Alex - Great interview! I'm catching up on some of the summer shows. This is a great one. You do a superb job of laying out your viewpoint. Andrew is clearly unprepared to defend his views. From the start, he was giving his stump speech and explaining to you his vast and deep understanding of Tibetan Buddhism. Woe to him.
Last summer, I participated in a 5-day Tibetan Buddhism meditation retreat in Grass Valley. It was my first time. At the meal breaks, I found myself having roughly the same conversation as you and Andrew, expect it was me and 6 Buddhists at the table. I was just beaten back every time.
The limit of deep spiritual training is it becomes a straitjacket the further the learning goes. Who wants to spend 3 years in monastic meditation, come out and write a bunch of books and then go on a podcast to be confronted by the host about the fallacies in their core positions?
thx Dan... but I'm having a hard time squaring this comment with yr reaction to:
Alex Tsakiris: Some people get offended when their religious beliefs are challenged. They feel like religious beliefs are protected beliefs, but others see religion as an extension of the social engineering project.
David Icke: I call it the “God program.” All of the different names and different rituals obscure the fact that it's a very simple blueprint: “What are you?” “I’m a Christian.” “What does that mean?” “Well, I go to church and this man in a frock (women often now) tells me what God wants me to do.” “Okay, well that’s interesting.” “And he tells me the consequences of me not doing what God wants me to do.” “Okay, you?” “Oh, I’m a Muslim.” “What does that mean?” “Well, I go to the mosque and this man in a frock, he tells me what God wants me to do, and what God will do if I don’t do what God says, which is what this man in a frock tells me he says.” “Okay, you?” “Oh, I follow Judaism.” “What does that mean?” “Oh, I go to the synagogue and this man in a frock, he tells me what God wants me to do, and they’ll be hell and damnation if I don’t do what he says, and that’s what Judaism is.”
And so you go on and you go on and you go on. What are those people in frocks actually doing, Alex? They’re getting in the spaces between the five-sense mind and expanded consciousness. They do not want a direct connection. Even the word connection is not correct, it’s only human language...it’s not even a connection because [in essence] one does not connect, it just is. And what happens is we get a disconnection of influence. It doesn’t mean we’re not still part of the great forever, we always are and always will be. It’s that it’s not influencing us because of this perceptual isolation, which religion has played a major part in.
What you had were forms of culture that for all their flaws, and there were many, practiced a direct connection with what they perceived as the creator, or what I call The One. And then religion came in and created that blueprint and we got the, “Only through this can you get to God, only through me, only through believing me and what I say, can you get there. And by the way, we’re going to give you a story. We’re going to give you a series of rules and regulations, and if you don’t follow them, well, have you ever stoked the fires of hell? That’s where you’re going, mate.”
And then, the impact of all of that, what was it? It was a tiny, tiny perceptual state that’s being sold here. You can’t question it because you’re a blasphemer. If you do, you’re out, you’re not one of us anymore.
But as people started to reject that, [next] came mainstream science, and we went from a situation where you can only get to the state of expanded consciousness, as I would call it, if you do what we tell you, because we know what God wants...actually, there is no state of expanded consciousness. There’s just you and you come out of nowhere, three score years and ten if you’re lucky, and then you go back into nowhere.
And now basically, you’ve got these two working simultaneously, science through technology and the technocracy that’s developing, controlled by technocrats, is now becoming more and more dominant, and there’s a common theme. Just look at the common themes everywhere that this system, the cult behind this system, is emphasizing everywhere that you cannot have a direct connection with expanded states of consciousness.