Tag Archives: religion

Why esoteric christianity? A new series of episodes on occult streams of christianity begins with AEWCH 220 featuring Reverend Jonah Evans!

2 May

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Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast via Patreon !

Friends,

I’ve spoken a lot about what we need to move beyond to meet the challenges of our time and the future: manifestation, magick, entheogens, wellness, and more. But what should we move towards?

Here is a series of episodes on occult & esoteric christianity, an evolving tradition that offers vitalizing insight into how to move forward.

Across these episodes, I’ll be talking about various streams and fruits of occult and esoteric christianity, as well as some of its key figures. Rather than presenting the typically dogmatic, dominating, and totalizing christianity — which is always in danger of being seized by people, especially conservatives, with power — this series will present a different and truer form. Open, wounded, individuated, and powerless; a tradition that relates to other spiritual paths without seeking to control or diminish them.

(And if you like this series, listen to last year’s series on the same topic, which started with AEWCH 181 and ended with AEWCH 185 – which I’ve linked to because it has links to all the other episodes in the show notes.)

To begin this series, it seemed important to me to ask:
Why esoteric christianity at all?

So I asked someone who works daily in one stream of esoteric christianity – the Christian Community, which offers christian services and gatherings based on religious renewal offered to ministers and theologians by Christian occultist Rudolf Steiner.

Jonah Evans is a reverend and seminary director in the Christian Community in Toronto. He is cohost of one of my favorite podcasts (right up there with Weird Studies!) The Light In Every Thing. And he helps edit the series of Rudolf Steiner lectures offered by the Community, and offers workshops and conference around the world.

This episodes gives a picture of Jonah’s experience of receiving esoteric christianity into his life, and why he decided to let it in, as well many christian mysteries, like:
Why does the name of Christ have any power outside of the christian tradition?
What is the mystery of the two Jesuses?
Does Hell exist?
What role do the dark forces play and how do we recognize them without a violent or merely dogmatic morality?

SHOW NOTES

WHAT BOOK SHOULD I READ? A Thousand Names for Joy: Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are by Byron Katie and her husband, Stephen Mitchell. We mention the book on the show, and, because it blends an Eastern tradition – Taoism – with a Western perspective – The Work – and because the Tao helped both Jonah and I prepare the way for esoteric Christianity, I think it can be a helpful supplement to the series, even though it’s not esoteric Christianity.

WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD I LISTEN TO? Jonah’s closest colleague is Patrick Kennedy, who was the guest on a favorite episode of mine, AEWCH 181.

MORE ON JONAH Jonah has a YouTube channel, Living with Christ, with lots of video lectures. Here’s an interview with Jonah about The Christian Community and his role. Jonah’s podcast with Patrick Kennedy has a patreon which offers early access to each episode and other benefits. And one of the best ways to understand some of what Jonah and that is to see if there’s a service near you and then attend one. Nothing will be expected of you, no one will try to get you “in” to the group. You’ll just encounter what all encounter: the baseline of the service is always the same; the Act of Consecration of Man. And then some talking afterward.

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Wrestling with the Angel in Realtime – Gang of Youths frontman Dave Le’Aupepe returns to AEWCH!

7 Mar

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SUPPORT AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB

The best way to support this show, my writing, my events & courses, is to give an annual or monthly pledge to  Patreon.com/connerhabib.

When you use patreon, you’re not only supporting me, but accessing an economic model that isn’t about paying people for their labor, and instead showing care and appreciation of who they are.

Friends,

All good art has a spiritual component, but how? Sometimes it’s obvious, of course; for example, a book or film will have spiritual content. But what about art that isn’t apparently spiritual but has deep spiritual meaning and resonance? I wanted to talk about the spirit in an unlikely place: rock music. So I invited my friend, Dave Le’Aupepe, frontman of Gang of Youths, back onto the show. Dave was last on the show back waaay on AEWCH 31 back when the show was primarily video.

Dave’s latest album with Gang of Youths is Angel in Realtime, which was one of the most celebrated albums of 2022, particularly in Australia. It’s a beautiful meditation on death and discovery, blending rock, minimalist composition structures, and excessive layering.

This is a wide-ranging episode covering angels, mythology, representation, politics in music, the dead, and more. I’m so happy to share it with you.

CH

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
Since the episode begins with a little back and forth about how people don’t know what to ask musicians, here’s AEWCH 109 with Stephen Malkmus about music and Giles Deleuze. One of my favorite eps, for sure.

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
To compliment Angel in Realtime, I suggest the most profound expression of loss ever written as a novel, Jame’s Agee’s A Death in the Family.

MORE ON DAVE
If you’re new to Dave’s music, listen to it! It’s brilliant. Here’s a playlist of Gang of Youths songs that I love. And the last time Dave was on the show, he played the Gang of Youths song “Persevere” and also a great cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” And obviously, you can go to the Gang of Youths site for Merch, tour dates, etc.

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AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 200: PART 2 – MARK O’CONNELL & PETER ROLLINS on IMMORTALITY + SARA GRAN & UNA MULLALLY on ART!

4 Oct

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Friends,
Part two of the massive, mighty AEWCH 200 is upon us! AEWCH 200 is three episodes over three weeks, featuring six conversations, each conversation has two previous guests of AEWCH in conversation with me on a theme. Here’s part one, in case you missed it!

These are people I’ve loved talking to (most of them have been on the show more than once) in conversation with someone they might never talk to without AEWCH bringing them together. The idea is a sort of conversational alchemy. What happens when people in different disciplines speak? What sort of new substances arise?

For instance:

What happens when a paranormal expert talks with a mortician? What happens when an occult teacher talks with a mystic comedian podcaster? What happens when a new age scholar talks with an anarchist organizer?

This time it’s Part 2: IMMORTALITY and ART Transhumanist critic Mark O’Connell talks with radical Lacanian theologian Peter Rollins + horror/mystery writer Sara Gran talks with journalist/artist Una Mullally!

SHOW NOTES GUEST WEBSITES & SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Sara’s website • Come Closer • The Book of the Most Precious Substance

Una’s website • Una’s column for the Irish Times

Mark O’Connell’s website • To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death

Peter’s website • The Divine Magician: The Disappearance of Religion and the Discovery of Faith

SUPPORT AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB

Being up to 200 episodes means AEWCH is in a tiny tiny percentage of podcasts that have lasted this long – something like 2%. I can ONLY keep doing this show if people support it on patreon.

I know post-pandemic times and economic roller coasters are affecting everyone in different ways. That said, the art and culture you love are great places to center support and love.

If you don’t already, please do the following to keep AEWCH going:

  • Give via patreon – Patreon.com/connerhabib
  • Tell people about the show and, if it feels okay, to support it on patreon (especially if you already know your pals are fans of the show but don’t support it).
  • Give the show a 5 star rating and positive review on Apple Podcasts.
  • Tweet and Insta quotes from and thoughts inspired by episodes!

Thank you so much for everything, and enjoy all this big talk.
Love,
CH

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A new series of episodes on Against Everyone With Conner Habib: Occult Christianity. My first episode, AEWCH 181 featuring Rev. Patrick Kennedy from The Christian Community

8 Mar

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Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST via Patreon

Friends,

Now in the midst of 2022, so many of us are seeking peace and meaning. But one of the primary sources of meaning, religion, can feel outdated or even cruel and anti-peace if judged by its historical pathways of violence. Yet many of us find the longing to connect with religious traditions that fascinated us, comforted us, or even just interested us at other points in our lives.

So I’m going to spend the next few episodes connecting us with one religious stream: Christianity. But this will be a different sort of Christianity: occult and esoteric Christianity. Some of it might look familiar. Some might seem absolutely bizarre. All of it, I hope will stir a feeling of warmth and depth of meaning for you, whether you feel any affinity with Christianity or the occult.

The aim is to discuss how to revitalize the spirit of any endeavor or phenomenon – religion, the natural world, technology, social justice, history, and politics – with the profound mystery secrets of Christianity.

The main headquarters, so to speak, of this exploration, will be the approach to the world developed by late 18th/early 19th Century philosopher/spiritual teacher/scientist/artist Rudolf Steiner, called anthroposophy.

First up in the series is Reverend Patrick Kennedy, who along with Rev. Jonah Evans, hosts one of my favorite podcasts, The Light In Everything. Patrick is a reverend in The Christian Community, the gathering of Christians in service and ritual informed by Rudolf Steiner’s guidance and Rosicrucianism. He’s extremely thoughtful, warm, and his voice is a beautiful light in the world.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? One of the best books on Christianity seen from an esoteric point of view is Wilt Thou Be Made Whole: Healings in the Gospels by Georg Kühlewind. It’s a beautiful book that will both lead you through all the instances of healing in the Bible, and also lead you into the experience of them through meditation and contemplation.

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? In this series, I’ll be focusing mostly on esoteric Christianity inspired by anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner. But there are other valuable and potent esoteric Christianity streams that deserve everyone’s attentiveness. One can be found in the work of Daskalos and the Researchers of Truth, which I go into in-depth on AEWCH 67 with one of Daskalos’s students, Daniel Joseph.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER? Well, the Christian Community, of course! One of the best ways to do that is to see if there’s a service near you and then attend one. Nothing will be expected of you, no one will try to get you “in” to the group. You’ll just encounter what all encounter: the baseline of the service is always the same; the Act of Consecration of Man. And then some talking afterward.

MORE ON PATRICK Aside from listening to Patrick’s podcast, you can support his endeavors on The Light in Everything’s patreon.

Love.
C

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Reading, thinking, and conversation are noble pursuits and reasons to live. AEWCH 177 featuring Zena Hitz on the value of intellectualism.

20 Jan

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Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST via Patreon

Friends,
Happy New Year! Here’s the third in the series of episodes on How To Live in 2022. The first, AEWCH 175, was with occult scholar Mitch Horowitz, and the second, AEWCH 176, is on why reincarnation matters for us now. It’s not just the obviously spiritual that we must bring to bear on how to live now, though. It’s how we spend our time, and what we give our days and thoughts over to. For me, intellectual pursuits – especially literature, film, music, philosophy – are what I long to spend my time on. But I resent, deeply, the idea that they have to be “for” something, even self development. It’s not that they can’t contribute to self development, rather, that they only contribute to self development when we don’t force them into the role. So how could I do an episode on how-and-why-to-be-an-intellectual without forcing it all into functionality? Luckily, public intellectual, teacher, and philosopher Zena Hitz‘s, book, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, is hugely clarifying on this. After reading it, I knew I had to speak with her. I hope this conversation is clarifying for you, too.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ?
Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others offers a great exploration of how to view art, the news, the world in general, without becoming numb: numb in the way we become numb to what we see again and again, and numb because of the narratives (or lack of them) that surround what we’re regarding. It’s a short book full of declarative and illuminating sentences.

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
A good companion episode for this one is AEWCH 141 with religious scholar Jason Josephson Storm. We talk about knowing beyond academia, beyond postmodernism, beyond the old ways of taking in knowledge… but without discarding the most useful aspects of all the above. We also get really weird about it.

WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER?
Since we discuss “spectacle” so much, I think I should direct you to the Situationists, the anarchist art/culture/politics group from 20th Century. One of the best entry points is via Ken Knabb’s super plain but very rich site, Bureau of Public Secrets.

MORE ON ZENA
Buy her book, of course. And visit her website, which is extensive; lots of interviews and thoughts and links and media. You can also look into the great books tutorial series Zena founded, The Catherine Project. And here’s a good talk from Zena at the Thomistic Institute.

Until next time, friends!
CH

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Let’s move to another layer of reality. AEWCH 154: Pilar Lesko & Conner Habib

15 Jun

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 154: PILAR LESKO or TIMELINES & THE END OF THE BATTLE OF GOOD vs EVIL

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Your support for Against Everyone With Conner Habib, as well as all my writing, lectures, activism, and the rest, are what keep me going. If you support my work via patreon, thank you! And if you don’t, please contribute on Patreon today!

Thank you so, so much. Buy books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 154 via bookshop.org. The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback.

You can also access Pilar’s amazing course, Uplevel, and get $111 off until June 30 by using the code: CONNERDANCING

Friends,

So much to say about my conversation with spiritual…worker? Attuner? Do-er? Pilar Lesko.

But first things first, it’s difficult for me to describe her. Why? Well, I talk about that at the top of the episode: she expresses a new and individuated unfolding of religion and theology and spirituality that’s happening for so many of us.

Pilar uses her own language – loops, timelines, hooks, cords, cheat codes. Instead of being wary of the mechanistic tone of some of it, we find in her a redemption of the mechanistic, in her, it find its truer form. The language opens pathways up rather than driving us deeper into the merely subnatural.

I took Pilar’s class UpLevel (You can also access Pilar’s amazing course, Uplevel, and get $111 off until June 30 by using the code: CONNERDANCING) and found myself listening, through her, to a new pathway for spirituality being formed. But not one that asked me to replace my pathway, rather I found she was encouraging me to understand my own.

I recorded this episode with Pilar on the day of the solar eclipse, as St John’s Tide approached. The date was perfect timing; I’d just gone through some absolute intensity a few weeks before, and so had Pilar.

Pilar talks about Timelines, and I knew I’d jumped from one to the next in the span of a week. We discuss what that means, exactly on the episode. We also talk about why having a huge spiritual shift doesn’t clear everything up, even as we wish it would: Sometimes when great change comes, you can feel even more acutely the aspects of yourself that are stuck in the old. You achieve something great, you create a great work of art, you get a new partner, you have a breakthrough in your understanding of yourself. Suddenly, you feel liberated, but you also notice now, since you have more light, the knots not yet untied. The parts of you living inn old or artificial layers/levels/timelines of what was real.

But the capacity of change has guided you and continues to. To paraphrase Rudolf Steiner it gives you strength to be yourself, it is now brightening and enlivening the light within you, and it is expressing the warmth from your own soul streaming through you.

I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Psychic and economic warfare as a training ground
  • Condensed timeline jumping
  • The will as an inappropriate magical tool until it meets the Will
  • Why do we have to do things twice?
  • That time a cockatiel gave me a spiritual message
  • What are “timelines?”
  • Aleister Crowley and Albert Einstein being part of the same oversoul with different faces
  • The presence of the dead in Pilar’s spiritual output (and all of ours)
  • The principle of ease and its absolute necessity
  • The uses and misuses of intensity
  • How our nervous systems live on other timelines
  • The way “plant medicine” and “magic” and “manifesting” have been infiltrated
  • The higher aspect is always hotter
  • “Good versus evil is still just a level of reality.”

SHOW NOTES

• For Pilar’s site (and her newsletter, which is great), go here. Here’s her post, “’11 Secrets’ to Running a Multiple 6 Figure Business With (almost) No Social Media, No Ads, No Strategy, and in General No F*cks.” And here’s a good discussion with Pilar on the Feeling Free podcast.

• For info on GameStop, here’s a quick and recent breakdown from Financial Times, which I’ve posted here so you can see the mainstream narrative about it and just how huge it is.

• No one called to claim Gino (as I called him), but he found a new and very loving home with one of my neighbors. I guess we were both ready for new worlds.

• I talked about supernatural politics with anthropologist David Graeber on AEWCH 99. And I talked about how consensus in consciousness creates materiality on a very recent episode, AEWCH 152 with supernatural scholar Terje Simonsen.

• Please of check out the work of Byron Katie, and if you’re interested, come to the Against Everyone Salon where I’ll be doing the work with patreon patrons.

• I talked about navigating uncertainty in 2021 on the first episode of the year, AEWCH 136.

• What if all the bad stuff is going away?

Thank you friends,

CH

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Alienation & Alien Nation. Catholicism and UFO researcher Diana Walsh Pasulka on AEWCH 144!

16 Mar

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This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? To buy Diana’s books, and books related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 144 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,

Everyone who listens to this show knows that I’m interested in the intersection of spirituality, politics, and philosophy. Not in some sort of parapolitics or conspiracy way, of course – which I generally find plays out a bit shallow, even when there is truth there – but in the way the aforementioned currents play out in our inner lives, in our spiritual understandings, in our desires and drives, in our ethics and morals and activism.

Of course, this means, more and more, that I find myself contending with technology and the scientistic worldview that accompanies it.

It’s why this episode’s guest – religion and UFO scholar Diana Walsh Pasulka – is a perfect person to talk to on the show. Diana Walsh Pasulka  is the author of American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology, Heaven Can Wait: Purgatory in Catholic Devotional and Popular Culture and co-editor (with Simone Natale) of Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural . They’re all amazing books.

At the top of this episode, I also spend a bit of time pulling apart something that comes up, and that’s the topic of AI, and how it relates to political economy and UFOs (phew!).

I’m still reeling from this conversation with Diana. She’s warm and thoughtful, and she’s mediating a lot of the intensities of the world that we need mediated. Ethics, morals, spirituality, science, tech, religion, and more.

I’m so excited to share this conversation with you.

(PS: As a bonus, this is coming out just before St. Patrick’s Day and has some St. Patrick’s lore in it! So it’s a sort of holiday episode!)

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Why do we not believe the things we don’t believe
  • Stopping ourselves from saying “that was weird” and “that was crazy”
  • The language of art as a way of knowing and learning
  • St. Patrick’s revelation
  • Diana’a UFO initiation process and academia as a site of false initiation
  • Academia’s resistance to supernatural and paranormal phenomena
  • Interacting with the dead in study and research
  • What’s the difference between Purgatory and limbo, and where is Purgatory (hint: Ireland)
  • When did physical evidence become a necessary aspect of making spiritual claims?
  • Are we all in Purgatory/limbo in quarantine?
  • My undergrad Geocities site as evidence of me speaking in tongues
  • When Diana’s social media was destroyed by bots
  • The burden and adventure of seeing what you see in the world

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Diana here’s her first and second appearance on Rune Soup. Here she is on a long (almost 3 hours!) podcast that often has… less interesting guests, the Lex Fridman show (I like Lex himself, no comment on him!). Here’s her CV on her university’s site.

• I talked about creating the new symbolic forms and language in the first episode of 2021, AEWCH 136. And here’s my discussion about metamodernism and theosophy with Jason Josephson Storm on AEWCH 141.

• The review of Diana’s book American Cosmic that was…not exactly positive, but still worthwhile in its critiques was from hermeticist Poke Runyon (who also identified the initiation event in Diana’s life).

• The shaman who said “you’ve graduated into a new danger” to me was Malidoma Some.

• I did a whole series on spirituality, politics, and tech – AEWCH 112 with Peter Berbergal an occult technology, AEWCH 113 with Duncan Laurie on the magical tech of radionics, AEWCH 114 on destroying Silicon Valley, and AEWCH 115 with Joanne McNeill on the inner experience of the internet.

• Here’s the trailer for Host, which, though flawed, is a really enjoyable horror film. Watch it on your laptop, for full effect!

• Here’s Somi Arian’s essay/“open letter” to tech about ethics/morals/free will.

• Steiner’s book, Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom, hasn’t been reprinted in the Collected Works series, but you can read it here.

Until next time friends,

CH

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We don’t need to “re-enchant” anything. Religion scholar Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm on Against Everyone With Conner Habib 141!

16 Feb

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • AnchorThis podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? To buy Jason’s books or books mentioned on & related to this episode, please go to my book list for AEWCH 141 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
I’ve always hated the term “re-enchantment” because it presupposes that the world lost its enchantment, or that somehow we just have to insert a fairy or into the landscape or talk to trees, or worse yet, see the world in terms of the Neil deGrasse Tyson “wonder of science”: the most banal way of seeing anything. Do that and then – voila! – we have a spiritual world again.But the world doesn’t need to be be re-enchanted or merely populated by astrological symbols in the night sky – instead we need to dissolve the kinds of knowing that obfuscate our understanding of the spiritual nature of existence. We encounter, each day, a tangle of bad notions of perception and concepts which get in the way of, more open, more honest experiences. Materialism is a form of bad enchantment; a kind of hex itself.

On the other hand, the idea that we need to purge spirituality from the left is even worse. Figures viewed as foundational to materialist leftist discourse like Hegel and Adorno are tangled up in hermetic traditions, not to mention even Marx’s works were published by initially by spiritualists.

To talk about all of this, I invited professor, religious studies author, and authorJason Ānanda Josephson Storm onto the show. Jason is the author of three books, including The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, as well as the forthcoming book on how to theorize differently, Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.This is an intense episode – my favorite kind – because we don’t hold back at all, we just go as deep as we want into religion, occultism, academic dishonesty, and consciousness.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • How did the tarot, astrology, and more show up in the left
  • Why the occult is not fascism and why we shouldn’t condemn Lutherans
  • The new materialists and neither new nor materialists, discuss
  • The desperate need for dewitchers and new theorists
  • The problem with trying to intervene in language
  • The way academics will develop “a whole vast edifice about the enchant(ment of) nature and it ends with ‘You should buy a Prius’ basically, and ‘Recycle!’ We already know that, we don’t need English professors to tell us that.”
  • My Bugs Bunny politics
  • Dissolving materialism rather than “re-enchanting the world” (and not hiding in dialectical materialism)
  • Why slapping furniture and saying “see, this is the REAL world!” doesn’t work, and also why Quentin Meillassoux is…not good
  • The failure of academia to keep the humanities valid, and why the theosophists (maybe) did it better
  • Why we can live and develop ways of knowing from that, instead of merely developing knowledge to shape and describe how we live

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Jason, here’s his Williams College website (with lots of info). Here he is talking to Vanessa Sinclair on the excellent Rendering Unconscious podcast.

• Here’s me with anti-productivity philosopher Brian O’Connor on AEWCH 89, where we also talk quite a bit (and positively!) about Adorno. And I talked about a lot of these themes from a completely different angle on AEWCH 137 with Mitch Horowitz!

• I have to say I have some hesitations about Jason’s claim that occultism was not central to the Nazi project or Hitler’s mission! I think there’s a very strong link, although I agree that it’s “overplayed” in many ways. See Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster for a counterpoint. Suster’s book also has some mistakes, but he at least takes the occult seriously as something other than just religious mind-control and stupidity. That said, it’s a very difficult book to get!

• Paranormal America (Second Edition): Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot Hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture is an excellent study (with TONS of data) on paranormal beliefs in the US.

• Witchcraft never disappeared in the UK, and I talk about it with Thomas Waters on AEWCH 98. You should also check out his truly excellent book, Cursed Britain. 

• The mountain that is there and is not there comes from Zen teacher Qingyuan Weixin: “Before I had studied Chan / Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers when I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains and rivers once again as rivers.”

Until next time!
CH

“Do not trust those who analyze magic. They are usually magicians in search of revenge.” – Bruno Latour

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How do we believe in things without killing each other? I talk to Peter Rollins & Elliott Morgan of The Fundamentalists podcast on AEWCH 135!

16 Dec

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast
This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon!  Thank you so, so much.

Want to buy the books mentioned on this ep? For Peter’s books, and other books mentioned on or related to this episode, please go to my booklist for AEWCH 135 on bookshop.org. It will  help support independent bookstores, and the show gets a small financial kickback, too.

Friends,
As the year comes to an end, we find ourselves surrounded by people holding seemingly incommensurable sets of beliefs and ideas – and those sets of beliefs and ideas are being held onto more tightly, not less, as the ship seems to be aimless. While some of you might be finding a sense of relief in the changing of the guard in the US, and the presence of a vaccine, many others feel agitated by both.
2020 was the year that one community, one group of people trying to dominate and humiliate the other, seemed to rule.At the same time, we’ve seen these amazing outpourings of mutual aid, of togetherness, of new demands for the structures that are supposed to be serving us. I wanted to understand all of this, I wanted to have a conversation about belief and politics, and the unknown.
So I invited my friends Peter Rollins and Elliott Morgan to the show. You might know Elliott as part of the YouTube comedy group The Valleyfolk, or from his standup; and Peter from his work as a psychoanalytic theologian, or his previous appearances on AEWCH 14, AEWCH 55, and AEWCH 70 (with Todd McGowan); but I was interested in having them on together because they’re cohosts of the philosophy and psychoanalysis chat show, The Fundamentalists. On each episode, Elliott brings his everyday but perceptive concerns about the world, and Peter pulls them apart with psychoanalysis.
This is, I think a special conversation because of that belief piece, that ideology piece – because we all have different pathways through belief in our lives, from Peter’s sport of strange revelation upon seeing an exorcism take place after leaving the theater – he’d just seen Gremlins 2 – with his friend, to Elliott’s church experiences with something called the Holy Laughter Revival, to mine growing up without much religion and then finding my life infused with occult philosophy.We also each have different psychological structures, which we discuss on this show.And we each have different intellectual mentors and perspectives. Lately, Elliott has taken up Jungian psychology, which stands in some opposition to Peter’s Lacanian/Hegelian view, and both in some opposition to my occult view deeply informed by Rudolf Steiner.
So we spend a lot of this episode fleshing out some of those differences and nuances – how current events, how thinking, how the unconscious, and more, can be seen from each perspective.Gradually, throughout the episode, you get a sense of a sort of peace process. Not because Peter and Elliott and I were i some sort of deep conflict to begin with, but because the ideas and ways of living and structures of psyche meet each other and rest with each other without violent disagreement. The show presents three people, not trying to resolve contradictions and certainly not trying to win out, but rather simply taking an interest in one another.

In some ways, it offers an antidote to clinging to belief on the mast of the sinking ship of our politics, economy, and culture.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Our journeys through belief
  • Different sorts of exorcisms and possessions
  • The interpretations of the concept of the lack in psychoanalysis
  • Why didn’t going to school for science make Elliott an atheist?
  • What the unconscious looks like for Freud, Jung, and Steiner
  • How each of – Peter, Elliott, and I – us fall into a psychoanalytic structure, and what those structures are
  • How to avoid turning anxiety into violence
  • How communism and liberalism have dovetailed with each other into a big mess
  • Comedy creating stability
  • The way love and knowledge meet to become violence in our time

SHOW NOTES

• For more on The Fundamentalists, my recommended episodes are “Success,” “Socialism,” “Fascism,” and “New Normal.” But you can really just start anywhere.

• Right off the bat we get Gremlins 2 and Alabama Snake references, which I feel like is a call to watch both.

• John E.L. Tenney went to a Catholic exorcism and we talked about it on AEWCH 133.

• Here’s a short video on the Holy Laughter Revival, and it is…well…funny!

• Jodorowsky’s Dune is one of my favorite movies about magic and art. (Below are character sketches for the film by Moebius.)

• I love AEWCH 116 with Are Thoresen about nothingness and Christ.

• Here’s a brisk intro to Franz Mesmer.

• Here’s the episode of The Fundamentalists about hot takes and the global pandemic.

• The Duncan Trussell Family Hour I talk about re: my prediction of the occluding force is here. And the other episode I mention is here.

• Slavoj Žižek comes up a bit, and if you’re looking for a good book to start with that relates to the topics here, I would say The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity is as good as any.

Until next time, friends,
XO
CH

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Why we need a new concept of time & space to create political change. Listen to me & Srećko Horvat on AEWCH 107!

21 Apr

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 107: SREĆKO HORVAT or DEMYTHOLOGIZING (AND RE-MYTHOLOGIZING) THE CRISIS

LISTEN HERE OR ON iTunes • Spotify • Overcast • Soundcloud • Patreon

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Thank you so, so much.

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AEWCH107TitleCard

Friends,

We’re surrounded by terms that sound new, but that aren’t new. “Social distancing.” “The new normal.” And actions that seem new but are not new. Elevated police presence. Government overreach. Pandemic.

But these are old narratives that have been changed slightly to seem new. They’re mythic. So I invited one of the most important thinkers of our time to sort through what is new, what is old, and what is needed in our moment.

Srećko Horvat is an author, political organizer, and philosopher. Of his many profound and politically potent books, my favorite (and the one you should start with) is Poetry From The Future: Why a Global Liberation Movement Is Our Civilisation‘s Last Chance. It’s a hopeful but evenhanded book about the possibility of interconnected movements in a world where neoliberal capitalism has won
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He’s one of the cofounders of the Democracy In Europe Movement 2025, or DiEM2025 – a broad-based coalition of thinkers, rebels, and political theorists committed to creating a true leftist alternative in European politics, particularly in response to the disintegration of the EU.

Srećko is also currently giving live mini lectures, Q&As through the DiEM25 channel, and hosting conversations with luminaries as diverse as Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Žižek, and Seinfeld co-creator Larry Charles. (And on the 24th, he’ll be speaking with Franco Bifo Berardi!)

I’m so excited to share this conversation with you. It’s one that combines the political, the spiritual, and the philosophical, with activism. It identifies and creates new directions for us to move in during this crisis, and after.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • How and why we were dreaming about the global pandemic before it happened, and how we assisted it in happening
  • Why the esoteric, the occult, and border science matter now; and how the right seizes on them because the left is ignorant
  • the “libidinal” economy and why the left needs to take it up instead of opting for class reductionism
  • Why a leftist project needs to include a reappraisal of time and space (and why it matters now more than ever)
  • The fundamental fantasies of the left, the right, and the center
  • The generation of political will through meditation, poetry, reading, creating, gardening, and more
  • Why people are turning to plants in the global crisis
  • The possibility of money losing value over time
  • How to think about the value of laziness
  • The difference between mythic art and occult art
  • Why we should and should not applaud healthcare workers
  • The importance of using your own language
  • The necessity of new and strange directions for our activism
  • Meeting the stranger and loving the Other (and dating the Other, too)
  • Why lust matters, and how it’s connected to love

SHOW NOTES

• For more on Srećko, here’s his lecture, “The Virus Mythologies,” where he breaks down the signs and signifiers And for a quick summary of his other work, you can read Subversion!. Here’s Srećko in conversation with Brian Eno about his book, Poetry From The Future.

• I start off with a nod to the eruption of Mount Tamboura – to learn more about that catastrophic time, read The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed History by William Klingman.

• I deeply appreciate Slavoj Žižek’s book, about the values of religion, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity.
• Unfortunately, I cannot recommend Eric Kurlander’s book, Hitler’s Monsters, which is filled with misinformation and (willful?) misinterpretation. The main issue is that Kurlander, like many “historians” of the occult, although Kurlander certainly knows exoteric history, he does not understand the occult. That said, I can recommend a better book on the same subject, Hitler: The Occult Messiah, by Gerald Suster. Suster’s book also has some mistakes, but he at least takes the occult seriously as something other than just religious mind-control and stupidity. That said, it’s a very difficult book to get! At the very least, read them both.

• If you’d like to hear more about psychologist and border science inventor Wilhelm Reich, and his challenging relationship with the left, check out AEWCH 59, where I talk with Reich scholar James Strick. And if you do want to hear about me talking Wilhelm Reich, here you go.

• Here’s a bit on Subcomadante Galeono (known to many as Subcomadante Marcos, but who changed his name to honor the dead) and the Zapatistas.

• Marx uses the vampire metaphor a few times in his work, but none more famously than, ““Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” (In Capital)

• Here’s Walter Benjamin’s Theses On A Philosophy Of History. It’s, for me, one of the most influential theoretical works. From the essay: “The only writer of history with the gift of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”

• And Srećko mentions Carlo Rovelli, whose work I have yet to read. But I think I’ll start with the one he suggests, The Order Of Time.

• To hear more about the problem with doomsday preppers, check out AEWCH 105 with Mark O’Connell.

Barthes-216x300• So much about the theorist Roland Barthes on this show. Including, here, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. Also, his classic, Mythologies. His book Sade/Loyola/Fourier is difficult to find, but here’s my essay on Fourier, and you can find excerpts of his book in A Barthes Reader (which was edited by Susan Sontag!).

• Here’s Michel Foucault’s essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.”

• The prayer of Saint Francis:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, Where there is hatred, let me sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy;  O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love.  

For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

• Here’s my short essay on Russian lust mystic, Vladimir Solovyov.

See you in the future, friends.
CH
WB

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