Deep Calls to Deep: Reading Together

Robert Anton Wilson's "Mind F---!": High Weirdness Part 3

https://youtu.be/JIMQBSi50Yw Dom and I are reading High Weirdness by Eric Davis together as a part of this reading in recovery project. "Recovery" can mean all sorts of things, but in this episode, it means recovery from the paranoid conspiracy theories that so many of us in the US are so deeply into. We discuss the "Mind F---ery" of Robert Anton Wilson and our own struggles to stay somewhere between naive belief and total skepticism, and the times when we went too far in one direction or the other. We discover, yet again, that in the most general sense, "recovery" is from absolutized or totalizing ways of being in the world that make each day a repetition of the same. We get sober to become more playful and creative, rather than more ridged, self-serious and certain. Therefore, Robert Anton Wilson offers both a cautionary tale about getting caught up in too much pattern recognition and the creative solution to this sort of psychosis, which is the play of humor that lovingly undermining one's tightly held concepts about reality. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

The Heaven and Hell of Now

Kevin and I have been having conversations about our faith for almost two decades now. While we are both actively recovering from such harmful doctrines as "eternal conscious torment," neither of us reject entirely the Christianity that we were brought up in. We have continued to develop what it means for us to be followers of Christ, so that we thought that the model of "recovery" was a better way of thinking about our faith journey than the currently popular model of "deconstruction." Recovery has both the sense of uncovering or clearing away debris to return to some essential kernel of the faith, but also the sense of getting over a sickness, or getting better from something harmful endemic to the faith tradition that was given to us as children. We are both agreed that the essential kernel worth saving is the Law, specifically the "Law of Love." In this first of our recorded conversations about our faith journey, we discuss recovering our faith by going more deeply into the teachings of love at the center of "The Way" that Jesus seemed to be teaching. We use Bart D. Ehrman's book "Heaven and Hell" as a helpful guide for freeing ourselves from some the misconceptions that we were taught as absolute truths in our religious education. https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Jesus Is Tested

I post this crossover episode as an example of the possibilities for hermeneutic circles as a religious practice. And as a reminder that our only freedom is the open and even playful interpretation of being. And I always love pointing out to people that if they want to follow Jesus, they would do well to adopt the curiosity about the meaning of being that led him out into the wilderness to have a conversation with Satan, and which led him to reinterpret scriptures according to his hermeneutic of love. It is often pointed out that Jesus would have be considered a poor interpreter of the bible in the light of modern Biblical scholarship, and that much to the chagrin of modern "Biblical Literalists," neither he nor any of his interlocutors held to such a limiting and deluded principle, except for maybe Satan, but that his open relation to his tradition allowed for him to understand himself and religious community in a new way. True followers of Christ seek to "make all things new." https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_s My Uncle Father Herb, my Dad Bob, and I discuss Jesus's testing in the desert. I chose the passage this time. It has always spoken to me about how we are left to interpret the Word of God for ourselves but as a community of interpreters. There will be no one "absolute" interpretation that excludes all the others. However, there will be interpretations that cannot withstand the practices of a hermeneutic circle of responsible interpreters. A hermeneutic circle tests possible interpretations against a set of criteria, which for our circle of Biblical interpreters includes: historical-critical techniques and scholarly information, the history of the theological interpretations of the Church, and our own experiences of trying to apply Biblical teachings and narratives to our lives. But the most important principle for the interpretive practices of those who seek the God of love is love, which is sometimes called the interpretive practice of "Christ the Key" in the Church's tradition of Biblical interpretation. Our faith is that the histories, mythologies and even the laws of the Bible must be interpreted, which means they are open, except for those interpretations that would close one off to hope or love. Unloving Biblical interpretation is without the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is what proliferates most rampantly today. This is the consequence of both our fallenness and our freedom to interpret without love's lure.  Love is revealed anew throughout ours lives as it has historically been reveled through out the lives of those who have sought it, but it is always a lure to love and never compulsory because love according to its nature must be freely chosen. Even when things seem dark or evil, it is our faith that God is still speaking as the lure to love. Jesus's test in the desert reveals His ministry and is character to Himself and to those that would follow Him. Satan's job as God's "prosecuting attorney," is to test and reveal. In the desert Jesus reinterprets the figure of the "Messiah" from his Jewish tradition and scripture according to the law of love, so that it becomes a figure not of power but of weakness as love does not overpower or control. Jesus passes His test by refusing to test, which is to choose the revelation of love over whatever revelation is given by tests of strength. If you want to check this episode out on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Fgjqb6bKJ_s My podcast in which I develop the theory of interpretation, or hermeneutics: https://failureisfreedom.buzzsprout.com https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Annihilation: Book and Movie Comparison

We get deep into the weird genetic refractions of Alex Garland's very loose take on Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation. Area X seems to be a place of infinite possibilities, except for the possibility of remaining untouched by the mysterious, churning flows of organic codes that produce mixed bodies of unknowable intention. What is the intention of this alien presence in what seems to be a swamp somewhere on the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico? Maybe, it doesn't have one. Join us as we think about the human proclivity for self-destruction, the ambiguity of identity, and how the intentions of organic bodies arise from the non-intention of inorganic processes. This is a crossover episode with the Desire of Horror podcast available on all the major pod-catchers, including apple and Spotify. Come check us out there. https://www.buzzsprout.com/2509184 Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nqaZp3-AK4Q or you can search "Kitchen Table Conversations: Annihilation" https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]

Byung-Chul Han's The Agony of Eros

James and I recorded this one in a parking garage for irreducibly ambiguous counter-reasons. All of the expected distractions of the parking garage environment were intended to illustrate the unintentional negativity necessary for a loving encounter with the Other. As two long term sober dudes, we're always looking for new Deleuzian "Lines of Flight" from the toxic positivity of the sort of self-optimization that our drinking used to protect us from. We would like to continue to actively ruin our lives and our time for the mechanisms of capitalistic capture by becoming "imperceptible," even to ourselves, and therefore as non-transactable yet productive as possible. Join us for a truly worthless conversation about the negativity of love, or the "Agony of Eros," as Byung-Chul Han put it. Whatever you're able to discern of the conversation over the noise of the cars passing by and the intense wind storm raging all around us in central Ohio's weirdly, windy clime, will certainly whet your whistle for the suffering gifted to true lovers by eros, not so much in the banal and idiotically positive vein of the Marquis de Sade, but rather in that of the erotic suffering of the negative excess of Georges Bataille "Accursed Share." https://youtu.be/YXn2K8ESb-w if you prefer YouTube, James and I posted the video of us performing this material there, or search Reading Together in Recovery: The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han https://www.martinessig.com [https://www.martinessig.com] Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio https://www.jamesreevesco.com [https://www.jamesreevesco.com]