I am really excited to read this, Mills, and I totally dig the way you mention the broken brain, the death of your mother, but "not quite as serious as it sounds, though." That's pure Mills Baker, and pure satori.
I vibed with David’s comment about the two streams of Buddhism almost being two religions. Because that was my experience floating between Christian sects. One brand of theology says “you’re just a dirty, totally depraved piece of garbage with an absolute moral imperative to grovel and seek perfection” and the other is like “oh man you’re quite literally the pinnacle of creation and are perfectly able to turn everything around you into a nicer garden if you just deeply accept that you are loved, and it’s normal if that takes a while”. Both versions see us as fallen and require us to see that we’re fallen to make moral progress. But oh man is that emphasis different in the psychosocial result it produces!
Writing this in the Target parking lot and will update later with more on the serious stuff, but laughed out loud that both you and David were also bullied for being gay without actually being gay.
Only my dad ever thought I was gay. (He typed at 3:19am)
On the problem of evil, man that’s a tough one. The best I can up with, after my weird experience, is “If we were different, we wouldn’t be us anymore.” All the things that make us, us, are imbedded in the universe too. You inherit the consequences of the speed of light, the permittivity of free space, and every other feature of the universe. Change those and you don’t exist. Except I think from God’s perspective, the higher perspective outside of time and space, it’s backwards. All of those things are the way they are, so that *we* could be the way we are. God chose us, warts and all. Love us, flaws and all. The evil is part of us, too, and from our naive perspective it is something that comes into us from the outside. But in the higher perspective, since we wouldn’t be us without the outside being what it is, the evil goes from inside out. Why would God choose to make that *be*? Well, we are His children. To wash that away would be to forsake us.
My sense is that He holds himself back for lots of reasons, the primary one being that if He intervened to the maximal extent then we wouldn’t be us anymore, either. We’d be puppets, little more than shadow puppets for his amusement. We wouldn’t have the chance to do things like He can do, to be good because we choose it, because we choose to make that our nature. To be brave, because we *can’t* see ahead far enough to know what the consequences will be from our actions. To love, through fear and vulnerability, because we don’t get to know first if someone will love us back or abuse us for that love. Yet we do all of that anyway. We *couldn’t* do them if we had perfect knowledge or perfect power. He gave us the one thing He doesn’t have: limitation.
Think about what it says about you that you get tired, and worn down, and I imagine you probably feel like a waitress at Hooters sometimes where being nice to people also feels like this drag that’s your job you can’t escape (you don’t ever have to do this for me, by the way, I am half-writer and half-corporate drone) but you choose to do it anyway. What are you, ultimately, if not that choice? And what would the strength of that choice be if there was not strain to push through it? Your limits and your adversity bring something out in you like a self-producing good, a flame fueled by its own brightness, something liken to the Flame Imperishable that is God’s alone.
My best guess is that everything *is* somewhere out there. That was my sense anyway. For God to know a thing, to imagine it perfectly, is for that thing to become real. Every life you could have lived, every possible circumstance. Infinite rolls of the dice for you to get it right while still being you. We too often make science and religion enemies of one another, but think about why that wasn’t the first religious response to the many worlds theory. So often people will spit on God because not everyone gets an equal chance, but what if everyone gets every chance? What if that’s built right in to the fabric of being? Same with evolution. People took that as an abdication of God because they could explain something. But did people think God was putting on some leather gloves and going into a workshop? Isn’t it weird, just by the way things are, that loving and connecting to another of your kind produces all the variety in the world we know? At a certain level, even propagating yourself through time does that same thing, hones you and brings you into harmony with your present moment. And that is supposed to be bleak?
We were broken at the start in our potential, but we are still loved for all of that. The apple was the way our minds were built and our exile from the garden was the beginning of the universe. If by some Cosmic scale this was not worth it, I don’t think God would have let it *be* from His vantage outside of time and space. He sees the end and the beginning together, all in one shining, perfect instance.
Anyway, I think I’m largely preaching to the converted. And if it helps, I try to think of every shitty propensity within myself at least a few times a day and accept they’re part of me even as I have to work against them, and frequently fail. It is all so beautiful, though, and we couldn’t possibly deserve it all except by grace.
Damn, what a cool conversation to sit in on. In addition to feeling a lot smarter than I was before I watched, I also feel like I'd like to experience that wild weed balloon with Mills one of these days. Beautiful conversation. Thanks for sharing it with us
It’s on the way, for real; I’m just juggling a lot! On the one side, my whole life as Chris; on the other, this sham of an existence I call “Mills”; and I’ve got a few other life paths cooking too. I’m sorry for the delay!!!
The video podcast this Degenerate Age really needs right now!
Heidegger's idea of fallenness would be another fun lens to apply here, especially given the role he thinks it plays in the construction of time. Not even going to attempt to summarize, so will just copy and paste relevant bits from this good essay (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/):
Thrownness and projection provide two of the three dimensions of care. The third is fallen-ness. “Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the world” (Being and Time 38: 220). Such fallen-ness into the world is manifested in idle talk (roughly, conversing in a critically unexamined and unexamining way about facts and information while failing to use language to reveal their relevance), curiosity (a search for novelty and endless stimulation rather than belonging or dwelling), and ambiguity (a loss of any sensitivity to the distinction between genuine understanding and superficial chatter). Each of these aspects of fallen-ness involves a closing off or covering up of the world (more precisely, of any real understanding of the world) through a fascination with it. What is crucial here is that this world-obscuring process of fallen-ness/fascination, as manifested in idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, is to be understood as Dasein's everyday mode of Being-with. In its everyday form, Being-with exhibits what Heidegger calls levelling or averageness—a “Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’ ” (Being and Time 38: 220).
(I hear Kierkegaard made similar points, and if he did, I'm sure he did so way more clearly.)
Enjoying this a lot! I want to comment, because I realize I do have a theory about this sense of fallenness.
This sense of things being wrong somehow, on a basic level, and this sense of falling back repeatedly into unconscious patterns, despite our best intentions—is explainable as itself being a habituated pattern of identification and disidentification with the constituents of our momentary experience.
We might say inhabitation and disinhabitation instead. I notice a pattern of behavior: wanting to remain on the couch and look at my phone for a few minutes when my house is messy and in need of my attention. I immediately vacate that area of my sensorium. That’s not me. That’s my bad habits, my unhealthy impulses, my psychological illness, my diabolical urges.
And so the sense of fallenness emerges—this part of me that does not belong is present. But I think the fallenness here is just the mirror image (or fractal arm) of the preceding fallenness: I have separated myself from myself.
I have left the Eden where I was whole, and entered this fractured, fallen world. Here I’m forced to toil endlessly, trying to regain that wholeness. Funnily enough (or maybe cruelly, if you’re in that mood), this effort to regain the state of affairs before the fall actually serves to prevent wholeness from reasserting itself.
Because wholeness is not somewhere or sometime other than here and now, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Utter relaxation (which does not preclude mental or physical exertion) regains paradise.
This is not a state that precedes something else, chronologically. Patterned disinhabitation could be explained as a kind of basic survival mechanism. And so animals and babies (and so on) are not closer to this “natural state”; their perception is probably more “hardened” in its patterns than a random human adult’s.
This accords with the basic Buddhist “precious human rebirth”—it’s not impossible to notice one’s own nature accidentally, but it’s far more likely with a competent teacher to point it out, a community of practice to play with while gaining one’s sea-legs, and the water/food/shelter affordance for regular practice.
As far as I know, this all accords with Dzogchen view, which is how I came into contact with it.
A fascinating conversation. The concept of 'fallen' is so oppressive isn't it? I always think of it as someone has pushed me over, but maybe that's me not taking responsibility!
I’m not sure! I don’t feel any less responsible for my conduct given variable initial conditions; it may be that the world is anything at all, with any story behind it, and the matter of what I do with it and in it remains for me to determine (and to feel the weight of). I do think “fallenness” is somewhat related to “complication,” and I have the sense that a lot of people are disappointed with the complexity of the world: its resistance to simple solutions and convergences. But for most anyone religious enough to take this metaphor “for real,” it’s simultaneously the case that we’re expected to do “good” in this world, as it is, fallen or not, so I think the responsibility issue can cut a few ways!
Fascinating discussion. Thank you both. Just a small thing but you mentioned that in the past Christianity had a suspicion of music. As an atheist I'm so glad that this no longer prevails. I find the following hugely uplifting!
I am really excited to read this, Mills, and I totally dig the way you mention the broken brain, the death of your mother, but "not quite as serious as it sounds, though." That's pure Mills Baker, and pure satori.
I vibed with David’s comment about the two streams of Buddhism almost being two religions. Because that was my experience floating between Christian sects. One brand of theology says “you’re just a dirty, totally depraved piece of garbage with an absolute moral imperative to grovel and seek perfection” and the other is like “oh man you’re quite literally the pinnacle of creation and are perfectly able to turn everything around you into a nicer garden if you just deeply accept that you are loved, and it’s normal if that takes a while”. Both versions see us as fallen and require us to see that we’re fallen to make moral progress. But oh man is that emphasis different in the psychosocial result it produces!
Hold on—does the camera AUTO-TRACK as you move around? Is that what i just witnessed on a LOW-PRODUCTION HOMEBREW PODCAST???
That’s just the iPhone and an Apple TV!!! It does all that stuff automatically!
That's awesome
Writing this in the Target parking lot and will update later with more on the serious stuff, but laughed out loud that both you and David were also bullied for being gay without actually being gay.
wasn’t that like close to 75% of boys from uh… well whenever to whenever?!
Only my dad ever thought I was gay. (He typed at 3:19am)
On the problem of evil, man that’s a tough one. The best I can up with, after my weird experience, is “If we were different, we wouldn’t be us anymore.” All the things that make us, us, are imbedded in the universe too. You inherit the consequences of the speed of light, the permittivity of free space, and every other feature of the universe. Change those and you don’t exist. Except I think from God’s perspective, the higher perspective outside of time and space, it’s backwards. All of those things are the way they are, so that *we* could be the way we are. God chose us, warts and all. Love us, flaws and all. The evil is part of us, too, and from our naive perspective it is something that comes into us from the outside. But in the higher perspective, since we wouldn’t be us without the outside being what it is, the evil goes from inside out. Why would God choose to make that *be*? Well, we are His children. To wash that away would be to forsake us.
My sense is that He holds himself back for lots of reasons, the primary one being that if He intervened to the maximal extent then we wouldn’t be us anymore, either. We’d be puppets, little more than shadow puppets for his amusement. We wouldn’t have the chance to do things like He can do, to be good because we choose it, because we choose to make that our nature. To be brave, because we *can’t* see ahead far enough to know what the consequences will be from our actions. To love, through fear and vulnerability, because we don’t get to know first if someone will love us back or abuse us for that love. Yet we do all of that anyway. We *couldn’t* do them if we had perfect knowledge or perfect power. He gave us the one thing He doesn’t have: limitation.
Think about what it says about you that you get tired, and worn down, and I imagine you probably feel like a waitress at Hooters sometimes where being nice to people also feels like this drag that’s your job you can’t escape (you don’t ever have to do this for me, by the way, I am half-writer and half-corporate drone) but you choose to do it anyway. What are you, ultimately, if not that choice? And what would the strength of that choice be if there was not strain to push through it? Your limits and your adversity bring something out in you like a self-producing good, a flame fueled by its own brightness, something liken to the Flame Imperishable that is God’s alone.
My best guess is that everything *is* somewhere out there. That was my sense anyway. For God to know a thing, to imagine it perfectly, is for that thing to become real. Every life you could have lived, every possible circumstance. Infinite rolls of the dice for you to get it right while still being you. We too often make science and religion enemies of one another, but think about why that wasn’t the first religious response to the many worlds theory. So often people will spit on God because not everyone gets an equal chance, but what if everyone gets every chance? What if that’s built right in to the fabric of being? Same with evolution. People took that as an abdication of God because they could explain something. But did people think God was putting on some leather gloves and going into a workshop? Isn’t it weird, just by the way things are, that loving and connecting to another of your kind produces all the variety in the world we know? At a certain level, even propagating yourself through time does that same thing, hones you and brings you into harmony with your present moment. And that is supposed to be bleak?
We were broken at the start in our potential, but we are still loved for all of that. The apple was the way our minds were built and our exile from the garden was the beginning of the universe. If by some Cosmic scale this was not worth it, I don’t think God would have let it *be* from His vantage outside of time and space. He sees the end and the beginning together, all in one shining, perfect instance.
Anyway, I think I’m largely preaching to the converted. And if it helps, I try to think of every shitty propensity within myself at least a few times a day and accept they’re part of me even as I have to work against them, and frequently fail. It is all so beautiful, though, and we couldn’t possibly deserve it all except by grace.
This is beautiful and yes: more or less where I’m at; and I am considering changing my title to Waitress at Hooter’s!!!
Awesome!
I love you guys.
😭😭😭 good lord hell yeah
Damn, what a cool conversation to sit in on. In addition to feeling a lot smarter than I was before I watched, I also feel like I'd like to experience that wild weed balloon with Mills one of these days. Beautiful conversation. Thanks for sharing it with us
If you're ever in New Orleans, come experience the wild weed balloon for sure!!! And thank you, extremely relieved!
Mills, you look like and have the mannerisms of someone I know named Chris. I refuse to believe you aren’t him.
Chris, you told me my lamp stand would be done two weeks ago. I suspect you haven’t even started. Unbelievable.
It’s on the way, for real; I’m just juggling a lot! On the one side, my whole life as Chris; on the other, this sham of an existence I call “Mills”; and I’ve got a few other life paths cooking too. I’m sorry for the delay!!!
The video podcast this Degenerate Age really needs right now!
Heidegger's idea of fallenness would be another fun lens to apply here, especially given the role he thinks it plays in the construction of time. Not even going to attempt to summarize, so will just copy and paste relevant bits from this good essay (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/):
Thrownness and projection provide two of the three dimensions of care. The third is fallen-ness. “Dasein has, in the first instance, fallen away from itself as an authentic potentiality for Being its Self, and has fallen into the world” (Being and Time 38: 220). Such fallen-ness into the world is manifested in idle talk (roughly, conversing in a critically unexamined and unexamining way about facts and information while failing to use language to reveal their relevance), curiosity (a search for novelty and endless stimulation rather than belonging or dwelling), and ambiguity (a loss of any sensitivity to the distinction between genuine understanding and superficial chatter). Each of these aspects of fallen-ness involves a closing off or covering up of the world (more precisely, of any real understanding of the world) through a fascination with it. What is crucial here is that this world-obscuring process of fallen-ness/fascination, as manifested in idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity, is to be understood as Dasein's everyday mode of Being-with. In its everyday form, Being-with exhibits what Heidegger calls levelling or averageness—a “Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’ ” (Being and Time 38: 220).
(I hear Kierkegaard made similar points, and if he did, I'm sure he did so way more clearly.)
Enjoying this a lot! I want to comment, because I realize I do have a theory about this sense of fallenness.
This sense of things being wrong somehow, on a basic level, and this sense of falling back repeatedly into unconscious patterns, despite our best intentions—is explainable as itself being a habituated pattern of identification and disidentification with the constituents of our momentary experience.
We might say inhabitation and disinhabitation instead. I notice a pattern of behavior: wanting to remain on the couch and look at my phone for a few minutes when my house is messy and in need of my attention. I immediately vacate that area of my sensorium. That’s not me. That’s my bad habits, my unhealthy impulses, my psychological illness, my diabolical urges.
And so the sense of fallenness emerges—this part of me that does not belong is present. But I think the fallenness here is just the mirror image (or fractal arm) of the preceding fallenness: I have separated myself from myself.
I have left the Eden where I was whole, and entered this fractured, fallen world. Here I’m forced to toil endlessly, trying to regain that wholeness. Funnily enough (or maybe cruelly, if you’re in that mood), this effort to regain the state of affairs before the fall actually serves to prevent wholeness from reasserting itself.
Because wholeness is not somewhere or sometime other than here and now, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Utter relaxation (which does not preclude mental or physical exertion) regains paradise.
This is not a state that precedes something else, chronologically. Patterned disinhabitation could be explained as a kind of basic survival mechanism. And so animals and babies (and so on) are not closer to this “natural state”; their perception is probably more “hardened” in its patterns than a random human adult’s.
This accords with the basic Buddhist “precious human rebirth”—it’s not impossible to notice one’s own nature accidentally, but it’s far more likely with a competent teacher to point it out, a community of practice to play with while gaining one’s sea-legs, and the water/food/shelter affordance for regular practice.
As far as I know, this all accords with Dzogchen view, which is how I came into contact with it.
I enjoyed this a lot. ❤️
thank you, that’s relieving!!!
🤣
A fascinating conversation. The concept of 'fallen' is so oppressive isn't it? I always think of it as someone has pushed me over, but maybe that's me not taking responsibility!
I’m not sure! I don’t feel any less responsible for my conduct given variable initial conditions; it may be that the world is anything at all, with any story behind it, and the matter of what I do with it and in it remains for me to determine (and to feel the weight of). I do think “fallenness” is somewhat related to “complication,” and I have the sense that a lot of people are disappointed with the complexity of the world: its resistance to simple solutions and convergences. But for most anyone religious enough to take this metaphor “for real,” it’s simultaneously the case that we’re expected to do “good” in this world, as it is, fallen or not, so I think the responsibility issue can cut a few ways!
Fascinating discussion. Thank you both. Just a small thing but you mentioned that in the past Christianity had a suspicion of music. As an atheist I'm so glad that this no longer prevails. I find the following hugely uplifting!
https://youtu.be/C-yyjTu4Xuw?si=36Doa-yNZ2kidFBC
Excited for this. Saved and a looking forward to listening this weekend.
i don’t know man but good luck!!!
This is the first time I’ve watched you, Mills! I love the balance of your energy with David’s and fantasize about doing a podcast with you.
lmfao ANYTIME!!! DM me!
.xX| Jeez, this turned into - My letter to André |xx.
~
what dear people
great chat!
i was unable to stop my pen for some time
so generous of you
Mills in particular in this case
to run around screaming
with your hair on fire
so we all know
it's normal
David, personally also,
it is nice to see that it is possible
to be calm amid all this
~
"fallen - attention to the mechanism may be clarifying"
~
if we can answer fear's questions
in our own lives
no small task
then we can see the fallen
like we see a house or a car
because the illness that overtakes the fallen
is a very simple loop
fear feeding through
to power-seeking behaviors
that are succeeding-
it is easily detectable
when we can look upon monsters
without loosing our center
-i will be reporting from the briefly department
~
"war"
because a 'just war'
is a spiritually possible thing
it has been used to trick many generations
into the horror we see before us
around us-
to even begin to understand
what a just war looks like
we would need to ask the angels
for an entire language
in place of the word
consent-
i say let's do it
after we get our shit together
~
my 'take(tm)' on the nowish thing;
be family mobile if you can be
don't die
we might make it to a crazy good place
share the gift of mobility
with another
if you can
~
"meaning"
however you generate silence
do that-
now
stop
making
meaning
~
if you get too freaked out by a sense of horror
just forget it and go back
or forget it and keep going
it really only gets awful
if you sit right there in the middle
~
"you can do whatever you want"
~
I hear this as a ghost in the attic
it is meant to make you afraid of the dark
so the reigns of your spiritual power can be seized
~
we don't have to become moral
the state immorality is a deluded state
all we have to do
is break the illusion
the delusion of separateness
not like a weird mystical connection
through the mystical whatever
it's pure physics
go ahead right now
look down through time
~
"independent of circumstance+modify circumstance"
~
ahh at last,
the two of you
have freed me from this horror of a zen puzzle
tangling my feet-
there is a single doing
we can feel it happening in our center
we can weave with acceptance
and non-acceptance-
another trick to tie the hand
averted
~
#goteam