Foreign.

Hello, my name is Will Spencer and welcome to the Will Spencer Podcast.

This is a weekly show featuring in depth conversations with authors, leaders and influencers who help us understand our changing world.

New episodes release every Friday.

My guest this week is Carl Teichrib and he's the author of the outstanding book Game of the Temple of Man in the Age of Re Enchantment Many of you know my story of wandering through the New Age before coming to Christ.

Think of that like a first person adventure, one guy on the road figuring it out on his own.

Now think of Carl's book as the view of that world from orbit.

Carl has been observing the various spheres of progressive spirituality for decades, and he's put in the legwork to read the primary source materials and attend conferences and gatherings firsthand in cities around the world, including the Burning Man Festival, which we'll get to.

As a result, Carl has put together a remarkably detailed map of the terrain that I was wandering through.

If you've ever used Google Earth to look at your city, your neighborhood, and then zoom in on your house or even your backyard, that is exactly the feeling I had while reading Carl's book.

He helped me understand things that I saw at the time that didn't make sense and validated other things which I knew were real but couldn't get anyone else to see.

He also helped me understand the broader context of how and why I got seduced by the Pied Piper of the New Age world, including going to college at Stanford University at precisely the moment I did.

And at the end of the book, the story he weaves even intersected with my life personally, as Carl discussed the Southern California desert rave scene, including the Los Angeles DJ crew known as Moon Tribe, whose parties I attended.

It was a real you are here moment, and he and I have exchanged some pretty amazing voice notes with each other about that one.

Not just for the personal aspects of it, but also because he lays out the New Age threat in a clearer way than I've heard anyone else do.

It took Carl four years to write the book with his family, making countless sacrifices along the way to make that possible.

But that act of service has provided a map for the terrain that I think you all need to know, and that brings us to the Burning Man Festival.

But what you might not know is that Burning man is not just a crazy pagan festival in the desert.

It's also a socio political, cultural and economic crossroads where the future direction of tech and the counterculture meet to plan the future.

Now that was never my world, but but I was aware of it.

And Carl attends the festival annually to observe those trends and also personally preach the gospel to the lost.

Now my Spirit Dream friends mounted an organized underground evangelical campaign for 15 years instead.

This is more like one man braving a fallen environment as an anthropological researcher to help us see the future direction of American culture.

And let me tell you something, it ain't Christian.

And that's why Carl's book matters.

The push for psychedelics like Ayahuasca, the discussions of trauma healing, and even the obsession with mystical topics like UFOs are not new.

These trends have been around for decades as part of a coordinated plan to bring the doctrine of oneness to the world.

In other words, he knows his stuff.

To use another analogy, if Carl is a war historian, then I was there on the battlefield and I can tell you what he describes in Game of Gods is how it was, praise God, that I survived.

And I hope our conversation blesses you and others Friends, we're not just recording conversations on the Will Spencer podcast.

We're part of a restoration project for Christian civilization in the west and I need you in this fight with me.

When you visit Spotify or Apple Podcasts, please take a moment to write how these conversations impacted you.

Your words might be exactly what someone needs to hear to give this show their first listen.

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Quick note before we begin, we had some trouble with Carl's microphone during the last hour or so.

I've done a good bit of sonic surgery on it, trying to make it as clear as possible.

And please welcome this week's guest on the podcast, the author of the outstanding book Game of Gods, the Temple of Man in the Age Of Re Enchantment.

Carl Teichrib.

Carl Tib, author of Game of Gods.

Thanks so much for joining me on the Will Spencer podcast.

Hi, Will.

I'm excited to have this conversation with you.

We've been both anticipating this for a while, so this is fun.

Yeah, I've enjoyed our, our banter back and forth and sharing some stories.

I talked a little bit about that in the introduction that I wrote to this podcast about how much fun I've had interacting with you, reading through the book and, like, real time and telling you, like, oh, my gosh, this part of this part of this part, like, you've, you've captured so many aspects of my story from, from the orbital view.

So I, I appreciate that very much.

No, that's cool.

And, and, and one of those takeaways was the realization that I didn't know this when I wrote it.

I wrote it for you.

You wrote it for me?

Yeah.

Because.

Because of that connection that was able to develop with your prior experiences, where you're at now, and how that dovetails into the challenges that we see in terms of, of the worldviews around us.

And I'm really glad that you documented that.

So for those who are watching, here's the book.

And you can see that I've got my notes and I've got flags on the top for the really important stuff and highlighted the whole thing.

And so I can go back through and read it again.

Because you have documented again, from a very high level the dangers of the world that I was walking around in.

And ground level, I think I said in my intro, I said, if you're a war historian, you're documenting the battle that I was, that I was in.

In many ways.

You got it.

You got it right?

I mean, I know that you showed up and in many different spots.

So it's not just like you're an academic reading books like you've been in there as well, but you capture, you captured the world that I was marinating in for 20 or so years.

And you help see things and explain them and explain their relevance to Christians and really to everyone in a way that I didn't expect.

Well, and you know this as well as I do, Will, that this is the trajectory of our culture.

So while it's your story and it's my story from the perspective of researching it and trying to understand it from a Christian point of view, it really, in many respects, is a mirror of what's happening in the world all around us, from the geopolitical to the social to the spiritual.

There are these interconnections, these worldview interconnections that are taking off, that are blossoming today that 30, 40 years ago, we probably couldn't quite anticipate, but here we are, we're living it out now.

Now, how did you find your way into.

Into this world?

That's the part.

So you and I were talking a little bit before we hit record.

I got to understand a little bit more about your background, so maybe talk a little bit about like.

Like who.

Who you were, where you came from, and how you got dropped into the middle of this, I guess, magical mystery tour, if we want to call it that.

I like that, Will.

That's great.

I'm an accidental researcher.

I'm an accidental author.

I grew up on a grain farm in rural Manitoba.

I still live in that same area.

In fact, I live just a half a mile away from where I grew up.

So I, as a farm boy, had no anticipation or no thought at all that I would ever become a social researcher dealing on these kinds of topics.

In fact, it had never entered my mind.

No, but you know what I mean.

So you grew up in that era.

And it's before the Internet, it's before cell phones, it's before cable television or any of these other common things that we're used to today.

And after I quit.

Let me back it up just briefly.

I quit high school at the end of grade 11, in the words of my favorite western author, Louis Lemour.

I found that high school interfered with my education, so I left.

And it's horrible.

That's just how it is.

And I went to Bible college for two years.

And that was a stipulation that my mother had, that my mother was a schoolteacher.

And both my dad and mom, though they were farmers, also drove school bus.

So the fact I quit was a bit of a shocker.

The fact that they opened the door for me to do that was also a bit of a shocker.

And so I went to Bible college for a couple of years.

I came back to my community and I ended up marrying my best friend.

And we settled down and I got a job working for a local healthcare organization, working with senior citizens in my little town, little town of 800 people.

And it's my job to develop a network of volunteers and community resources to help senior citizens stay in their home for as long as possible.

I had to answer to a board of directors.

And it turned out that the majority of my board of directors, actually all of them were either members of the Masonic Lodge, the Eastern Star, the Rebecca's, the Royal Purples or the Elks, because we had five lodges in our town.

And in fact, my town, Gladstone, is the oldest incorporated town in western Canada west of Winnipeg.

And we had a Masonic lodge before the town was even incorporated.

So I was under intense pressure to join Freemasonry as a young man because I was active in my community, I was politically involved, I was socially involved.

I was part of the infrastructure, some of the glue that binds together a small rural community.

And I would have been a good catch for them.

Any young man is a good catch, especially because the organization demographically was already starting to die out.

And things were said and things were done that forced me to examine Freemasonry.

Two of my board members took me out for a supper meeting and one of them said something that changed the course of my life.

In fact, we probably wouldn't have this conversation well if it wasn't for his brief statement.

And I'm like, what?

Yeah, like, you know, where's that coming from?

Good for you, I guess.

And so bells are going off in the back of my mind.

It was like, you know, if you were a car salesman and I was kicking the tires and decided I still was just going to walk away, you would cinch the deal by saying, we're not Satanist.

This didn't make any sense to me, Will, whatsoever.

And I walked away from that conversation going, boy, I need to know what's going on.

I need to know why they would.

Say something like this.

What compelled him to make a statement as bizarre as what I had heard?

And so it began a multi year journey to discover what Freemasonry was about.

Now, at that time, I didn't realize that there were books published on the subject.

Again, this is pre Internet days.

How do you go about doing it?

Well, I did a number of things that allowed me to gain access to documents, their philosophical works, their works of history, their rituals, their monitors.

And I did a deep dive into that because it was just a personal thing, nothing more.

And so I dived deep into that and it didn't take long.

And I found out that I had to dive into another movement called Theosophy and then Rosicrucianism.

And it didn't take long.

And I realized, okay, I've got a model, a very interesting model of a old boy network of sorts, with spiritual implications.

But more than that, there's social implications and even political implications because there's a worldview, a oneist worldview.

And I began to overlay that as my model to try to understand how my province was working, my nation was working, and then to see it as a global model as well.

So I was accidental.

And in terms of the writing side of it, I've always enjoyed reading.

I've always enjoyed writing.

I didn't like school.

That wasn't my thing.

But I enjoyed learning.

And so in the.

Oh, golly, I think.

92, 93, I started writing articles for motorcycle magazines.

I'm a dirt biker again, farm boy.

My life revolved in the summertimes around dirt bikes, hunting, swimming holes, and farm work.

In the wintertime, my life revolved around again, hunting, trapping, snowshoeing and snowmobiling and skating on the river, stuff like that.

I mean, pretty basic stuff.

It was just a hobby, and I enjoyed it.

My youngest brother, 17 years old, Bevan, was tragically killed in a truck accident less than a mile from the farm.

And at the same time, I was doing the research, I was doing that research on worldview issues, and I was writing alongside as well.

And all this is just a hobby.

But his death forced me to make a decision.

Do I take the road of potential moto journalism?

Because that was in the cards, so to speak.

The writing was there, pun intended, or do I take the road of dealing on Christian worldview issues, bringing a warning to the church with what I was seeing, wrestling with the implications of the worldview shift that I had been studying.

What do I do?

I was at a crossroads and I went, you know, you do something that has lasting importance.

I love motorcycling.

I still love riding, but that's.

I knew that I had to make that change.

I had to make that shift.

And so the gears shifted, and I am doing what I'm doing now.

So it sounds to me like they talked to the wrong farm boy.

They did, totally.

I've always been a bit of a.

Yeah, I'm not troublemaker.

I've Always been a bit of a troublemaker.

There's always been something inside of me that's desired true truth.

Okay.

And so my parents were Christian.

They were wise individuals.

My dad is still alive.

He's almost 86.

He still lives on the farm.

My mom was incredible, incredibly, a wise woman.

My father was a hardworking, wise individual.

And they instilled in me from a very young age the importance of truth.

If there was another pivotal moment I could look back on.

And there's a number of them.

Will.

Grade 2.

It sounds as bizarre as it is.

The memory's still sharp in my mind.

Right before Christmas, a wonderful Ms.

O'Connell, beautiful school teacher, lovely lady, had all of us sitting in this circle, and she was going to tell us this wonderful story of Santa Claus and reindeer that could magically fly.

And I lost it.

And I stood up and I demanded that she stopped telling lies.

Stop it now.

And it was a clash of convictions, a swelling of emotions.

By the time it was all said and done, the whole class had ruptured in a deluge of tears.

And she kicked me out.

And that wasn't the first time I got kicked out.

And it sure wasn't the last time I got kicked out, let me tell you.

But Will, she sat me on her lap afterwards, and it stung as she explained to me.

Sometimes you have to tell people what they want to believe, even if it's not the truth.

Wrong.

And those are the things that stick in a little boy's mind.

That even growing up, you realize that, okay, these are some of the pieces of your private life that has shaped where you are today.

I mean, that, that.

I mean, all those pieces.

That makes sense, right?

Like you would be told you would.

You would know at that young age that you disagree with the idea of telling people comfortable lies, the commitment to truth.

And then right, fast, fast forward.

I don't know.

I don't know how old the two.

How old the second grade.

You said second grade.

How old.

How old that is until you're in your early 20s, when.

When you start pulling on the thread of truth of this kind of new age, the theosophical, progressive spirituality, freemasonic.

And you just.

You just keep pulling.

It's.

It's incredible.

You just keep pulling the string.

It literally just keeps going.

And so you got.

You got hooked with the largest truth pursuit, I think, probably ever, just considering the magnitude of what you found.

Exactly.

And you're right.

You're pulling that string.

You're still pulling that string as a Christian.

You're still pulling that string, unwinding now how that clash of the truth claim versus the false claim, how it still unfolds and all the historical threads that have pulled together this tapestry, really a tapestry of fiction, but a tapestry that nevertheless runs.

Runs the world, so to speak, in terms of having its impact.

Right.

From social issues to political and obviously spiritual.

Yeah.

So after you left the motorcycle magazine and you started getting more into.

I don't Accidental researcher, but what label should we use for this topic set?

I usually call it the New Age.

I know that that's not such a popular term anymore.

Progressive, spirituality, progress, new thought, all these terms.

Is there a term that you prefer to use to describe all this?

Yeah, that's an interesting question.

I don't know.

I like the term re.

Enchantment as that grander narrative.

But this is.

It is new age, but it's more than the new age.

It rolls through in the realm of politics, it rolls through in the realm of.

Of social reconstruction.

And so it ends up having really a practical application beyond the theoretical.

So I look at this as simply a macro worldview transformation as we have stepped away from the Judeo Christian ethic, as we removed ourselves even from modernity, looking to fill it with something else.

So, and this is something that I teach my class, I teach a class on secular pagan trends at Miller College of the B.

It's a modular course, a 20 hour course that I do once a year.

Of course, these are first of all often literary, artistic, scientific movements, philosophical intellectual movements, but they have their.

They touch on so much more.

And then with the Vietnam War taking place first for France, we forget that France was there before America and how the French nation ruined itself in the jungles of Vietnam.

And it opened up a massive transformation in French social thinking.

All of a sudden, the questioning of authority, national purpose, the lies being told.

America follows suit and does the exact same thing in Vietnam.

And so now we have this shift from modernity which said that we had entered an age of reason, materialism, naturalism, that's all we have.

But it gave us.

It gave us, you know, it gave us Auschwitz, it gave us the atomic bomb, it gave us mustard gas and machine guns in the trenches of World War I.

And then it gave us mass slaughter in World War II.

So it's a generation that has already now, culturally, been soaked in the experience of death, death coming from really the implements of modernity.

And so authority is now up for grabs.

We reject modernity, but we reject Christianity, too, because modernity rejected Christianity.

We're not going back to that.

And so we enter a postmodern era.

But with postmodernity, as you peel it back, you realize that there's ultimately a vacuum of meaning and purpose, because it says, in essence, all we have are questions, and we stay in the question.

We don't look for the solution.

And honor is found in the question, but not in finding the ultimate truth.

And so we're kind of mired in no man's land, but a vacuum of meaning demands to be filled.

And so, at the same time that postmodernism enters the fray, intellectually, we see its own replacement being born.

And some would call it the New Age movement.

I would say it's more than that.

I'd say it's re enchantment, this desire for wonder, for purpose, this desire for meaning, a desire to now feel like I'm part of something bigger, like I'm somehow connected into something deeper and now giving me a personal sense of purpose.

And that is, in essence saying we need to return to the earth.

We need to return to some form of mystical spirituality.

We need to get in touch with the cosmic.

We need to find our purpose and our sense in the we, not even in the I that comes with the New Age movement.

But the New Age movement, in a sense, is a thinly spread smorgasbord of spiritual experiences, which are almost more like a consumerist approach to try to find inner meaning.

Whereas re Enchantment says it actually is found in a collective, it's in we.

And so that's the twist that I'm seeing.

And in terms of that sense of re enchantment, I'll give you just one example how it ends up landing into the realm of politics.

I'm in Canada as of this recording Yesterday, my prime minister basically came out and said, I'm gonna resign from my position.

We're coming up for an election.

It's gonna center a lot of it around the carbon tax.

Well, the carbon tax is a re Enchantment tax.

It's a tax that says collectively.

Collectively, if we all pay, we can somehow save Gaia, we somehow save Mother Earth.

Bingo.

That's the narrative.

And so I'll be honest, it ticks me off.

I fill up my car at the gas pump and I'm going, I'm paying my tithe and offering to Mother Earth in the form of a carbon tax.

Thank you.

Finally, someone said it.

Yes.

That'S the collective.

That's the real.

That's re Enchantment hitting politics.

Yeah.

And it sucks.

It really does.

It really does.

Because it's an entirely.

I've tried to talk to people about this and when I try and explain to them, for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to click.

But when you were.

When you take out God the Father, and then you go into a realm of new age and new enchantment and re.

Enchantment, which I want to get to because I've seen inside the New age, that division between self centered, self focused.

I don't mean self centered in a derogatory way.

I mean focused on the self self focused spiritual experiences to the emerging understanding that through those self focused spiritual experiences, you emerge into a greater we.

That was always the dogmatic stuff that would come at the tail end of all the stuff that I was doing.

Excuse me, I never, I was never really super into it, probably because ultimately it's hyper feminine and effeminate in character.

Because when you take out God the Father, you have to substitute another deity and that deity becomes God the Mother or Mother Earth or Gaia.

And that is it that I try to explain this.

That's exactly it.

And you're the first person.

And we talked on the cultish podcast.

I was like, okay, he gets it.

Because I tried to explain that to people and they don't see it.

Right, right.

But.

But you're absolutely correct, Will.

This is a transformation.

It's a shift.

We're shifting from God to goddess.

And that's.

That's the cultural momentum.

Yes, it is goddess.

It is psychedelic, it is mystical.

All of those elements come together.

So that's the age we're finding ourselves in.

And what you documented in the book is.

So this is the collective age that we're all experiencing that we can't quite feel, but we can't Quite see, but we can feel it.

And I don't mean to say that Donald Trump is a savior.

He's not.

But what he embodied in the collective psyche was this masculine patriarchal, he's a business owner, he's a grandfather.

This masculine patriarchal spirit.

Right.

Versus this feminine joy.

It takes a village, it's her turn.

Kind of feminine spirit like in the ballot box of the United States.

That's what I, that's what I saw that as.

And it was a big question, who's going to win?

But just because Donald Trump won that election doesn't mean that this collective, this collective we re.

Enchantment energy has gone anywhere.

Guess what?

It's angry.

1997.

By that point, I was writing articles on these topics.

I was diving now into the political side of it.

And this is going to be my country's foreign policy pursuit, that we would be pressuring the United nations to create its own rapid reaction military capability, giving the Secretary General its own vanguard force with his own intelligence capability, plus a global taxation structure to pay for United nations controlled military capability.

It's not a conspiracy theory.

It was actually in our local newspaper.

And so I have no formal training in doing research.

Okay, again, back to the beginning of the story.

I'm just a farm boy.

That's all I am.

And so how do you go about engaging in real research?

I didn't know.

I wasn't trained in this.

Not to any extent.

I mean, I went to Bible college for a couple years, but they don't teach you this.

So I figured I'll just do what makes sense.

I picked up the telephone, I called the Department of.

I believe back then it was called the Department of Foreign affairs or International Affairs.

Called them up.

I said, can I have a copy?

They said, sure, how much?

Well, it's free.

It's a government document.

Awesome.

Can I have three copies?

Sure.

Done in the mail.

That's research.

Old school style.

But for myself, that was where the political side of this oneist view kind of started to coalesce as I realized that my own government had a worldview that was attached to politics.

And so within the document itself.

It recognizes that national sovereignty was going to be challenged by such an approach.

And then I started to dig deeper into this idea of world federalism, global governance.

Because the Rio Earth Summit gave us the climate change agenda.

It gave us things like the conventional biological diversity.

It really set the stage for the radical green spiritual, social, political movement we have today.

That in many respects is the jump off point.

And so I very quickly realized I couldn't divorce myself from the spiritual and the political side of it.

They're both there and they both had to be explored, including the social side.

Explored, deconstructed.

And then hopefully I could reconstruct, communicate this back to the Christian community about what was transpiring, how re enchantment, this idea of a changing worldview, basically Neo Babel Babel 2.0 was being lived out.

Yeah, I remember reading through the book and you're touching on so many themes woven throughout the book itself.

But you used a term a second ago that I think it'll be important to unpack.

Use the term oneist.

So let's, let's talk about what that term is.

I know what it means.

My audience might not.

So let's.

What does oneist mean?

Sure, sure.

I Give my friend Dr.

Peter Jones credit because I think he's done the best job in breaking this down.

And he describes the dominant worldview that we see in action today as a oneist worldview.

One is a being.

Man, God and nature all share the same essence.

All three are intricately linked together.

There's a continuity between the three realms and there is no primary difference.

I am divine.

The squirrel that just ran down the tree over there is divine.

You're divine.

The chair we're sitting on can even be divine.

There is no true distinction.

There are no categorical differences.

With that in mind, then there's also no value judgments.

And this is the thing that kind of gets me about the oneness perspective.

Oneism is always saying, we want a better tomorrow.

Well, hold on.

If you're a true oneist, there is no tomorrow, There is no better.

All there is is the eternal now.

Your cancer and your cat, it's all the same.

It intrinsically means nothing.

So that's the dominant worldview.

Whether you take it from a New Age perspective.

You can even take it from an atheistic, secularist perspective saying, man is the measure of all things.

There's nothing higher than man.

Well, hello.

Now you've already starting to wade in those waters.

The biblical worldview says, hold on, no, it's not oneism.

And Dr.

Peter Jones does a really good job of saying this.

It's twoism, not dualism.

Two ism, I.e.

god distinct, unique, categorically different than all of creation.

He is the Creator and then we have the creation 1 and 2.

And it's a very simplistic way of looking at it.

Will.

But at the same time, that simplistic approach, and it's not, pardon me, it's a simple approach, but it's not simplistic.

It plays itself out in very complex ways on both arguments.

This is being lived out today.

And I believe firmly that the Christian church has largely, we largely have misunderstood the importance of the basics of that, that God is distinct.

Yes, we've, we've, yeah, we've absolutely lost that.

And it's funny because over the holidays I was, I was arguing while I was doing an apologetics.

Wasn't an argument, it was an apologetics engagement with a proponent of Advaita Vedanta.

She was a, she's an American Vedantist and she was proud of it.

And so, so for those who don't know, Advaita Vedanta is a sect of Hinduism.

It's called non dualism.

All is one.

I am that it's, it's really just saying that all things are one and all things are God, pantheism, monism and all that.

And, and I was arguing, I was arguing with her saying if you believe, first of all, you don't actually live like all things are one.

No one does.

Right.

Nobod.

Nobody does.

Like, you want to believe it conceptually on some level.

But even if, even if you did believe it, you would be saying that I have, if all things are one, then you have no ability to say what is good or evil, what is right or wrong, because all things are essentially one.

All things are equally God.

You know, the, the, the psycho killer, you know, malicious serial killer and, and, and child trafficker is equally God as the, the most holy and, and, and peaceful and loving person.

You know, there's, there's no difference on some level between them.

And she agreed.

I, I, I give her, I respect her for saying, yes, there is no, there is no difference.

But as I continued pushing her on, on the worldview, it was clear that she was getting very uncomfortable because a lot of people don't think.

Yeah.

Through the implications of their, they don't think through the, the trajectory of their ideas, the implications of those beliefs.

Exactly.

I'm there doing research and also looking for opportunities to have conversations.

And I had a wonderful conversation with an elderly woman.

She was from Delaware, if my memory is correct.

Her perspective definitely would have been Wiccan in orientation.

And we end up having a conversation about one ism and twoism.

And she was completely entrenched in the oneist worldview, made that very, very clear.

And then I brought about a oneist.

Pardon me, a twoist answer or alternative to the oneist worldview.

In essence saying that if this other perspective even exists, it acts as cracks in the very foundation of your one estate perspective.

Because there shouldn't be a philosophy that cannot be subsumed eventually into your oneness worldview.

And this, by its nature is completely counter and remains counter to it.

She had never even thought of any of these ideas before.

Nothing.

It was really interesting, but she was like, she had to wrestle with this.

I had a similar experience.

I sat with a Wiccan practitioner and we had this amazing conversation around oneism versus two ism.

Same with that.

Burning Man.

Want to go to Burning Man?

Will, more often than not, that's where we end up landing.

Is reality one or is it two?

And of course, the argument is always, it's one.

But we're like, hold on.

In fact, I remember having a conversation.

I think I have it in the last, second, last section of the book or a paragraph or every chapter in the book where I had a Russian esoteric artist come to our camp, and he sees a sign at our camp which says, camp of the unknown God.

And he blurts out to the effect of, who is this unknown God?

We sit, we have this great conversation.

I find out he's a oneist.

You always ask a lot of questions.

And I find out he's a oneist.

He's an artist.

And so I broached the issue of 1 ism versus 2 ism by saying or asking him, are you saying that you are the same as your artwork?

And he goes, of course not.

I'm the artist.

I have more value than my art.

And I'm like, God, right, exactly.

And God is the ultimate artist.

And you've been there.

I know you've been to Burning Man.

This is how you and I have made that connection earlier on.

You know, you've Got this mountain backdrop all around us.

It's a harsh environment, but there's a stark beauty to the place.

And so I just, you know, I held up my arms and said, God is the ultimate artist.

This is his artwork.

If you're not the same as your artwork, how can God be the same as his?

And he got it.

He was like, you're right, I have to rethink some things.

So, you know, it's a starting point.

It's a starting point, but an important starting point.

It is.

It is like these conversations.

Well, because most people, if you come into the New age or re.

Enchantment world, I'll just call it New Age for the sake of brevity.

You come into the New age world.

The thing about the New age is there's no place to stand within it, to critique it.

Like, you can't.

It's all hyper relativized, so you can't stand any place to get.

The only.

The only way that you can see it is from outside it.

And the second you take a step outside it, you get the question, what are you one of them?

Like, I got that question once I started.

Begin waking up.

Long before I became a Christian, I started having problems with this idea, with this exact idea that all is one.

Because it's like, wait, you're telling me that good and evil are just my subjective perception that I have to.

That I have to undo my own consciousness, my own conditioned awareness is what the.

Is the Buddhist term for it to see that all things are one.

And ultimately there is no moral distinction between anything at all, just the judgments that I bring.

Okay, fine, let's go with that.

So you're telling.

And this was actually what happened.

I said, you're telling me.

So I've discovered about Jeffrey Epstein.

I've told the story many times.

I discovered about Jeffrey Epstein and child trafficking, we'll call it, just for the algorithm's sake.

So, And I, And I was like, so you're telling me that you would look, you know, a child in the eye and you would tell them that you are equally God as that man who's trafficking you.

You would say that to a child and because it shattered my worldview to imagine that there was wickedness that was that serious, that genuine, you know, and that.

That malicious, like, there's no.

You're not making.

That's not a mistake.

Like, oops, I had no idea.

Like, you're not making a mistake.

Well, that's evil.

And so, and so you're telling me that you would look that child in the eyes.

And you would say that to them.

And I could never find anyone who would say yes to that.

But instead they would question me like, what are you one of them?

Like, like not obviously not one of the traffickers, but like someone from the outside when I was just running out the, the philosophy, the theology of the worldview.

Because I cared, right?

And so, so, okay, so I have a question.

So I have a question.

Then I have a question for you, Will, because you mean.

And I kind of know the answer already, but you've been there, right?

You've immersed yourself in it.

Tell me if I'm incorrect.

Maybe it's not a question, it's a statement.

Tell me if I'm incorrect with this statement.

The oneness perspective doesn't need to have a philosophical foundation that is strong and true because my feelings affirm it.

Would that be accurate?

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

So how do you argue with feelings?

And how do you argue with this lived experience that literally really, a dopamine rush, you know, neurochemicals flooding your system?

That now proves by my emotions, my feelings, that I'm one with everything.

Of course, just because you feel something doesn't mean it's accurate or true.

Which is why we should always be questioning our feelings.

And while our feelings are important, they don't dictate what is ultimately true truth.

I had a situation at Burning man this last year.

We were at a workshop on giving nature legal precedent the same as humans giving, in other words, giving nature human rights.

And it's an international law movement.

It's an international movement.

In fact, there's a couple of Latin American countries exploring what this looks like.

Giving rivers human rights, giving mountain ranges human rights, giving animal species human rights.

What this looks like in law.

Which is really dangerous territory to go down.

Yeah.

Oh, very much so.

And the person giving the presentation was a influential social change agent within this movement trying to bring about a nature based code that would be equal to human rights.

And explain to us how there's really no difference between us and the animals and us and the dust on the playa.

There's no fundamental difference whatsoever.

We're all one.

I couldn't take it anymore, Will.

And as a researcher, I don't try to interject, I don't try, I don't try to push the button.

But for whatever reason this last year I had to just way too many times, I'm like, no, my hand's got to go up.

And so I raise my hand and I asked a question.

To the effect of, deer aren't having these conversations, ducks aren't having these conversations, beavers aren't having these conversations.

The very fact we're having this conversation, pro or con, demonstrates that we have a value higher than nature.

And the whole place just went silent.

The moderator didn't know what to say.

I had this wonderful lady sitting right beside me.

She looked, and I kid you not, Will, she turns, she looks at me like this, and her hands raise up and she goes, you're right.

Amazing.

I know.

I know.

Awesome.

And so here's the beautiful part.

Her and her boyfriend, we end up.

And the rest of our team were filtering in and out of this camp where this lecture was happening.

It was at Earth Guardians, by the way.

And so we sat there, and for about two to three hours, we had this incredible conversation with Ryan and Rosie.

Wonderful, wonderful conversation.

I went back to their camp, gave them copies of my book the following day, invited them to our camp for our morning devotionals.

Because every morning we were exploring one of the psalms, and surprise, they came.

They came.

The morning we were tackling Psalm 51, which is David's plea saying, I am undone.

I can't save myself.

All I can do is rest on God's righteousness.

God doesn't require sacrifice.

He just requires a broken and contrite heart.

And David is a broken man because what he has done to Bathsheba and created this national shame.

And I remember Rosie reading that passage because she asked if she could read the passage there at Burning man, and the tears are just streaming down her face as she recognizes herself in the passage.

So it's.

We're still having conversations with both of them.

In fact, we still go back and forth by text and by phone call, along with many others that we had interactions with this year.

So here we go.

This oneness worldview.

You challenge the assumption in a simple way.

We know the moderator or the speaker isn't going to budge.

He's bought in.

He's the salesman.

But the consumers all around, all of a sudden, some of them, maybe one, maybe two will be going, you're right, I can't buy this product because it's flawed.

Well, praise God for that.

That's a.

That's.

Yeah, because.

Because you.

You draw a really clear distinction there between the apostles of false religion, the prophets of false religion, and the.

And the refugees from them.

You know, the.

The people who are just.

They're listening because they.

Maybe they don't know better.

Maybe they've never been taught.

But here's someone Providing for them a coherent theology, more or less a worldview that seems to speak to their sense of moral outrage.

There's legitimate injustice being done in the world.

We live in a fallen world.

And so, absolutely, as the Christian moral framework has departed from the public square in the favor of postmodernism, as you say, you know, re.

Enchantment, the new age has happily come in and say, well, we'll just sit down in this chair.

And there's no.

There's no counterpoint.

And so I'm.

I'm grateful that you were there to speak into that moment with the audience, and I'm.

I'm glad that it landed with some people for you, because I was worried that they would have turned on you and started lighting up the torches and, you know, the Burning man would have been.

Would have been you.

But.

But that's actually a new man to burn.

And he's a Canadian.

But, you know, to your.

To your point, this is actually the importance for us as Christians to understand the worldview challenge, to understand the shift, to know the language, to grasp the assumptions, to work through the assumptions, so that when we hear those assumptions laid out, we can raise our hand.

We actually can.

Especially in this age that says we are supposed to tolerate everything.

We're supposed to give everybody a voice.

Well, stand up.

Use your voice.

We can.

We should.

We must.

And so we had numerous opportunities at Burning man this last year.

I mean, again, previous years, for the most part, I'm there doing research, I'm surveying, I'm going to lectures, I'm interacting and try to understand the culture and then some of the larger conversations that are taking place.

Because Burning man, in many respects, as you know, is kind of this weird overlap between the World Economic Forum and Mardi Gras all at once, because those levels of conversations are happening while people are running around naked.

So it's just a bizarre collection of the secular and the spiritual, the mystical, the material, the serious and the silly, the political and the religious.

It's all there.

And so this last year, we raised our hands a lot, and I think every single time it elicited some conversation with somebody in the room.

I had one situation where I had the mic taken away from me.

We had a prominent person with a guy in the network at Camp mystic giving this really intricate lecture about how mathematics proves God.

And I mean, well, it was really a cool lecture.

He went into the Bible and he used scripture verses, and then he used complex mathematical processes and big assumptions to show that you are God because you are all Mathematical beings, yes.

There's a twist.

You had me in the first half, not going to lie.

So I had to raise my hand because again, there's just something wrong with this.

And so I asked or made a.

Statement to the effect of, first of all, I thank them.

You always thank them.

And because it's important, they are, they're giving of themselves and they believe it.

And so I thanked him.

I thanked him for his references to scripture, back to the Bible, and for the mathematical equations and the foundations he was laying mathematically.

And then I said something to the effect that, but we are the process of that mathematics.

We are mathematical creatures.

Everything about us, everything has a mathematical equation behind it.

But that portends that there is a mathematician outside the math.

And as I was talking, people in the audience were looking and some of them were starting to, you can see it.

They're like, oh, maybe I'm not God.

Maybe God is the true mathematician and we're just the product of the math.

And this guy couldn't get his microphone away from me fast enough.

He was literally grab that mic and get it back.

Because I wasn't done, but I guess I was done.

Nevertheless.

It opened up some awesome conversations afterwards.

And then our little team is there and we are conversing amongst ourselves always.

We're always critiquing what we're hearing.

And we're doing it just loud enough that we know that Everybody within about 10ft will have the ears going and listen.

Because all of a sudden we're dealing with the very topic that they were buying into, but from a different perspective and deconstructing it and bringing about another angle to it that they never thought of.

And even just our private, non private conversations opened up room for having greater dialogues and talks with those around us.

So hey, use the 1 est, use the 1 est and 2 est methodology to bring about a conversation around what is true truth, and more importantly, who is ultimately true.

Well, I just want to applaud you for doing that.

Thank you.

That's that.

You know, I've talked to a lot of people, particularly when I spent more time on Instagram.

Burning man would be coming up and I'd see posts about it.

And so maybe I would wade in and leave a couple comments, not intending to be provocative, but just saying, like, hey, just so you know, this is what's going on there.

And from Christians, I mean, oh, we're going to Burning Man.

It's like, oh yeah, where I'm going to give my testimony.

And it all seems their approach to it seems very casual in the sense of like, you know, we just want to go and, and hang out, but we're going as Christians, you know.

And so I've, I've had, I've pushed back on people about that and they don't like it because the friends who found me at Burning man camp, Spirit Dream, they, they mounted a 15 year organized campaign to do an underground ministry.

They had protocols, they had rules, they had structures.

They sent people home.

Like, this is business.

We, like we are here.

This is a mission work.

You know, we're setting up a camp and this is what we do and we leave before the burn.

Like, they were professional about it.

And I'm like, that's great.

And so, so I appreciate hearing from you about how you go as an individual or a small camp, just two or three people, five people, something like that, and how you conduct yourself as a Christian in that environment.

Not that I had any questions about that.

Naturally I didn't.

But the question has always been up for me, like, well, first of all, I have no desire to really go back.

I think it would be, it would grieve me quite deeply to go back in some ways.

But hearing you talk about the way that you conduct yourself there, that you use it as apologetic opportunities and to speak into these dialogues and to speak into these conversations, to put forth a, let's say, two ist worldview and a deeply one est world.

I think that's very, very admirable and very brave.

Well, thank you.

It's.

I mean, God opens those doors and equips those to do that type of a task and for whatever reason he is called a farm boy to go and do it.

What's interesting is I didn't go into the Burning man experience for apologetics or for ministry reasons in the sense of acting as a missionary.

That wasn't my original intention.

It was primarily first and foremost, even though I went my very first year, I went my, my friend Bob Worley, great guy.

He currently lives just down the road from Burning man up in Cedarville, California.

But my original intention was just to go in and try to understand the culture, to try to understand the implications, understand the influences emerging via Silicon Valley, into the desert and then out into the world.

Because as you know, Burning man is not just a party, it's also political.

It has massive social ramifications.

I'm studying on the political side, World federalism, the United Nations.

I go to UN events, I go to world Federalist events, I go to global governance events.

That's what I did for a long period of time.

That was actually my primary focus for a lot of years.

And then interfaithism, which represents that oneness perspective within the world of pluralistic religions, of perennial philosophy, and how that's coordinated intentionally through events like the Parliament of World Religions and other interfaith activities.

So if there's a political side to the oneist worldview, if there is an interfaith religious component, is there a technological side?

Yes.

So I dived deep into that because there's a technological response to this oneist worldview.

We can become one through our technology, but if all that's in play, there has to be a celebratory, cultural celebratory expression.

And roughly that time, I started to dive into it a little bit deeper because I realized that, okay, this is that cultural celebratory expression of oneism.

Hence that's why all of a sudden it was on my radar for research, going to, first of all, regional burn.

Even before that, I attended a small transformational festival, doing surveys and trying to grasp, number one, what's happening here.

And then what does this mean in terms of how it impacts and influences the culture in a larger way?

Is it mirroring the culture?

Is it an incubator for culture?

Is it projecting back into civilization, kind of allowing it to seep into the cracks and pores of our world?

Is it all that?

You know, is it all that and more?

Yes, absolutely.

And so I see this as having as much of.

Of an importance in terms of.

Of research or a Christian point of view, trying to wrestle through that apologetics of 1 ism versus 2 ism and just recognizing it in its different facets, politically, religiously, technologically, and with Burning man culturally.

So you.

You get that.

And, and that's the sort of thing that it's very difficult to explain to anybody.

Well, particularly to Christians.

And that's not a bad thing because it's so difficult when explaining the festival, to get past the hedonism, the Nudity, the drug use, all that stuff.

All that stuff is there.

Yes, yes.

That's a huge part of the festival and.

And more.

Right.

And when you get past that, it.

The festival is actually an ideological crossroads for different sectors of, we might say the.

The.

Well, the political, economic, cultural elite to meet, exchange ideas, and then go repropagate them out.

So one of the things that people don't really know about Burning man, or maybe they do.

That was my first year.

You could basically walk across it.

You didn't need a bike.

I walked everywhere that year.

And it was just a whole bunch of people in the desert being like, well, we don't really know what we're doing, so let's like, shoot some lasers off and have some fire and have, you know, art cars driving around.

It was.

It was like the Wild West.

There was a chaotic element to it.

In some very important ways.

One of those ways was that there were now bus camps of elite tech entrepreneurs that would be driven in.

In giant rockstar tour buses.

Those tour buses would be then parked in a circle, like, circling the wagons.

There would be a gate with wristband access to entry.

There would be chefs and showers so that the elite could come to Burning Man.

They could put on their playa attire, and so they could walk amongst us looking like everyday average people, of course, with security guards who did their best to not, you know, to not stick out.

But then they could go back to their elite camps and have whatever meetings and sleep, whatever, in whatever comfortable bed.

And then when they're done, they get in the bus and they.

And they drive out of town.

And so that was a.

That was a big shift that.

That gets written about a lot in San Francisco papers.

You know, is this really Burning Man Whatever?

But it strikes me that that really misses the point that you have these elites coming to Burning man and marinating deeply in a.

In a drug and hedonism fueled, all as one environment.

And then they take that away from them, where they take that away with them when they go back into the world.

And that drives technology, that drives policy, that drives politics, and that drives culture in ways that Christians can now feel, but they don't know where it comes from.

Absolutely.

And probably one of the most extreme examples of how this intersects is with Google.

Google, Eric Schmidt is the CEO that made Google what it is today.

Larry Page and his buddies put the Burning man symbol on their webpage and that was the very first Google doodle doodle.

And it was them announcing to Silicon Valley were burners first.

And so Google culture has been completely enmeshed within the Burning man culture.

In fact, so much so that they would have buses in those earlier years bringing Google personnel to Burning man, allowing them to go back.

They would in fact do in house videos on how to handle yourself when you as a Google employee go to Burning Man.

Exactly.

And so and Burning man art was what would fashion the walls of Google's headquarters.

And so when Larry Page was looking for a new CEO, when they're looking for the CEO to make Google what it is today, they picked Eric Schmidt.

Why did they pick Eric Schmidt, who by the way, now is one of the most important and powerful men on the planet?

Well, because he had Bernie man on his resume.

Hello.

And so I have to tell my class, my students, and I tell this to Christian conferences sometimes when I'm given the opportunity to talk on these topics is that whether you realize it or not, you're all digital burners are ready because you're all using the products that have been designed, incubated, imagined in environments like nature.

This second life of the first successful VR platform, non gaming platform, was incubated through the Burning man experience.

It forms a major, a major component of today's VR, kind of the evolution of today's VR environment.

So there's lots more going on again than just simply a party.

And this is just one component of the work that we do in trying to understand how oneism has captured the mindset of the world.

There's so many other areas to explore, but I see Burning man as kind of being that the example that really encapsulates it, it really encapsulates this.

Now we all individually feel the oneness in our collectivism.

We're part of this social movement.

It is a social experiment that's very evident.

And in fact that's how it's described even within the Burning man community.

This is a social experiment.

What I do find interesting, and I've done some, a little bit of Freedom of Information act inquiries, I need to do more is the interplay between the intelligence community, the military and Burning man, because that's there.

Whoa.

Oh yeah.

That is seen.

I've seen big burly dudes with earpieces like, all, you know, steampunked out.

You know, I've seen.

I've seen that before.

I've seen guys that, like, they're.

That guy clearly is not enjoying the party.

That guy is here working for some sort of agency, and he looks like Dolph Lundgren a little bit in the.

In the Rocky movie.

It's like, I don't think he's from around, and he's.

That you'll.

You'll recognize.

He's at.

He's at the robot heart.

You've probably seen or heard of the robot.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, so they're.

They're on the sunrise, and everyone just kind of grooving their head as the sun's coming up.

And I'm looking around me, and there's.

There's the Terminator right there.

I'm like, okay.

Exactly.

You know, I can't remember if it was this year or last year.

My goodness.

We had a Chinook helicopter circling us almost daily.

All right, that's running at 10 to 15.

Yes, that's running at 10 to $15,000 per hour.

And how many circles are you doing around the city per day?

And that's not the only military hardware I've seen at Burning Man.

I've seen quite a bit of it, so.

All right, okay.

There is more going on.

We got wet.

So what.

In fact, it was kind of a neat experience because it chilled the place right down.

But what was interesting was we had an art piece put together by the Ukrainian minister of defense.

Okay.

Wow.

You are.

In fact, it was the Minister of defense for digital warfare, who was at Burning man for two weeks setting up this art piece.

I thought you were at war.

I thought you were at war.

Too busy.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, hello, why are you here unveiling a Ukrainian art piece?

I get why.

I totally get it.

I totally get it.

Ideas and Blackrock City into the World Bank's Charter City program.

So there's.

Again, this is not a party.

This stuff doesn't happen at parties.

Again, Ukraine, Russian conflict being played out in a propaganda battle within the Burning man community with art pieces to the Ukraine conflict with Russians coming.

There's a lot of Russians now who attend Burning Man a lot.

Fascinating.

Some fascinating geopolitics take place.

But what was really made Burning man tense this year, and I mean so tense that by Friday, we had a police presence, a special police presence.

Police trucks surrounding the man, police vehicles surrounding the temple, police vehicles around opulent temple, around Mayan warrior, around Robot Heart.

Oh, yeah, we had cops on Friday night.

Cops were everywhere.

I didn't hear anything about this.

No, no, no, no.

I don't think it ever really made it off Playa.

We had a massive police presence from Thursday on, but Friday it was extra, extra intense.

And so some of our team, we had a small team, eight people, some of our team members went to the police at the temple Friday night and went, yeah, okay, like, what's going on?

You guys obviously are expecting something.

And the police officer was like, we're expecting something.

We're ready.

We're expecting something really, really big.

And we already knew from the day before what that really big thing was, because we'd already had some conversations with people inside of the working mechanism of Burning Man.

So this is what was happening, Will.

We had pro Palestinian Hamas supporters and pro Israeli Jewish supporters all engaging in a propaganda war on Playa.

So as you would have, let's say, items dedicated at the temple to the October 7th massacre in Israel, all of a sudden, there'd be a Palestinian flag placed over top of that.

Then there'd be something placed over top of the Palestinian material.

And then all of a sudden, people be walking around with their backpacks and somebody would walk up behind and put a little flag on their back.

They wouldn't even know that all of a sudden, they're walking around with a pro PLO flag.

There was an October 7th memorial dedication art piece, but then there was also Arab Palestinian camps dedicated to that cause.

And it was so tense that by Thursday we were hearing some pretty hard rumbles.

One of the people on our team is a global security analyst.

He sat us down and he was like, all right, let me give you guys a bit of a breakdown of what you need to do if things hit the fan.

So he was giving us some Steps.

This is a guy from inside our camp.

He's a good friend.

And then by Friday, yeah, the police presence was big.

In fact, Black Rock City itself basically got emptied of police.

More forces came in.

Everybody went into the playa, went to deep Playa, surrounded the main community gathering sites, and we were waiting for something.

So.

But if you think about it, well, and this makes sense, and you would know this, if five drops of rain fall on Black Rock City, it makes it into the papers.

Okay.

This last year when we were at Burning Man, a woman dropped dead on the street.

We actually saw her.

We were, we were one of the few people, one of the.

Not the few, but one of the first people who saw the body.

We had paramedics rushing behind us.

It made the news.

Somebody died in Black Rock City.

But it's a city of 65 to 70,000 people.

In any given city, there's people dying all the time.

It doesn't make national news.

It doesn't make national news when an unknown person dies in, I don't know, Bakersfield doesn't make international news.

But a Burning man, it makes international news.

The rain's five drops, it makes international news.

So if you want to engage in a propaganda war with a global voice, have a global footprint in that one week span of the year, what is the most observed, most recognized place on the planet?

It's Blackrock City.

And so this last year was.

So we had a couple of days that was pretty, pretty intense as literally global geopolitics was playing out as a propaganda war on the Playa.

That's insane.

And I, I, first of all, I'm shocked that I didn't hear about any of this.

I didn't even hear a whisper, like normal.

I remember when the blm, you know, so.

So Burning man started on Baker beach in California.

I moved out to the Playa, right?

And so the dry lake bed in Nevada, and people would just bring their drugs and party and stuff like that.

And then ultimately it became kind of evident to the Nevada authorities, like, hey, yeah, people are on, you know, public land and they're really high.

You know, they're buying and selling drugs.

And so that was a big shift that happened once the Bureau of Land Management and I think Nevada police started patrolling the festival very lightly.

Like it wasn't, like, it wasn't like a police state presence, but they were around.

And so, you know, if you were going to do something that, you know, illegal, you had to be aware that there would be plain clothes officers around.

So.

And which to Me, that made sense because I just didn't see the state of Nevada or the United States of America being like, yes, on this plot of land, it's okay to buy and sell drugs because your guys are autonomous.

Like, I don't, I don't think so.

It didn't bother me that that was the case.

But like, what's odd about it is once that started happening, that made a little bit of news and Berners would start talking about, hey, I saw this police officer.

I saw these Bureau of Land Management guys.

They were always cool.

It wasn't, you know, it wasn't like someone out to, you know, harass people.

They're just doing their job.

Right.

So it was, it wasn't like persecuting kind of cops.

Right.

They're just, they're just there.

So just, just doing their everyday, average job.

But to know that you had police presence around the man, around opulent temple, around the, around the temple temple, and that none of that seems to have made it out of the playa at all is very strange to me because like you say, five drops of rain falls on the playa, everyone hears about it, but like a whole squadron of cop cars encircles the major landmarks of the festival.

And that's not, that's.

I don't, I don't understand that at all, actually.

Yeah.

Again, that's why for Christians, we will look at this event and we're going to be going, well, it's just a hedonistic party in the desert.

Everybody's drunk, everybody's high, everybody's having an orgy.

No, you actually just, in saying that, you just described most universities, by the way, you know, which is.

Okay, it's true.

Yeah.

In fact, you just described a lot of your towns as.

Well, that's what happens.

That's the world you just described.

Mardi Gras, you just described.

How many festivals did you describe?

That's a pretty good point.

Yeah.

And how many universities did I just describe?

For that matter, how many towns did I just describe?

Okay.

This stuff happens everywhere.

This is not new.

This is not novel.

Not in any respect.

It's just novel in the sense that there's a spotlight on it.

That said, we have missed.

And I understand why, because number one, there's not a lot of Christians doing this work.

And so there's the voices, I'm going to put it this way, the voices who have had that multi layer experience of trying to understand worldview politics.

All of this within a complete and dynamic package.

There's really not that Many of us, oh yeah.

And so we're getting it always from somebody's social media feed or somebody's Instagram or somebody's YouTube rant.

But there's not a lot of voices of people who've gone who are trying to bring some measure of reasonable, a reasonable dialogue within it, recognizing, yes, this stuff is happening, but.

And I've got a friend who was part of our camp this year going, you know, it's actually almost a psyops that that's what we always focus on.

While the real meat of the event is in the camps where we are talking about artificial intelligence, where tech leads are having high level conversations with other tech developers, with policymakers.

I'm going to workshops.

I remember last year I went to a workshop with a Republican insider on building left right, Democrat Republic coalitions.

Okay, that's the kind of stuff that's happening.

But we focus and I get it, we focus on the morality and I do understand that.

Which is actually a moral problem everywhere.

And we tend to forget that or not forget.

We tend not to realize that there's actually bigger worldview games being played.

And this is an incubator for some profound ideas that are going to shape your world.

And so for us as Christian researchers, there's only a handful who go in a way going to Burning man, like going to the parliamentary world religions, like going to United nations events, like going to transhumanist gatherings is giving us a window into what the world will look like in three months.

One year, 24 months later, we already see where the trend lines are going to be taking us.

Hence going to a workshop where we have a conversation about giving nature legal, human rights hello.

Watch how law begins to change.

It's so interesting because there are many communities online.

One of the, one of them is 4chan for, for those listening who have heard of 4chan 4chan poll 4chan B particularly be you know, they there there are things happening in those online communities that are important for people to know about because they have ripples outwards into the culture.

You may not believe that a small, you know, image board on some corner of the Internet can have that much influence, but believe me, it does.

Like the Rick Roll video.

If you, for those who know what Rickrolling is, it's 1.6 billion views.

You know, within a, within a year of it being sort of memed, he was already Rick Astley was performing at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

That's how.

And it had spread from 4chan.

One of the ways that that community functions is to post disgusting, outrageous, shocking images, right, that are just.

You just.

You don't want to look at it.

But they're there to drive away the people who would otherwise be inspecting and witnessing what's going on.

Like, you just.

I can't put that in my head.

I'm not going to look at it.

So you're missing the people that are just filtering it out.

And I wonder now if there's a way that Burning man sort of serves a similar function.

Like, okay, we can hide in plain sight because the people who would want to bring about traditional morality or who carry those ideas with them won't be able to handle being in the environment where all traditional moors are flouted.

All of them.

Right?

There is.

There is no traditional morality here at all beyond like, don't murder, don't kill anybody.

You know what I mean?

Like, no, no violence against people.

Right.

So.

So, so we're talking about traditional sexual morality.

Traditional morality in that realm.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, and so you can't.

So you.

So people wouldn't naturally be able to enter that environment, to pass through that wall, to be able to sit in and have the.

And listen in on the conversations that are going to be driving the culture, because the conversations are being had by people that.

That's the life that they live or they don't care.

Right.

Because they're opposed to traditional morality.

So in a way, it serves as a barrier, an effective one.

I can hardly argue, like, hey, we should all go and, like, just deal with that.

Right?

No, and like, it works.

And, and just real quick, that's why my friends from Spirit Dream, that's why they had such strict protocols that they developed over 15 years.

It's like, look, if we are going to be here and actually do ministry work, we have to recognize that this is what we're going to see.

This is what's going to be around us.

This is.

We're going to be subject to all of these spiritual influences.

Many are benign, many are malicious.

They have some stories about that.

And so we have to treat this like we're doing missionary work in a foreign country.

And maybe there's a case to be made for the right kind of Christians to think that way and to go in and to recognize that, like, yeah, you have to sort of, like, you have to.

You have to desensitize yourself so you can witness what's going on.

Perhaps there's a case to be made for that.

I think you just made the case for actually most foreign mission fields Missionaries who will go afield.

I have friends who did tribal missions in the Philippines, and they came with us to Burning man this last year, and they witnessed and saw things at the tribal setting, including shamanism, including morality, things that would cause anybody to blush.

And that was the norm that they had to deal with.

Of course, when we think of going into a foreign mission field, and my friends brought this out very well, you go in ahead of time with teams to survey it, to work through it, to understand it, to help come back and train those who now be entering that field.

And in some respects, in a way, that vanguard force is kind of similar to what we're doing at Burning Man.

We look at ourselves as kind of a vanguard force.

We know what we're going to encounter.

We're surveying it.

We understand it.

We probably in some respects understand it better than they understand themselves.

That's right, because we're seeing it through a different lens.

I would not recommend it for everybody.

Not even close.

At the same time, I have to remind everybody, you don't have to go to Burning Man.

You don't have to go to Pig Anacon, the largest gathering of witches in the US Midwest Indoor Conference.

I go to that to do research purposes.

You don't have to go.

Just step outside of your house.

It's all around you.

The worldview is completely unmatched.

My little village 10 miles down the road from me, there's a church that in the next few weeks is having.

This is a church.

Let me say it again.

A church that is doing chakra dances.

And I'm not kidding, it's nuts.

But they're putting up the chakra dancing.

I know they're doing chakra dances, opening up their chakras with full moon celebrations.

And I'm like, are you kidding me?

This is a denomination that 80 years ago was solid and strong, and now it is effeminate.

It is pro pride, it is mystical.

It is.

I mean, little town of 800 out in the middle of Canadian prairies, they're going to be doing full moon chakra dances in a church.

So again, you don't have to come with me to Burning Man.

Just open your eyes.

It has landed in your yard, and odds are it's landed right within your household.

And this is why it's important that somebody steps kind of, let's say, over that veil or through that veil and observes.

It comes back and reminds everybody, hello, it's here.

You're living it.

You're using it on your cell phones.

You're using it in your day to day practices.

This worldview has political, spiritual, technological implications and it's among us.

And we're not going to change that, Will.

We're not turning back the clock.

So the more important question is now, how do we respond?

I know how we react.

I watch how Christians react all the time and it disturbs me immensely.

We're very good at reacting.

Reacting is emotional, it's guttural, it's visceral.

We're going to be sitting down at our keyboards going, are you a bunch of pagans gonna burn?

Blah, blah, blah.

You know, we're great at that.

And I understand it because we are now feeling as if the walls have closed in.

The walls are crumbling down and if we just put the barriers up, we can maybe stop this.

No, no, they've already breached the wall, so the walls are abandoned.

Quit putting up your fictional walls of your emotional reaction.

And I do understand the sentiment, but it doesn't help.

Instead, formulate a biblical and sound response.

Come up with a reason for what you believe, understand who it is you believe, and begin to articulate that in a way that you can bridge those two worlds and bring the gospel in.

If you want to model, it's Acts 17 with Paul going to Athens, to Mars Hill.

We look at that passage, we read it, we glance past some of the implications, some of the dynamics that are taking place.

So, all right, if we could transport ourselves, if you and I could hop on a time machine and go back to Athens right around the time that Paul was there, what would we see?

Number one, it's not a Christian community.

It's the heart of pagan, the pagan Greco Roman world.

Paul is taken to the council of Areopagus.

He is taken to the Areopagus, the shoulder of the hill of the Acropolis.

He is now set before a council, literally the judges of the city.

This is what you're reading in Acts 17.

He's taken before the judges of the city a judicial committee that historically was put in place to wrestle through and work through esoteric philosophy and the religious understanding of their pagan worldview.

It has a long, long history in the pagan past.

He's literally standing before pagan judges.

Those judges are going to determine whether Paul's conduct and what his message is is worthy of being heard in Athens.

The backdrop that Paul now finds himself facing is the temple of Isis.

Massive, it's right there.

He's on the Acropolis.

It's right beside him.

The temple of Zeus, the temple of Athena.

They have their sacred prostitutes, they have their rituals they have their ceremonies.

It's more raw than anything we'll probably ever see.

A burning man.

Because the Christian ethos doesn't exist yet in that world.

And so there's Paul, and he has surveyed Athens.

He's spent time walking through the city.

He sees a vantage point with their monument to the unknown God.

And he uses that to launch into a description of who that unknown God is.

And he even goes so far as to quote their own poets, their own philosophers.

He quotes from the Hymn of Zeus.

Paul's not a stupid man.

He knows not only does he know Jewish law, not only does he understand Christian theology, not only has he had a personal encounter with Jesus, but he understands their world well enough to quote their philosophers within a proper context, leveraging what he has seen in the city so that he can make an argument that they understand.

What's the response?

Some mocked, some said, let's go for coffee.

I want to hear more.

Some came to Christ.

That's our model.

Well, that's what I'm seeing today in the culture.

And I'm going, all right.

We have entered that age.

We have entered the pagan age.

Re enchantment ultimately is the pagan age.

The Christian Judeo Christian worldview has been jettisoned.

So we have to respond as ambassadors.

An ambassador is somebody who has the legal authority.

You have been chosen, you've been given the legal authority to be the official representative of a government.

We are now the official representatives of Jesus Christ.

Literally, we are the legal representatives.

I can't think of a higher calling than that, Will.

I just can't to be able to go into all the world.

I don't see any place where the Bible says asterisks.

Check which cities you should not go to into all the world.

And some are equipped to go into different places.

And for some strange reason, we have found ourselves in the heat and the dust of the blackrock Desert.

And so, all that said, wherever you find yourself, whichever community you're in, whether you're in the rural part of Canada like me, or whether you're in Southern California, wherever you may be, wherever your feet are, that is where your ministry is.

And so we need to be able to respond and not react.

I really appreciate you saying all that because I think it's very accurate.

And I have observed privately to myself that I really don't think Christians know how late the hour is, because I look around the culture and I know what I'm seeing because I came out of it.

I can spot it.

I know what that is.

I Know what that is?

I know what that is.

That person who just said that thing, Even if they don't know, I know what that means.

And so I've written that in a very real sense, Christians now live in a new Rome that was built up while the church slept.

There's no other.

That's just how it is.

We had it for a minute.

Maybe, I don't know, I wasn't there.

But it's gone now.

And now we live in a world of, as you say, re.

Enchantment.

We live in a world where oneness is celebrated, propagated, promoted at the highest levels of technology and culture.

By the way, I just want to insert something that you said real quick.

Any illusion that, that these, that these tech giants are somehow at odds with each other should be dissolved in people's minds.

To imagine, you know, all these guys ply it out with their goggles and their feather boas, like, high on, whatever, dancing together at the robot Heart or whatever sound camp, like they're partying together at Burning Man.

They're having private meetings in their camps.

Like that's, that's what they're doing.

They get to meet each other on the sequel ground, be buddy, buddy.

And then they go back and they can pretend to be whatever they want to be back in Silicon Valley for the, for the cameras.

But realistically, like, they do believe this and they do share this ideology, and they do not share.

They do not have a Christian worldview.

And we are very much evangelists for a world that no longer is.

You know, we are, We're.

We're refugees.

I'm in my case, I'm a refugee from the world that currently is.

And so to look around at this, not just at Burning man, but to look around in culture and see things like, there's a statue of Shiva the Destroyer, the Hindu God, at the CERN labs in Switzerland.

Now, why is that?

How interesting, right?

And during that, there was a photo on Twitter.

There was some UN gathering, some panel that had gathered in an office space to discuss pandemic response, kind of.

That's what the panel was about.

In the background of the room is a giant Hindu God, Shiva.

You probably know the photo that I'm talking about, right?

So these things, they're every.

They're everywhere and they're hidden.

Like it's not always in your face like that.

Like you're not going to see a politician, you know, getting up and talking about the God Shiva.

But it still represents a worldview that many people at the highest echelons of politics, culture, media, they share that worldview.

And it's unfortunately their world now because they took it when the church decided to pull back from, from, from the world for whatever reason.

And so now I like what you propose.

That we all have to learn how to be our own mini version of Paul in that particular evangelistic, apologetic way to know our faith, to be able to reason, give a reason, defense for the faith and the hope that is within us.

And we have to learn how to do that.

And we have to turn off social media and entertainment and start doing that probably right now.

You're absolutely right, Will, you're correct.

That is where we're at as a church.

I do know because I mean, I grew up in a Christian home.

I've been a believer.

My testimony is very simple.

I understood as a child.

Well, first of all, I knew I was a sinner because my rear end told me so.

I was a bit of, I was a troublemaker since the time I could crawl.

Being the firstborn son, my arson was warmed up many, many, many, many times and deservedly so.

And so when my mom sat down and talked to me about my sin nature, there was no argument on my part.

The spankings were more than evident of my sin nature.

So I understood as a child.

I believed as a child.

I grew as a child and I'm still a child, but I'm a child of God.

So I've been in the church culture all of my life.

I've been inside the Christian culture all of my life.

That said, I am now seeing so much fear and trepidation in the Christian culture on so many different fronts.

Real and a lot of it is just self perceived, self made up.

And I'm going, hold on, hold on.

I can understand why people will, especially those who've grown up in a Christian culture, growing up in the church, been a Christian most of their life.

I can understand why all of a sudden you're vexed by what you're seeing and you should be concerned.

Absolutely fearful.

No, look at this as opportunity.

This is opportunity.

You now have an opportunity.

I mean, every day we have new opportunities.

Look at this in a positive light.

Yep, the walls have been breached.

Actually the walls were breached because we were asleep in.

And what you just said was absolutely true.

We have been asleep.

The walls have been breached.

So while the walls have been breached, in fact, we have quit sending out the missionaries to go spy out the land report back to say, yep, we can take this.

We have the truth on our side.

Let's move forward and come in.

Love, truth, grace, respect, all of those elements of the goodness that comes in being a follower of Christ.

And let's demonstrate to the world that Christ is real because of the love that we have.

Well, okay, so that's gone.

They're inside the camp.

Now we have the opportunity to recognize, wake up, Recognize they are in the camp.

The worldview is in the camp.

The worldview is in the church, not the true church, but it is in the church community.

And so we have to look at this as opportunity to first of all reevaluate what we truly believe.

Believe, get back to the basics.

And that's so important.

Again, back to the issue of oneism or two ism.

What is ultimate reality?

Is it one or is it two?

Recapture the foundation.

And once we have established that foundation, the foundation is always there.

But once we have re landed on that foundation to recognize that we are ambassadors for Christ, we are his legal loyal representatives.

Here's another key component.

And this is something that came to me when I was at a pagan event that every knee will bow.

I was at a witchcraft event.

There was a very raw ritual that I observed called the marriage of heaven and Hell, where we had a Christian mystic and a Luciferian, both almost like a competing cage match of rituals for an hour.

There was bloodletting.

It was a pretty, pretty crazy, pretty crazy event.

And for the first 10 minutes, Will, there was angst that was rising in my chest.

In fact, the doors had been locked.

We were told as.

We were told as witches.

He didn't know I wasn't a witch, but we were told as witches that if you're disturbed by what will be transpiring, please leave now.

And I stayed because somebody had to document what was taking place because nobody's going to believe you.

Yep.

And I remember, will, the first 10 minutes or so as the Christian mystic was going through his ritual using points of theology to attempt to conjure a very specific demon to stand in front of us.

And the demon didn't come.

And the Luciferian did the same thing and the demon didn't come.

Praise God.

Praise God, totally.

But the angst that was in my heart as all of a sudden my chest is beating.

I'm here to document that.

I don't want to see this.

Yeah, of course.

Then why are you there, Carl?

Was because it's actually my job.

What struck me and I Believe it was the Holy Spirit's prompting because it reaffirmed scripture.

It was simply this.

Every knee will bow.

Every knee will bow.

Every witch in that room will bow.

All the powers and principalities that they venerate will bow as well.

You bow, you've bowed in love, they will bow in judgment.

Why are you afraid?

Amen.

Okay, that just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Fear vanished and I went, lord, you're right.

You're absolutely right.

Why are we afraid?

I can sit here, observe.

I don't like it.

I don't have to like it.

I shouldn't like it.

I observe it.

I recognize it for what it is, but I don't fear it.

You don't have to fear it.

Quit fearing man.

Fear God.

Yep.

Amen.

Amen.

People don't want to believe this stuff is real.

Like, I get it.

You know, I studied, I've, I've, I haven't talked about this as much as some of the other things, but I have mentioned it.

I studied Tarot and Kabbalah for two years, two years of a, of a 15 year program I got into.

And so I could tell you that occultism is very real.

It is, it is very real.

There is an actual spiritual reality behind it, right?

This is, this is not just fooling around.

Like there is actual symbolism and actual masters of this stuff.

There is a, there is absolutely a spiritual reality behind all of it.

And so when you see it in rap music videos and when you see it in movies, I mean, you see it on TV shows, like, understand that this is not, they're not play acting, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe the actors are.

But like the people behind these symbols are absolutely, they're absolutely very serious.

Right?

And, and so no one wants to believe that these rituals, that these practices, that they're, that, that they, that they're real, that they can manifest actual spiritual realities.

They can and they do.

And, and the, the surest proof for that is in scripture, right?

There are demons, right?

All throughout the Bible.

Particularly, you know, when Jesus shows up, there's a whole.

Demons just start showing up when he starts, when he comes around in the New Testament.

But also like the worship of these things, you know, in fact, it's, it's a, it's providential in a way, because I've been reading Ezekiel and there's the chapter in Ezekiel where he's shown, you know, the rituals that are being performed in the temple and the prostrations to the sun and all these abominations.

You will see, like And God's just showing Ezekiel.

Yeah.

This is what's going on behind what you think as the.

Are the temple walls.

You must think, oh, this is some temple to God.

Like, no, there are abominations behind these walls.

It's in scripture.

And it's still going on.

It's still going on behind closed doors, you know, it's still going on by people who are fooling around with it.

There's.

Which Talk on.

On TikTok, and maybe some people aren't serious about that, or maybe it's a fun thing just to do for clicks and views.

But I can assure you that there are people that take this stuff very, very seriously.

And, and, and they're out.

And they're out there, like you talked about as a.

As a great example that I'm sure will blow some people's minds.

Jack Parsons, why don't you talk a little bit about.

About.

Yeah, exactly.

So about Jack.

Jack Parsons, right?

Like, this is like, what.

So talk about Jack Parsons and the role that he played in history and some of the things that he got into.

Oh, my goodness.

Well, I mean, Jack Parsons from number one.

There's a connection right into.

Into your intelligence, your.

Your aviation, your aeronautic industry.

Significant connection.

The idea of trying to conjure up a moon child, bringing about a.

In essence, trying to birth an Antichrist.

Like some seriously sick stuff.

Some seriously sick stuff.

Very, very real in terms of an occult worldview, an occult practice, but a man who was highly influential within some very serious scientific fields.

So, yeah, there's so many overlays when it comes to occultism.

Some of the military, the intelligence community.

I don't know if this is true anymore.

I understood that at one point in time when you joined the US Military, and this goes back a ways that if you were depending, I guess maybe on which service you're looking to join or kind of go into, you would have to list what organizations you've been part of in the past, and there'd be a spot for, like, Freemasonry and those kinds of things and that it was not uncommon if you were a member of a secretive order, that there would be a fast track into the intelligence community.

It was understood that because you know how to keep secrets, you understand the esoteric in the spiritual, but there's an esoteric in the politic.

And so there is this dovetail.

Jack Parsons lived that out.

He lived out that occult intersection with aviation, with rocketry.

He lived it out in a very twisted, weird way.

And he's just one Example of many.

So there's a reality to this.

There is an absolute reality to this with entities.

I mean, even in the world.

Let's just look at psychology.

Carl Jung.

I have his red book.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

You know, here, here, Carl Jung has got this, this inner conversation taking place.

And, and they didn't release his red book until after he had passed away.

And I get why.

Yeah, because he's having encounters with demons.

That's truly what this is boiling down to.

That's the essence of it.

This is a demonic entity that's playing in his head.

And you're like, all right, well, okay, archetypes and the unconscious and all the theories that come out of his influence.

Deeply, deeply influential, you know.

Deeply influential.

Influential.

If it wasn't for Carl Jung, you probably wouldn't see some of the things that took place at Esalon.

You probably wouldn't see some of the things that took place in the realm of psychology today.

It set a ground movement as he blended Eastern religions, yoga, his connections to Crowley.

My goodness, some serious stuff.

And if this is happening in the past, Parsons, Carl Jung, Alice Bailey, Blavatsky, Albert pike, the list just goes on of esoteric thinkers and dreamers and visionaries, some of them having intersections in the realm of politics.

I know the influence that Alice Bailey has had within even the United nations itself.

I was an accredited individual expert on globalization, brought in as a story behind all that.

Have a little bit of that in my book, Game of Gods when I'm there in the agenda book.

Here we have the list of sponsors for the United Nations Millennium Forum and Lucis Trust is one of the sponsors.

We have Alice's Bailey's Great Invocation handed out during one of the workshops at the United Nations.

Hello.

Wake up.

There's a reality to all of this.

And it's explicitly an anti Christian reality.

Meaning.

Yeah, maybe it has its own objectives, aims and goals.

And the only way that it can achieve those goals is by eliminating Christianity.

That's what Helena Blavatsky herself said in the Secret Doctrine.

She said the chiefs of the Society, if you thought Theosophical Society, declare that the.

The Christian religion is especially pernicious, Christianity is especially pernicious to the goals of the.

The Theosophical Society.

So they have their own aims, but they're explicitly about eliminating the Judeo Christian tradition, a cultural tradition, and Christianity as a religion from the earth.

Because of, as we've been talking about the.

The Two ism, that there is a creator and a creation and there is a moral law binding their behavior.

Right.

That's the, that's the.

Go ahead.

Absolutely.

And you're right, Will.

We are.

Whether, whether we realize it or not, as Christians, we are a continual witness to the fact that the God we serve and the God of the universe is not the same as us.

We're a continual witness back to the very fundamentals of the first lie in Genesis chapter three, that if I transgress God's law, I can transform into God himself.

That is literally the foundation of the Genesis 3 lie.

Eat the fruit.

Did God really say, look, it'll make you wise, you'll know good from evil.

It'll illuminate your eyes, you'll have a new gnosis.

You can be like or as God.

In other words, transgress to transcend.

And so for us as Christians, we are a witness to that fundamental lie and the consequences of it continually.

And so the esoteric world, the anti Christian world, will hate us because it hated Christ first.

Who is Christ?

Well, Christ is literally God in flesh.

John 1, the Word becoming flesh, walking among us.

And as Paul talks about in Colossians, the one who is preeminent, the firstborn of the dead.

That's not to say that he died first and raised first, because we had Lazarus and others before.

But he defeats death by never dying again.

He literally demonstrates that he's the author of life.

And so we are in this conflict.

On one side, we say we want to be as God, collectively or individually.

That's the game.

That's always been the game.

We are all our own messiahs.

When I go to the Parliamentary World Religions, I hear it all the time.

Thank you.

Thank you for those of you who are here to save the world.

You know, save the world?

Can world leaders save the planet?

Hold on.

Who made you Messiah?

That's what this is.

It's a messianic claim.

And this is something I have to tell people, especially I tell my class.

Look, when you're diving even into the politics of this.

At the level of the United nations, we are always talking about saving the world.

We say that if we come together collectively, we save the planet.

No, who died and made you God?

Seriously?

But it is.

That's what it is.

It's an alternative.

Ultimately, the politics at that level is an alternative.

Messianic claim that through our collective power, we are the ones who take charge and save the world.

It's on us.

In fact, I've got a copy of my book here.

I'm just going to quickly find a quote from.

Oh, here we go.

Jean Stapleton.

She's long gone.

For some of us who are older, we'll recognize the name.

She was a famous actress, all in the Family or whatever.

What was the name of the show she was on?

Archie Bunker, all that.

It's horrible.

Just have a brain.

Brain fog.

Nevertheless, actress Jean Stapleton.

Actress Jean Stapleton was a promoter of world Federalism, this idea that what we need to do is come together as one world.

And years and years ago, I had embedded myself with the World Federalist association.

And the World Federalist movement, going to.

UN and other global governance events.

So this is what she said.

Listen to the salvific nature of her endorsement of world Federalism.

The goal of the World Federalists is peace through unity of government.

We must support their vision of oneness in diversity, for it is the salvation of humanity.

I'm sorry, that's not politics.

That's religion.

And so we have to start as Christians, understanding what that is, recognizing that all we're doing is we're dealing with a counterclaim to another cell, difficult message.

And it's either Jesus Christ is true or we are all gods.

Which is it?

Who do you choose?

Amen.

Yeah, no, that's.

That.

That is.

I don't know that people really fully understand the gravity of how real.

What you're talking about is that these are not philosophies.

These are not just books that people have written.

These are not just ideas that people carry.

These are policies.

These are worldviews that people carry at the highest levels of influence in politics, culture and economics.

That is truly how.

That is truly how they see the world.

We are all gods.

They are slightly bigger gods than we are.

They have been charged with saving the world.

And if they get to extract their pound of flesh in exchange for what they're doing to save the world, well, you know, whatever.

Like, we don't exist anyway.

Right?

But there was something that.

There was something that you said that really landed in, like, a bomb, and it was transgressed to transcend.

Now I, I can tell you from, from my time in, in the New Age, specifically what I discovered is that the Eastern mysticism that, that forms the core of the New Age is the on ramp.

Now not everybody gets here, not everyone fully walks this path.

But Eastern mysticism, ultimately for people who follow it leads to Western occultism because most people in the west will look at occultic symbols, pentagrams, you know, goat head baphomets and stuff like that, and they'll feel revulsion at that.

And so what the Eastern mysticism serves to do is to break down one's inner boundaries to, to various transgressive spiritual ideas, meditation, you know, et cetera, stuff like that.

And so then very slowly you, you might encounter that world.

This is how it happened with me as I had been into the Eastern mystical stuff at that point for 12 years, 13 years, something like that.

And so when occultism showed up, I was like, oh, I haven't explored that yet.

And that's how, that's how I got into that world.

And that's, and that's how it functions now.

It's at that stage where you start to get the notions of, of, of transgression that like, they don't just, they don't just shoot transgress out there at people because it will touch something in their conscience.

What they sell is transcendence.

And so, and so it's interesting that you say transgress to transcend because that is, that is the, at the high level belief that many, that many hold for the average person who gets roped into the New age, right, and discovers that's where they are.

What sold is the transcendence.

And for those who walk far enough down the path, that's where they're offered the opportunity for transgression.

And that's, that's the, that's the, that's the dangerous trap.

Now that doesn't mean that everyone in the new age is immediately aware that they're transgressing.

Like again, they have, they have transgressive sexual values, right?

And that's, that's a, that's an inheritance of the, of the sexual revolution, right?

So, and that's not to, that's not to say that that's not bad.

Of course it's, it's very bad.

But you're not seeing things like doing harm.

You're not seeing things like do without wilt.

You're not seeing like enact your will over the, over others.

You're not seeing that you're just seeing.

You're not like it's yeah, go.

Yeah.

You're not seeing.

You're not seeing Jack Parsons and L.

Ron Hubbard doing stuff.

Correct, correct.

And following that road like I never got far enough down that road again, I did for the occultism studies that I did was just two years of lessons.

Right.

But it made really like lessons that I received in the mail.

But just that brief time which God prevented me from going further, just that brief time was able to show me there's spiritual realities here.

There are people here that take this very seriously.

This is an ancient tradition.

This is not something that was just made up.

They're passing down doctrines of manifesting self will that they've inherited over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, are going back to the garden even longer.

And so.

And so you've identified something very important that wouldn't necessarily be obvious to a lot of people.

Perhaps not.

The church today is at the core of the new age.

And at the core of this re enchantment movement is an attempt to subvert and transcend and become.

And become God and to.

And to eliminate any evidence of there being a God to challenge them.

Yes.

This is one of those takeaways from when I was doing my early dive into transformational culture.

Transformational festivals, working through the idea of the temporary autonomous zone TAs.

And it was evident that what I was witnessing, first of all from the point of view of the academic side, the study of it, and then going and observing it and documenting it, was that these were containers to allow you to transgress.

And in so doing, you would have a transformational experience.

Which is why of course, it's called the transformational festival.

Yep.

It was meant to be the playground for that.

That is so interesting.

I had never thought of it that way, but you're right, is that we.

The temporary.

I knew the term temporary autonomous zone.

I had learned it during my time in Occupy Wall street in San Francisco.

That was where I had picked that up.

And what was so interesting to watch that process, which I haven't really talked about my time in Occupy, like the things that I saw that eventually led me out of liberal progressivism because the, the.

The.

The own goal insanity that I saw liberal activists doing pre woke so that.

So wokeness people believe, and I think they might not be wrong, that wokeness was actually an attempt to subvert Occupy Wall street, which actually had a sociopolitical message against the Big against the big banks.

I think there might be some reality there.

So even pre woke liberal activists were insane.

And I got to, and I got to see that firsthand.

I was like, what is, what is going on here?

This is not reasonable.

But they had asserted a temporary autonomous zone at Justin Herman Plaza, which is at the end of Market street towards the waterfront in San Francisco.

They had decided they are going to occupy this space and for this space that they get to, they get to set the rules.

And these are the rules.

This is a temporary autonomous zone.

And the police, the policemen in the fire department, they had something to say about that, as it turns out.

So, but I mean, maybe we don't think so, but the temporary autonomous zone idea manifests in so many other ways, like Burning man, like Cy Trans festivals, like Regional burns, like other, like pagan festivals.

Maybe you can talk a little bit more about those spaces and where, where the idea of a temporary autonomous zone comes from and the sort of things that you've seen in spaces like that.

The philosopher behind the idea of a temporary autonomous zone was a controversial figure.

Bacon was his last name, very controversial because of some allegations of young sexual impropriety.

Not very nice stuff.

He fashioned this idea of creating a temporary space, a liminal zone, a zone between reality on one side and the reality that you want to see.

And you have this in between space, this in between time, when you could live that reality out, that a perceived or hoped for reality and experiment with what the future would look like, experiment with what your vision, how it would unfold.

And so you would put away the limitations of the true reality.

Your workplace, your family, your sexual mores, your.

Your ethical constraints, you put away your religious shackles, you unfetter yourself from the world.

And we're not yet in the world we want.

We're not yet in that utopian place.

We're not yet in that perfect zone.

So for a short time we can create experiences that will open up a space and in a handful of days or maybe a week or two weeks, we will forget about or remove those reality limitations.

We will explore ourselves, we'll explore each other, we will transgress the norms and at the end of it, we walk away with an experience that will be transformational because we have broken down reality and recreated our new one.

And now this is how we think we should live.

More importantly, it's how we think everybody should live.

And then we start pressuring it in the realm of politics and social change and all that goes with it.

We become change agents and it Seeps back into the cracks and pores of civilization.

So when I go to transformational events, be it a regional burn, be it Burning man, be it a few other events, I recognize that what is taking place in that space is this has been a blocked out location.

Let's call it what it is, a container.

It's a container where the world doesn't infringe.

We're free to do what we think we need to do to encounter our true selves, find our higher purpose together, transgress the norms, because the norms are holding us back.

Feel something, experience something, have an amount of response to what we've just encountered.

And we walk away from there, transformed, transfigured, transcended.

And the idea of go, please.

Yeah.

And the idea, the idea is that we will now recognize that there is no divine God who's outside of time, space and matter that we bend to, we bend our knees to ourselves because we have now just, we have just experienced this in a short little snippet of time and space.

We haven't experienced it at all.

All we've experienced is our own delusion, let's be honest about it.

And we might have had a lot.

Of fun doing it.

That's going to create the emotional appeal, the sensual appeal.

But you're not God and you didn't become God.

You enter back in the world and you still pay your bills.

You still get a flat tire.

You still get a flat tire.

Oh, your dog still bites the neighbor.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, like at Burning man, like one of the things that I never liked was that particularly as burner culture developed.

So there's, there's people who go to Burning man, which is like, it's just any festival attendee.

But then there are burners.

Burners are people that they root their identity around the festival, right?

So they're, they're doing, they're doing what's called a Burning man decompression, which is a big festival that happens one or two months in San Francisco after Burning Man.

I don't know why they call it decompression, but whatever.

But then there are all kinds of like burn fundraiser events during the year where even in the winter they're wearing their steampunk gear.

And it's just, it's just part, it's embedded in San Francisco culture.

The way that people identify themselves as burners.

They go every year.

It's a core pillar of their identities.

They would say that like, oh, I'm going home.

When they talked about going to Burning man, they say, I'm going home.

And that never sat right with me.

I'm like, well, wait a second.

Your home is where you spend 51 weeks a year.

Your home is not where you spend one week a year.

That's your, that's vacation.

But thinking in that way that you're.

That Burning man is your home is actually, it's actually quite dangerous.

And like you say, because you actually go back to the real world and they lose touch with reality, believing that this one week festival, that is where so much of everyday life is simply is facilitated for them.

Like they couldn't live that way for a month.

They couldn't live that way for two months.

No.

But, but they call that home.

And they live in that in their minds in this rarefied, mystical environment.

And their feet come off the ground and they don't care about the places that they live in or the relationships they have or whatever because they're, because this place does.

This world is not my home.

Right.

And they're right.

And so there's, there's a, you could.

It's a.

I think it probably exploits a tendency within all of us to be, you know, looking towards some idyllic stage and thinking that's where we actually belong.

But like, no, you have to live down here on the ground with the rest of us as unpleasant and as, as uncolorful as.

As it is.

Right, right.

And so that's why you have decompression.

So San Francisco isn't the only place.

There's actually decompressions all around the world.

World.

Yeah, there's a lot of decompressions now.

And one of the reasons why you have a decompression is because the experience of Burning man and I imagine this would be the same with Boom.

With Azora, with so many of the other major transformational events.

The experience has been so intense because, you know, it's a multi sensory non stop, just absolutely physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually draining week.

I am never more tired than what I am when I get back from burning that.

It is a massive, massive undertaking.

You can't switch.

And so.

No, you can't, you can't.

It's.

And it is psychologically shattering and is meant to be that way.

And so what decompressions do is because there is a level of, of mental health problems that will come because of that experience, including depression.

Decompressions.

Decompressions form like a safety valve for you to now come dress up, be with those of you who all understand because you've like in the combat You've now shared a common experience.

You've shared an experience that is uncommon to the rest of the world and that has been highly energized, extremely dynamic.

It has shaken you up, and it does because it is that intense.

So you now have a very unique experience that nobody else does.

And you end up just like any other profession where all of a sudden, you have had that unique, very intense experience for your police officer.

You hang out with police officers, fire department guys hang out with other firefighters.

I've got lots of friends who've gone to combat.

They hang out with their soldier buddies.

They can all relate.

There's almost a need for it.

Same with Burning Man.

It is that much of a shock to the system that for so many people.

Not all.

Not all, my goodness, not all.

But for so many people, it requires them to have some connection back, because otherwise there is a tendency to sink into depression.

One of the famous ways of dying at Burning man is not at Burning Man.

It's the suicides that happen afterwards.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, okay.

I mean, you can see how the Burning man ethos gets reinforced.

You know, when I.

When I was.

Yeah.

When I would do men's initiation work weekends, it was the.

The point was always made, like, yeah, you can go and have the experience on the weekend, and that'll be great, but to really bring the lessons home, you have to show up to the weekly.

The weekly groups.

Right.

And.

And keep reinforcing the values.

And so the Burning man decompression, the various events scattered throughout the year, are meant to reinforce the Burning man values periodically when leading into the following.

The following festival, so that people never fully leave.

They never fully leave the playa.

They're always living in that kind of.

Some.

Some amount of that temporary autonomous zone lives within them, even in their everyday lives in San Francisco.

Absolutely.

And that's.

That's why regional burdens become so.

So important.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So regionals have taken on a tremendous, tremendous importance within the burn culture.

And this is something that Marion Goodell herself has recognized, that the regionals now have a higher value than ever before.

And there are regionals around the world.

There's a number of them in Canada, a number of them in the U.S.

europe.

There's even regionals in China.

South Africa's got the largest regional midburn in Israel, where they burn an effigy of Adam and Eve is a regional event.

What?

And.

Yes, absolutely.

Yikes.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I know, Exactly.

Okay, okay, wow.

And then those displays moved on to other galleries.

My wife and I went to the Cincinnati Art Gallery when they had their entire building set up to display Burning man after it come back out of the Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian.

I'm sorry, I don't see Jehovah Witnesses having an entire wing of the Smithsonian dedicated to them.

Not even Mormons.

Maybe that's happened, I don't know.

But here we go.

So is it fringe?

Not when it makes the Smithsonian.

No.

No.

So wake up.

Right.

And also to understand, just to put a couple pieces together, this is the transgress to transcend mindset or an expression of it.

That is now it's in the Smithsonian.

This is the heights of American culture in some ways.

This is.

This is the belief system.

This is.

This is what's happening.

Right.

That doesn't mean that everyone who goes and touches it is immediately going to go out and.

And commit some form of immorality.

Like it doesn' doesn't emit the vibes.

But you can understand that percolating into corners of influence within the Smithsonian Museum.

There's some stamp of approval on everything Burning man represents and the want to promote it to the.

The higher echelons of American culture.

The upper class people transgress to transcend.

And so subverting some.

Subverting traditional morality at the very.

At the very highest level, but it's slow.

And I think that's the part that enables Christians to take their eye off the ball that just because the Smithsonian Museum displays these things doesn't mean that there's immediately going to be an orgy that breaks out on the floor.

It's just slowly chipping away one little millimeter at a time at these values where suddenly the transcendent re.

Enchantment.

Particularly re.

Enchantment.

I can see now how the New Age is probably a good term to set aside because it refers to individual experience.

But the re enchantment as the collective slowly chip the collective all is one, we are all together begins chipping away from this individual moral accountability kind of framework.

Oh yeah, absolutely.

So you're right, it's not going to cause somebody to stumble just going and seeing something like this in the museum.

But the museum experience, and specifically the national museum experience at the Smithsonian level demonstrates the heightened recognition of the importance of that event.

It elevated it as a national icon, which is very telling, very remarkable.

And they went on their happening trip across the United States, sowing the gospel of lsd.

San Francisco launches the counterculture which changes the world.

Burning man is San Francisco counterculture 2.0 connected in with Silicon Valley.

And we are now changing the world in the palm of your hand with your digital technologies.

And the two of them are absolutely correlated, as was the San Francisco first counterculture and its importance in bringing about the computer age that we know today.

So I'm glad that you mentioned electronic devices and the technological revolution because there was a book that I read many years ago that came to mind when we were talking a bit earlier.

And the book is you are not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier.

Yeah.

So it's a fantastic book.

And for people who don't understand how deeply these socio political values are woven into the products we use every day, that's what Jaron Lanier talks about in this book.

And so it was written, you know, pre smartphone era.

He's probably not a fan of smartphones in general, but it's very much about how the unconscious worldview biases of technology developers are woven into the products that they create in ways that they're not conscious of.

And the example that I use, he doesn't use this in the book, I read it elsewhere, I believe is Twitter.

So on Twitter, or X as it's now called, everyone gets the same 280 characters.

It doesn't matter if you're the President of the United States or some homeless guy with a smartphone.

You both get the same 280 characters.

You get the same weight of your voice in the dialogue.

And that's a, that's a creative choice that was made to me to say that, well, on some level everyone's voice is equal.

Right.

But is that is that really so.

And I think that's a big problem with the platform is that the end user is.

Has to sort out who is the credible voice.

And that's not to say that individual voices don't have.

Don't have merit.

It's not to say that only people in positions of authority do.

It's not to say that at all.

But there's a profound leveling that happening that happens all throughout social media to diminish authority and elevate marginalized voices, you might say.

And that's a creative worldview choice that the developers of these platforms might not even be aware of.

But it all feeds back.

It all feeds back to these topics we're discussing.

Oh, absolutely.

And by the way, that's.

That's a really interesting book.

I read it as well.

Lanier was a pioneer in the realm of virtual reality.

And have you ever, have you ever watched any of his lectures at all?

You can find them on YouTube.

And the price is okay.

The guy is brilliant, mathematician, a programmer.

His role inside Silicon Valley has been pretty, pretty significant, especially in the realm of VR technology.

He really, in many respects, is kind of like one of the founding fathers of VR.

But he's a big dude.

I mean, physically, he's a big dude.

With these crazy dreadlocks.

And he often will start one of his lectures by playing for a couple of minutes some obscure wind instrument, because he collects ancient and obscure wind instruments.

And so the guy is just zoning right out with this cacophony of bizarre sounds, all just kind of there it is, and he's just like zoned.

And then he puts it all down and he talks about virtual reality and the dangers of social media and how technology has destroyed creativity.

And one of the things that I took away from his book that really struck me was the challenge he made regarding how digital technology has, in essence, kind of shackled us to a sameness within music styles.

And you've got all of these new or these novel sounds of these novel genres that kind of emerge in seemingly every generation, at least in the last, whatever, 80 years or so.

All we've done is rehashed and remixed old genres in digital ways and digital formats.

And it's an argument he's making.

I had to think about that because he's like, yeah, hip hop.

Yeah.

No, that's not a new thing.

New Age music, you know that soothing, weird, fluty stuff.

No, that's been around for a long time.

Yeah.

What is this generation's new, and I mean new, new novel music style?

What is the new genre?

Maybe it's out there, maybe I don't know it.

But he makes the argument that that's really hard to find because our digital, our digital revolution has forced our creativity to one mold.

And he does.

He sees that within the realm of music.

That's a fascinating take.

And it speaks to something about the power of our digital technologies to bring about conformity.

We bring about a sense of sameness or a sense of or at least having a one flavor that kind of emerges from it.

We kind of become one being.

We're all now interconnected.

We are literally living out oneness digitally.

And it's removing that sense of even finding novelty creativity.

I mean, I grew up in an era without computers.

I remember when we got computers in high school and you had to learn basic.

And before you, the printer, the dot matrix printer would print out an image with these little dots of maybe an outline of Snoopy or something stupid.

And it took you like two days to figure that out with your basic.

We've gone from that to everything is interconnected with technology.

Here we are, the world is wrapped up in ones and zeros.

We have our new Babel language, and it's digital.

So I view technology as having number one, has great utilitarian function.

It wasn't for tech, you and I will wouldn't be having this conversation.

You know, this platform wouldn't exist.

We wouldn't be having a conversation at all.

At the same time, we have to be cognitive.

We have to be aware of the fact that technology isn't neutral in what it does.

That can start to shape how we think about things.

Transhumanism is a fantastic point of reference.

I've been down the transhumanist trail for a long, long time.

And transhumanism ultimately is this concept that through science and technology, we can transcend ourselves, take evolution in hand, and refaction what it means to be human.

But it's interesting because it's a thinking that really first emerges from the Western occult traditions.

The cosmonauts as a whole came out of Fedorov's thinking that space, even space technology, would demonstrate that we can transcend ourselves and that the conquering of space will be a way of showing us mankind is greater than his limitations here on Earth.

And cosmism in many respects has this kind of bizarre mix of theosophy and evolutionary thought and orthodoxy and just.

It was a strange, strange mixture.

But today's transhumanist movement takes its cues from so much of that came out of the early cosmist movement.

Again, it's looking at science and it's looking at technology.

And while the technology is good in itself, or maybe it's not good, but it's there, it serves a utilitarian function.

We are ascribing to it now, transformative powers and justifying ourselves through the use of technology to say that we can become more than that.

My goodness.

We saw incredible technology, massive claims of where we've been going or where we're going to go as a people.

Martin Rothblatt, the founder of SiriusXM Radio, who started life as Martin Rothblatt and became one of the first public big.

Name.

Transitioners, become Martine, Cheeky, whatever, gave a series of presentations.

Ray Kurzweil was there, Marvin Minsky, who is now gone, he sent in a video lecture for us.

We had 800 of the world's leading transhumanists, top neuroscientists, top philosophers, some of the world's most important coders, and people in the tech industry all talking about how we are going to become as gods.

And they didn't even mince the words.

They were very open about this.

Why could they make the claim?

How could the boast be so blatant?

Look what we can do with our technology.

That was the cue that was adjusted.

Through our tech, we can become more than what we are.

There's a story about that in the Bible.

We decided through technology to build a tower.

The tower itself was a technology.

Actually, it's a tower and a city complex.

The two go together.

It's found in Genesis, it's called Babel.

And we look to unify around the works of our hands.

I got a picture of the COVID but it shows a new Tower of Babel on the COVID of ICBM's magazine.

All codes, all computer coding showing the rebuilding of the Tower of Babel.

Look what we can do.

So, again, the worldview implications are in your face.

I live 200 km west of Winnipeg.

Kind of putting a target on myself that way.

I live 200 km west of Winnipeg.

Yeah.

Okay.

Come and find me.

Good luck.

Nevertheless, yeah.

That said, downtown Winnipeg, we have an edifice called the Museum of Human Rights.

We like to call it the Museum of Human Wrongs.

It's a national museum.

Costs 400 million to build.

It takes roughly 25 to 35 million per year to run this great big museum.

And it is set up in the structure of a massive ziggurat.

In fact, Architect Week magazine made it very clear that the archetype for this structure was a tower of battle.

And the engineer described this as a unifying symbol for all mankind.

Well, we can't get beyond the shadows of the tower that looked to build so many centuries, millenniums ago.

And so when we look at oneness.

We look at all of what we've just been talking about, whether it's in the realm of technology or transformational culture.

We haven't talked about interfaithism, but maybe.

That'S a conversation down the road for another time.

But interfaithism is a huge, huge issue the Christian community is vaguely aware of, but they have no clue how deep the implications are and how far it's already reached.

Then we look at things like globalization, global governance, and stuff I've seen at the United nations, all of this together.

In my mind, what I'm seeing is the erection of a new battle.

It's a new structure, It's a new edifice.

Look at what we can do together as we work in unity, as we work in our oneness.

What will we build?

You know, it's interesting because we see in the Genesis account, God comes and intervenes.

In the Tower of Babel's construction, he intervenes in a very specific time.