like, Whoa, right? Eric: Yeah, do remember. Yeah, I mean, you have a story from Pythagoras too, that Pythagoras remembered, you know, five or six of his previous lives or in Kibra Kallam. And, you know, there's some great sort of legends about improving it and stuff like that too. But I love that idea, you know, you know, the Hindus have that idea of sort of divine play when it comes to the gods. And I can kind of see that being at play with the soul too. Like you could at some level say, Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah. Eric: We do these things because it's fun and we like to do it, you know, as souls or whatever, you know, I think people maybe get confused though when they think about it in terms of like, if we, if we were basically in some kind of blissful heaven, why would we ever want to, you know, put ourselves in this situation that is painful and hurtful and whatever. ⁓ but I can also see the same end of that. When you are in that blissful state, you know your soul can't be hurt or damaged in any meaningful way. go, ⁓ I'll put on a body. I'll go have a good time. That's always fun doing that. You know, it's not as serious from that perspective that it is to us where we're like, ⁓ you know, the gnashing of teeth. Woe is me. Whenever we have a problem down here, I could see from the level of the soul. It's just looked at in a much more maybe casual kind of way or, or looked at as like an experience. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which can be frustrating because, you know, on our end, we go through so much BS and we're like, can you just next time, like, do something different, you know, can we maybe go somewhere else? And then it's sort of on the other end, you're so, you're possibly so blissed out or whatever that all, that's like super minuscule, you know, it's very, very minuscule. But, you know, human beings, man, we have put ourselves through such. Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: torturous experiences in pain. Like it is profound. this, you know, this is a challenging thing to wrap our heads around. ⁓ Why we would ever allow ourselves to experience this kind of thing. Well, just like you said, if you posit the idea that well, in the end, everything's gonna be all right. Right? And that you can't really be hurt than that. That now it all of sudden makes sense, you know, and it makes sense far outside of the mythological ⁓ explanations for this, like a fall of man out of the Garden of Eden and so on that may end up. Yeah. And these may end up being and have been like symbolic attempts to to, ⁓ you know, illustrate what we're talking about here. Eric: Right, like it's a divine punishment or something like that. Collin Conkwright: Right, and I mean, even Plotinus in his description of his own out-of-body experiences, he seems to, though he's so brief about it, dag on it, why are you so brief about it? He's like, of his body, and then he's like, but as soon as I started asking the questions, like why did it ever, know, et cetera, et cetera, then he's back down in his rational mind and back closer to the body, right? Eric: Hahaha Yeah. Right. And that's kind of the way I imagine it too, is that if you've done a lot of spiritual work as far as meditation and trying to get to those states that are more... ⁓ where there is kind of a via negativa thing going on, where you've cut out the world, right? You've kind of lost sense of what your body is. Maybe you're moving past thoughts and you're moving into that sort of empty space that's there. ⁓ All it takes is like the tiniest little thought and then you're like, in my room, you know? And so it's like, it's not a hard thing to do. At least for me, that's how I always imagine it. It's like as a soul, you probably are in that state, but the moment you think about, what would it be like to have a body? ⁓ now you got one. You're in a womb. You're like, good luck with that. Collin Conkwright: Mmm, yeah. Mm. Yep. Yep. And that's also, you you can confirm that too through the dream experiences and lucid dreams. And because when you're in a lucid dream, like I experiment with lucid dreams because I think it's one of the it's one of the best ways for an individual to like have radical, radical experiences ⁓ that are when you're there, they are experienced just as physical. They may be more quasi physical as this reality. So experientially, there might be no difference between that reality and then this one other than like it's way more flexible. It's more quasi physical and it's reflecting your interiority more in the actual exterior experience, know, in the landscape. But when you're in a lucid dream, you can begin to feel your body where it actually is. And there's like degrees of lucidity. you know, as you get higher and higher lucidity, you can start to feel, okay, I'm actually exactly on my couch in my living room, and I can feel the couch on my back. Eric: Mm-hmm. Right. Collin Conkwright: Right? But you're still in that lucid experience in the dreamscape, doing whatever it is you're doing. And that just figuring out, like getting your mind to that place just at least once, it is a profound ⁓ experience in and of itself. And it sort of indicates, as one of my favorite neoplatonists, Senesius of Cyrene, super neglected by the way, but I love him. ⁓ Eric: Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Now on Dreams is great. Collin Conkwright: Yeah, yeah, on dreams. I put that right next to, you on the mysteries. On dreams, like, I love that. You know, he describes, like, he even says, you know, he thinks mythology is derived from dream, dream experiences, and stuff like this. ⁓ Eric: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, you have, ⁓ I think it was Campbell that said, isn't it that, ⁓ myths are, or no, it Young who said that myths are collective dreams, right? It's something like that. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Of course, Young would say exactly that. No, I like I like Carl Young for sure. So, yeah. Eric: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, pro pros and cons for me too, I guess I, but yeah, I do, I do like some of his ideas for sure. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah, maybe a little too much over-psychologizing things. Eric: Yeah. Yeah. Better than Freud, let's put it that way. Collin Conkwright: For sure, for sure. But yeah, so you know, all of these things can be very insightful and it's really, we're kind of in the dark night of Cartesian materialism and it's this blink of an eye though. It's this blink of an eye. It's not gonna be here, I don't think it's gonna be here for long and it was never destined to. It was sort of destined to like, Eric: Yeah, I hope so. Yeah. Collin Conkwright: prove at the most mundane level all of what everyone was saying already, know, sort of conscious, fundamental consciousness and this kind of thing, which, you know, to their credit, these people will eventually do, and I think you're already doing it. It's just like, academia moves so slow. Eric: Right. Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: You you get all this data for this one thing and it's like 10 years later, you're like, maybe there's something there. And then 10 years later, you're like, you know, okay, well, we've reproduced it in all the studies. When are we gonna finally get around to like, you know, the implications here? Yeah, so that. Eric: Mm-hmm. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's that book. I think it's Thomas Kuhn who writes about the, it's like the architecture of scientific revolutions or something like that. But one of the things he mentions in that book that it's interesting is that, you know, these scientific revolutions don't happen just because good evidence came out. It takes this whole like paradigm shift where like there's so much evidence that it's almost like a dam breaks. Collin Conkwright: Mmm. Eric: all of the sudden, you know, it builds up over time and time and finally the damn breaks because they just can't bear the weight of the falseness of the idea anymore. And I kind of see it like you're saying, I was getting to that, that maybe we're at the tail end of this kind of Cartesian worldview where it's all materialism, we're all trapped in our minds, we can't be sure of anything that's out there, that kind of skepticism. It does seem like postmodernism has kind of brought us to the brink of absurdity where Collin Conkwright: Hmm Mmm. Eric: If we can't really even be sure that reality exists or anything and we're all just trapped in our own heads in this kind of solipsistic way, like, what are we doing here? You know, it's the, that realism that we're talking about is breaking through again. And it's almost like reasserting itself. think where people are starting to come back to some sense of a, maybe a new epistemology coming around where we say, no, there is, there are real things. Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Eric: There is something real about this universe. There's something real about our experience and it's, it, isn't just an illusion. Collin Conkwright: Mm-hmm. Yes, I mean, how do you how would you build a functioning society off of that basis anyway, that it's sort of nothing is real and it doesn't matter. It's like, OK, well, then it doesn't matter. I'm not going to contribute anything to this to this society. You know, I don't I think it has brought us to exactly where we are with all of its deficits, very plain to to, the eye that is that is capable of seeing this this stuff. ⁓ We are on the brink on the brink of absurdity. It's sort of like simultaneously Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: simultaneously you have chaos is rising and absurdity is rising and you're getting all these brand new insights and these sort of like hey guys This is this is where it is, right? So, you know, I just I just want to contribute to breaking that damn You know whatever I can throwing a grain of sand on that on that mountain even if it's just a grain of sand It'll eventually just collapse Eric: Yeah, I mean, we can hope that that's where we're heading. mean, that's very much the work that we're doing here is kind of getting back to that, you know, platonic realism, the idea that, yes, there are these real things. are, there's an essence to reality and we can understand it. We don't live in this sort of skeptical wasteland. And yeah, I do hope that we have a big breakthrough with that. And it does kind of feel like we're getting there, but I also have this feeling that materialism is going to... die a slow death. It's going to be a hard, hard one win. but they seem to be losing cultural influence, you know, it almost seems like it peaked at like the, the new atheist kind of movement and all of that. And it seems like we're past that and people are already, you see more people returning to religion. You'd see them turning to these ideas. I think at this point, I'm just as much concerned that we don't slip back into dogmatism then at the same, you know, time. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. Yes, yeah, and that is like, that is why it is so critical to... ⁓ Increase our religious literacy and to bring these kind of you know to get back in our heads that not everyone in the past was was so dogmatic and so closed off and it was you know, I I Really do think it was kind of the Abrahamic traditions that that started doing this like especially like if you just look at I know this is kind of segueing here But I wanted to touch on this one of your earlier points like the wisdom of Solomon's writing I believe you know Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: composed by a Hellenized Alexandrian Jew, first few centuries BC or AD, right? And he is depicting the Egyptian pantheon in this very simplistic way. And just like biblical authors do, they just make accusations and assertions. That is bad and because of that, and we don't do that, they, you Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: they have bad consequences because of that. They're not like some of the great Greeks that we know and love. They don't have these very drawn out arguments and they're putting all of their logic to the test in these things. They're just making these accusations. And then when you go back and you look at the kind of complicated history of the Egyptian provinces and their different religions and so on, you realize as Jan Ossmann points out in his book, A Search for God in Ancient Egypt, Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: that the local gods of the temples could be these universal gods that early Egyptian solar theology was proclaiming a universal deity that applied to all mankind because the sun of course does that. And simultaneously the intelligence behind the solar deity surpassed the sun. wasn't, know, it was sort of like Plato said, look at these objects in the cosmos as decorations, right? Not the literal, we're not literally, you know, Eric: Right. Right. Kind of Julian's Helios is the same kind of idea. Yeah. Collin Conkwright: Yes. Yes. So, so it's convenient to erase or be ignorant of or just not be informed on all of that nuance and complexity there and just accuse the polytheists of this idolatry and so on. And that's what I think the Abrahamic tradition has successfully instilled even up until this day, casually in the common culture is like to have that look back at prior to Christianity and so on and you kind of scoff at it because they didn't, they apparently weren't super developed and advanced. Eric: Right. Uh-uh. Collin Conkwright: you have the Platonists that critiqued Christianity and so on, and they were saying, you guys have reached a new level of absurdity with this stuff. Eric: Right Collin Conkwright: proclaiming that Jesus is unique and can also be a God when we've already had, you know, people that had histories as human beings that then were proclaimed as God, right? But hey, we never said that they were the God of the entire universe like some of you guys did, right? So I don't know, I love that back and forth. And the thing is like Julian's against the Galileans, it is still pertinent to the conversation. Eric: Mm. Right. Yeah, it's insane how pertinent it is. it could have been written yesterday. You read through it and you're like, you really realize that they've been like this the whole time. Like it hasn't changed in 2000 years. know, I mean, that's a good segue to one of the things I was thinking about with this is that I do look at Christianity sometimes and wonder like, it an innocence? Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah. Eric: kind of like a noble lie where it's like the average person, like Jordan Peterson said this once, that maybe Christianity is as rational as people can get. And I don't necessarily think it's true for obviously like people like us, and there's plenty of people who get it, but like when I think about the average person, it's like, do they need this dogmatic kind of framework? Do they need to have the story kind of simplified? Collin Conkwright: Mm. Eric: into a bunch of parables and a ⁓ basically like a Greek play in order to transmit that idea. And maybe is that the success of Christianity is they were just the ones to do it. And I wonder if like, can we get to a place where it was more like the way that the ancient Greece was and the ancient world where there was this sort of universalist spiritual culture that we all participated in on these different levels? I think that's one potential future. The other thing I worry about is either return to the dogmas that are already there or we just get a new one, right? We get some new version of it. That's maybe just as bad or worse. And then we're stuck with that because it, it satisfies this need that people have to have these truths sort of distilled to them in a very black and white and simple way. But I don't know. That's these are my just thoughts on that. Collin Conkwright: Mmm. Yeah. Yeah, well, well, I mean... Of course, we're going to get examples of all of that, for sure. We're gonna get examples of that. this is why, if we can bring some of these other sources into the discourse and not just get frozen in time with like one holy book that is not honestly that great to apply to your individual circumstances all the time, right? And it's proclaiming a lot of different things and there's a lot of different stuff going on that has no bearing on Eric: Right. Right. Collin Conkwright: on a lot of our particular realities. I know that the audience that I'm, like I'm trying to speak to the relatively younger Americans, not necessarily, but who are dealing and wrestling with all of this, right? It's like if my future wife wants to go to church and whatnot, I'm gonna go to church with her. Eric: right. Collin Conkwright: because that's okay, right? Now, if they have a problem with me not actually being a Christian and they discover all of that, that's a whole nother thing, but I don't have a problem with any of that stuff. I see it as a valid permission slip for individuals to utilize in their own ways, but would that permission slip be utilized in this way if we had better religious literacy? I don't know. That's where you get Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: into this tricky territory and would people be as ignorant or as willing to fall back into radical dogmatism or radical materialists, know, those extremes if they had better religious literacy and like parapsychological experientialism sort of sprinkled in there, you know, probably not. So it's like it starts at this. It kind of starts at this education problem, you know. ⁓ Eric: Sure. Yeah, well, I think you're totally right. And that's actually one of the big failures, I think, of the ancient pagan world is that sure, the philosophers knew all this stuff, and it was taught at this very high level, but it didn't really disseminate down to the common person. And I think it made it a lot easier for a religion like Christianity to come up and sort of take this particular role, because at some sense, the philosophers were a bit shut up in the ivory towers, so to speak, and they were talking amongst those themselves and talking to rich patrons and stuff like that. But they weren't doing quite as much like going out into the trenches, so to speak, or going to the common people and finding a way to sort of communicate that idea. And that's why I think, you know, what you're doing here with this book is so important, like being able to distill these principles down for people so that they can have that kind of literacy and have this more, ⁓ grounded worldview about what spirituality is and what religion really means. that doesn't require them to, you know, go get that from a very dogmatic and kind of biased source. Collin Conkwright: Yes. Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. And I think... ⁓ You know, I think if we had a little more nuanced view and were a little more broadly studied ⁓ in this regard, we would be able to see the red flags when they come up. you know, I mean, how easy it's so easy to spot the red flag of like, well, you don't believe in my in my prophet, you're burning in eternal hellfire. And the thing is, is like people still are still asserting that, you know, regular people still assert that on a regular basis. Eric: Mm-hmm. Collin Conkwright: and nothing could be more insulting and simple-minded than that, right? And it's also contradictory. You can't simultaneously profess some unconditionally loving ⁓ father deity that is also kind of responsible for goodness and whatnot and mercy, and yet if you have a wrong opinion, Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: you're kind of damned. mean how, like, that would mean this whole thing is absurd. you know, it's like, right? So. Eric: Yeah. I mean, the idea you mentioned in the book, you had this one quote that was, let see if I can find it. It was, it was really good. I liked it a lot. ⁓ it was basically about dogma being a claim to be God essentially. And, know, I, I see what you mean in that, in that statement there is that like, there's an attempt to sort of speak for God when we do dogmatism a bit. Collin Conkwright: Mm. Yes. Yes. Yeah, it's the opposite of epistemological humility. You're taking the place now of the writer of the spiritual laws of the universe and proclaiming that you know something about some other person's soul or what have you. And this is why we could use a heavy dose of humility in all of this stuff, because it's all, we're stalking the mystery. every time we get close to it, we get something. Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: but it slips our grasp. And that's all a part of this journey to some greater truth and some kind of transformation that gets us closer to... to something, to something that can provide answers ⁓ for us because, know, and I think we have more questions than ever. And the old way, the old vessels that we used to bring these questions through are not satisfying the questions anymore. So we're reaching this tension, you know, this tension exists. And the scientific community, though there are definite outliers, don't get me wrong, and even in academia, there are definitely scholars that are catching on to this kind of stuff. Eric: right. Right. Right. Collin Conkwright: You know, it's like, yeah, it's both of these extremes that can know they're no longer viable to the mysteries that we are. Eric: Right. Collin Conkwright: that we are searching for and the answers that we're looking for and the experiences that we're having. So clearly something has to adapt, something has to transform. it's simply because the cultural religions that are closest to us, they lack the ability to adapt to this kind of thing. That's it. Eric: Right. Yeah, they can't change their perspective on a lot of these things. I kind of laugh when it comes to the whole idea of calling aliens demons. I think that that's part of it. It's like, they can't really adapt the worldview that's been created to the possibility that there are alien species all over the universe. Because if that is true, back to this like, so you really think that God's plan was to send a guy here for 33 years and only teach for three and not write anything down in one world in one part of the world? Like that's his plan. If like that's his plan and there are really aliens all over the universe, well that's a pretty crappy plan. So you know it doesn't really bear itself out. So what do you do? Well you just call them demons and then you move on you know. But I agree it like that doesn't fit our worldviews anymore. Like it doesn't fit what we know about the universe anymore and Collin Conkwright: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Eric: I am hopeful that that Christianity really made itself work when it had dominant state force. Basically, once they lost that kind of state power, even by the Reformation, it seems it's kind of been downhill since then. You know, like they've been kind of losing power institutionally and even culturally since then. And I kind of have a feeling it's going to continue to happen, but who knows? Collin Conkwright: Yeah, wild times ahead. Eric: Yeah, well, I think that's a good place to end it. So if you haven't gotten this book, I highly recommend it. Go out and check that out. And then do you want to plug kind of any other spots where people can find you? Collin Conkwright: ⁓ well, I host the American Esoteric YouTube channel on YouTube and you can find all my links there. I have a sub stack and so on. Just released this book that I've been working on for a few years now. ⁓ And yeah, yeah, I'm around in different interviews like this one. So you can find me out there. Eric: Great. Well, thanks for coming on. I highly encourage people to pick up the book. It's great. ⁓ yeah, we'll talk again soon. Thanks. Collin Conkwright: Thank you so much, Eric. Have a good one.