Brian Muraresku: The Secret History of Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #211

The following is a conversation with Brian Murarescu, author of the Immortality the Secret History of the Religion with no Name, a book that reconstructs the forgotten history of psychedelics in the development of Western civilization. To support this podcast, please check out our Sponsors, Inside Tracker, GiveWell, NI Indeed and Masterclass. Their links are in the description. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here's my conversation with Brian Murescu. Who or what do you think God is? How is our conception, maybe put another way of God, changed throughout history?

We're starting with an easy one, Lex.

Yep.

So what is God? Well, God is a thought, God is an idea, but its reference is to that which is beyond thinking, beyond our ability to even conceive, beyond the categories of being and non being. So how do we talk about that? To talk about it is almost to get it wrong, right? So Joe Campbell famously said that, you know, any God that is not transparent to transcendence is like an idolatry because it's just a mental construct and it can't possibly speak to the incomprehensible. So we use poetic language. We say the being of beings, the, the infinite life energy of the universe, the. The mystery of transcendence, boundless life, unqualified is ness. But it doesn't quite get to the point. I think that if there's any great insight from mysticism, it's that you and I participate with God in a very real way. Lex Friedman here in Austin, Texas, that in the here and now, to touch that eternal principle, another way to refer to God, to touch that eternal principle within ourselves, is to participate with divinity in some way. So not an external force, but that divine sense within.

So there's some aspect in which God is a part of us. So one, it's a thing we can't describe. It's represents all of the mystery around us. It's outside our ability to comprehend. And at the same time it's somehow the thing that's inside of us also the ultimate paradox.

Matilda of Magdeburg, 13th century German mystic, maybe the first German mystic, says that the day of her spiritual awakening was the day that she saw and knew that she saw God in all things and all things in God. And so we can say this, by the way, without apology or lightweight theology or vapid speculation or even heresy. You know, we can, we can talk about this, including within the Abrahamic faiths, the mystical core of these faiths, all talk about the encounter of divinity within. That's what I explore in the immortality key, this notion of techniques Archaic techniques, in some cases of ecstasy, that allow that experience of the eternal principle to actually rise up in our consciousness when we're still here as flesh and blood beings.

There's some sense in which our conception of God, though, is conjured up by our own mind. And so aren't we creating God? Like, aren't we the gods that are creating the idea of God? Like, if we are, like, when we talk about God, aren't we playing with ideas that are created by our mind and thereby we are the Creator, not God. This is a very kind of cyclical question, but in some sense, I mean that if God is the thing that represents the mystery all around us, contrast that with our conception of God. The way we talk about him is more a creation of our minds. It's not the mystery. It's our struggle to comprehend the mystery. And therefore we're creating the God in terms of the God that we were talking about in this conversation or in general, if that makes any sense.

It makes no sense whatsoever.

Great. This is wonderful.

But this is the eternal mystery. This is why it's so difficult to talk about. And yet it could be the very center of our beings. You know, the Upanishads speak about us as the creators, about us as gods. It's a very different creation myth. But the God of the Upanishads in this great verse talks about pouring themselves, pouring themselves into creation. Indeed, I have become this creation, says God. And there's a great line. Verily, he or she who knows this becomes in this creation, a creator. So, yeah, I mean, just our ability to engage in mentation, our ability to think about this stuff, is partly our divine nature. This is what the humanists were talking about in the Renaissance, by the way, and that it's not so much learning, putting dots together, having arguments with each other over learned books. It's a process of unlearning is what some of the mystical traditions talk about, unlearning. All these thoughts, emotions, traumas and experiences that have gone into the false construction of our false self, that behind all these layers, like peeling back the onion, is a part of us that once you can identify, that begins to look a little bit different. In other words, it's one thing to foster a relationship with God. It's a very different thing to identify as God. And I mean that quite literally, without being heretical. You can find this in the mystery traditions.

Can you expand on this? You mean a human being can embody God?

That is textbook incarnational theology that you can find in any Christian mystic But you can find it in the mystical tradition of Islam and Judaism as well. So Rumi, for example, the great Sufi mystic, talks about, if you could get rid of yourself, just get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open to you, that the face of the unknown would appear on the perception of your consciousness. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, a modern day contemporary mystic, talks about, because this stuff does continue, there's a continuity to it.

The poetry here is incredible.

So, well, listen to Rabbi Kushner. He says that the emptying of selfhood allows the soul to attach to true reality. And in Kabbalism, the true reality is what's called the divine nothingness. Ayin. And so I like the adage that atheists and mystics both essentially believe in nothing, except that the mystics spell it with a capital N, the divine nothing. And then I'll give you Meister Eckhart, another medieval Christian mystic. He says that if you could knot yourself right, the same concept, if you could knot yourself for just an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all. So again, you're seeing the same thing in Sufism, Kabbalism, Christian mysticism. The way to identify with the divine is to peel back these layers and attempt to discover pure awareness.

If we look at the universe from a physics perspective or, you know, I'm a computer science person, so if the universe is a computer, there's some sense that God, the creator of the universe, or just the computer itself, doesn't know what the heck is going to happen. It just kind of creates some basic rules and runs the thing. So there is some element in which you can conceive of humans or conscious beings or intelligent beings as, as a tool that the creator uses to understand itself himself. Do you, do you think that's a perspective that we could or is useful to take on? God, that is basically the universe created humans to understand itself. He doesn't actually know the full thing. He needs the human brains to figure out the puzzle. So that's in contrasting to the unlearning, to the getting out of the way that we've talked about. It's more like, no, we need the humans to figure out this puzzle.

Well, we have no answers to this, which is why philosophers still have jobs, if they have jobs at all. But I mean, they're, you know, so the physicists, take a look at this. Have you seen the article that came out, I think it was this month in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. Robert Lanza, the Biocentrism theory, the idea that the universe comes into being through our observation. Right. The whole. The God equation. So not just in quantum mechanics, but in general relativity, the idea that we make the universe moment by moment, which is kind of mind blowing, gets into ideas of simulation. Okay. So that's how the physicists, at least some of them might look at it. You could also look back to the medieval Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart once again says that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me. Right. So one sight, one knowledge, one love. Another mind blowing concept. But this is why the arts and poetry and music are so important. Because although I love astroparticle physics, it's another to kind of hear this, the same message across time.

Yeah, the simulation thing. I was actually looking this morning at video games, just the statistics on video games. And I saw that the two top video games in terms of hours played is Fortnite and World of Warcraft. And I saw that it's 140 billion hours. Billion hours have been played of those games.

That's a lot of video games.

Yeah, but that, that's very sophisticated worlds being created, especially in the World of Warcraft. It's a massive online role playing game. So you have these characters that are together sort of creating a world, but they in themselves are also developing. They have all these items and they're grow like they're little humans. Like there's complicated societies that are formed, they have goals, they're striving and so on. And it's. We're creating a universe within our universe. And for now it's a kind of. It's a basic sort of constraint version of our more richer Earth like civilization. But it's conceivable that, you know, that we are. This thing on Earth is a kind of video game that somebody else is playing. It's like you could see sort of video games upon video games being created. That. And this is something I think a lot about, not from a philosophical perspective, but practically. How fun does this video game have to be for us to let go of the silly pursuits in this meat space that we live in and fully just stay in. Wow. Stay in World of Warcraft. Stay in the video game for full time. So I think about that from an engineering perspective. Like is there going to be a time when this video game is actual real life for us? And then the creatures inside the video game, they'll be just borrowing our consciousness sort of to ground themselves, will refer to us as the gods. Right. Like won't we become the gods. This conversation is not going how I expected, but I think about this a lot from, you know, because I love video games and I wonder more and more of us, especially in Covid times, are living in the digital world. You could think about Twitter and all those kinds of things. You could think about clubhouse, people using just voices to communicate with little icons sort of in the digital space. You could see more and more we'll be moving in the digital space and let go of this physical space. And then the remnants of the ancients that created the video games that nobody centuries from now will even remember, those will be the gods. And then there'll be gods upon gods being created. This is the kind of stuff I think about. But is that any at all useful to you, to this thought experiment of a simulation, basically the fabric of our reality? How did it come to be? What is running this thing? Is that useful? Or is it ultimately the project of understanding God, of understanding myth is a project that centers on the human, on the human mind. For you.

We seem to be at the center of this divine dance, which sounds awfully anthropocentric, but the ancients thought about this too. I mean, the concept in Sanskrit of Leela, that the point behind existence is this play, right? It's ultimately playful, this divine dance. It gets awfully complicated in the Gnostic and Neoplatonic schools, these chains of being from Godhead down to us, right? Some invisible, right? And we're going to get into Terence McKenna territory later on, but we can start now by talking about discarnate entities and archons and aliens and archetypes. I mean, there is a world where Terence McKenna does meet Plato and Gnosticism quite kindly. And that's in this invisible college, right? The invisible world with which we seem to have some kind of.