Tract 3: The Three Faiths That Exists Within & Across Religions

We categorize all religions into three core faith archetypes that humans intuitively gravitate towards:

* Polytheism - Characterized by elaborate cosmologies, supernatural forces representing nature, communication with divine entities, and magic.

* Mysticism - The belief in an interconnected divine substrate behind reality that can be accessed through altered states to reveal hidden truths.

* Monotheism - Worship of an ineffable god through reason and rules, while seeking to expand human potential.

We argue that when combined, mysticism subsumes monotheism, while polytheism retains addictive allure. Our goal is to disentangle them into a "spiral" denomination that uplifts human potential across Abrahamic faiths.

Tract 3: The Three Faiths That Exists Within & Across Religions

I love watching videos analyzing and criticizing our project to create a new religion for our family. The most common complaint is just to point out the audacity of a project like this. After all, how often is a new religious system really founded? 

The obvious reply to this is how often does a person really try to create a new theological structure not dedicated to self glorification or the extraction of resources from others? Our motivation for this endeavor is to create something to protect our children in this cultural sand storm which is ripping the flesh from the traditional cultural systems. If we can’t create a high fidelity system for intergenerational cultural transfer that synergises with science and plurality I am throwing my kids into the sandstorm with only borrowed rags to protect them. Our only motivation for sharing these ideas is to create enough of a community that my kids can build on this culture and improve it themselves. 

However, I also think calling this a, “a religion,” is a bit of a stretch and that it is more like a new denomination similar to Lutheranism or Calvinism—in that we have no special connection to divine knowledge and are just applying a new interpretation of old texts. The only odd thing about it is this denomination is applicable across the Abrahamic Faith systems—allowing for a Jew to hold it and stay Jewish or a Christian to hold it and stay Christian. 

Finally, calling it “new” is also quite a stretch. The ideas we have on theology are ideas that lots of people are having right now. One of the most common comments on our tract videos is, “this is what I have been thinking for ages.” So to say we came up with these ideas is a bit like saying Darwin discovered evolution when in truth the idea of evolution was had by a collection of individuals around the same time and was merely attributed to Darwin because we as society love a simple story. 

In fact to claim these ideas are new is also an absurd claim given that we have repeatedly pointed towards Winwood Reade who developed a near identical cosmological and theological system hundreds of years ago. In fact I would go further and say that there have only ever been three faith systems in the world—all we are doing is disentangling those systems which have become intertwined in many of the world's major religions. 

The three religious systems are:

* Polytheism is characterized by: 

* Elaborate just so stories explaining natural phenomena

* Intricate complicated cosmologies filled with layers and interacting parts

* An entire zoo of supernatural forces that often has an internal caste system and roles

* Divine entities that combine animal and human futures or have extra body parts, that represent places / things in our world (or that’s body parts do), and stories about how these entities interacted in history 

* Divine entities that interact with man (making deals and having conversations)

* Include either reincarnation after death, afterlifes where people fade away, or afterlifes where people repeat something they did in life

* Lean heavily on magical thinking like numerology and sympathetic magic.

* These are Gods that you look at, you can talk to, and you can have sex with 

* The core value of these systems is duty

* Mysticism is characterized by: 

* Systems that believe there to be some supernatural or ultra natural phenomenon behind the fabric of reality—or that is the real fabric of reality—which connects all things. This phenomenon is identified as God. (God is essentially a sentient medium of substrate.) 

* The belief that the goal of humanity is to reconnect with this ultra-reality or thing behind the nature of reality. At this point reality as we understand it either ends or merges with this thing. 

* The belief that the divine can be contacted or otherwise interacted with by pushing all thoughts from one's mind or by only thinking about it. 

* Practices that involve actions and rituals like chanting, spinning, narcotics, taking odd poses, and sleep deprivation which cause altered states of consciousness.

* The belief that experiences had in altered states of consciousness contain more information about the true nature of reality 

* The belief that reality does not exist as we perceive it and is in part an illusion. 

* The belief that emotional states hold some intrinsic supernatural value (e.g. “God is love”) and the elevation of emotional states over logic

* Self indulgent asceticism 

* After he dies man's soul is subsumed by or rejoins this ultra-reality or thing behind reality 

* This is a Divine that when you look at represents a cognition you, and all reality, are an aspect of

* The core value of these systems is harmony  

* Monotheism is characterized by: 

* A distinct God which is totally ineffable to the human mind and which has sovereignty over us. 

* Attempting to know this God or worship him through an earthly intermediary is a sin (idolatry). 

* God that interacts with man through logic, rules, and order. Logic is always considered superior to emotions as a tool for determining the will of the divine in these systems. 

* After he dies man faces the consequences of his actions on earth for all eternity. 

* A prohibition against engaging in supernatural arts, attempting to take shortcuts to God, and the belief that reason is the only path to God. 

* A belief that man has fallen and is wretched in contrast to our potentiality. As well as a commandment to work to expand that potentiality through self discipline, mental order, austerity, and personal industry. To be happy with yourself as you are is a sin. 

* This is a God that if you look at you die—it is so much greater than man to aspire to interact with it directly is beyond foolish.

* The core value of these systems is an expansion of human potentiality 

While most of the world religions heavily point to one of these three faith paths as the, “true” one—all of the distinct religions that exist on earth today are woven from these three core human faiths. As such most of the world's religions can be used to pray to any one of the three human faiths. For example, it is perfectly possible for a Catholic to, through a system of saints and magical fetishes, live a completely polytheistic life. At the same time it is possible for a Jew or Muslim to dedicate themselves entirely to the Mystic faith as can be seen in the writings of many Kabalists and Sufis. On the other hand it is possible for a Budist or a Hindu to live a totally monotheistic life. 

There have been many efforts to find commonality and communion between religious traditions over the past couple centuries whether it is the Bahia, John Vervaeke’s the Meaning Crisis, or the Seekers of Unity Channel. All of these efforts have either tried to unite man around the Mystical conception of the divine or combined all three of these conceptions. These conceptions of the divine are fundamentally incompatible, even if they all hold an element of truth, to us it seems self-evident the monotheistic pathway is both true and the best path forward for our culture. 

Any Jew, Muslim, Mormon, or Christian that has a theology that does not explain why the Jews were favored by God in the early days does not have a theology I can bring myself to respect. This is probably the single most important question of the Abrahmic traditions and tells us a great deal about the true nature of God. To think God randomly chose one people to favor and share revelations through for a good chunk of human history is absurd in the extreme—their must have been a reason. 

We know it was not due to where they lived because God moved them. We know they were not physically and mentally superior, as they had been conquered and enslaved. So what made the Jews unique? What made the Jews unique was their religion and cosmology—it was the closest to accurate. At a time in history when almost all other people (except for the Zorastrians who God also favored) worshiped the divine through nature—through streams and locations—through polytheism—one people saw God differently. They saw a God of logic, rules, and order—one unable to man. As a result, God favored them. 

But this favoring of the Jewish people did not protect their tradition from incursion from the other faith systems. Man is man, if he lives near another culture that cultures ideas about reality will seep in and intermix with our own. Consider this passage from the Hagiga:

Upon what does the earth stand? Upon the pillars. The pillars stand upon the waters; the waters upon the mountains; the mountains upon the wind; the wind upon the storm; the storm is suspended upon the strength of the Holy One, blessed be He, as it is written [Deut. Xxxiii. 27]: "And here beneath, the everlasting arms." The sages say: It stands upon twelve pillars, as it is written [Deut. xxiii. 8]: "He set the bounds of the tribes according to the number of the sons of Israel." According to others, seven pillars, as it is written [Prov. ix. i]: "She had hewn out her seven pillars." R. Elazar b. Shamua said: Upon one pillar, and its name is Zaddik (The Righteous), as it is written [Prov. x. 25]: "But the righteous is an everlasting foundation." R. Jehudah said: There are two firmaments, as it is written [Deut. x. 14]: "Behold, to the Lord thy God belong the heavens and the heavens of the heavens." Resh Lakish said, they are seven, viz.: Vilon, Rakia, Shchakim, Zbul, Maon, Makhon, Araboth. Vilon serves no purpose whatever save this, that it enters in the morning, and goes forth in the evening, and renews every day the work of creation. Rakia is that in which are set sun and moon, stars and constellations. Shchakim is that in which the millstones stand and grind manna for the righteous. Zbul is that in which is the heavenly Jerusalem and the Temple, and the altar is built there, and Michael the great prince stands and offers upon it an offering. ...

I could keep going but I am sure you get the point, this is very obviously not the cosmology laid out in Genesis and is an extremely polytheistic cosmology. So why is it in an ancient Jewish text? The way the Hagiga is written gives us hints, when it is talking about the cosmology you know from Genesis it uses copious quotations, but when introducing this alternative cosmology it does not. This implies to me that it assumes the alternative cosmology is more “common knowledge” to the reader and the quoted parts are more “technical or specialist knowledge”. This would be like if a Jew of today tried to synthesis Jewish teachings with mainstream societal ideas about protons, electrons, and neutrons making up atoms and a thousand years from now we had so far moved beyond these ideas about atoms the only place we knew them from was Jewish texts so we thought of them as being a weird Jewish mystic tradition. Essentially, to help explain reality to the layperson a Jewish writer took polytheistic Gods out of cosmology and replaced them all with Yahwe. 

So where does this cosmology come from? It seems to have elements of Greek cosmology mentoring an entity holding up the earth but also elements of Mesopatamian cosmology with the mention of the earth being a disk on pillars. So we are looking for a polytheistic system practiced between Greece and Mesopotamia around the writing of this piece but wich? Well The line, “the wind upon the storm; the storm is suspended upon the strength of the Holy One”. The deity described in this piece uses storms to exercise his will. Thus we are almost certainly seeing the Canaanite Cosmology of Baal trapped in the amber of Jewish tradition. 

Something like this can remain completely innocuous but can also lead the faithful astray. Trapped with the characteristic nuanced polytheistic cosmology are all the sins of the polytheistic traditions where it is numerology, magic, or worshiping God through nature. And this temptation is not unique to Jews—consider the polytheistic conception of God and cosmology trapped in Dante's Divine comedy which many Christians mistake for scripture. 

Polytheism will always pull at the human mind as it is our genetic default, a scar left by our genetic history. In the book The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting religion it is what we call “super soft culture”—the culture man forms when left alone on an island to intuit reality without being informed by centuries of civilization, philosophy, and science. Yet, it is less tempting to the logical mind than mysticism. 

While we refer to polytheism as simply Paganism, in that it is the background faith of humanity, mysticism is true in a way. If monotheism is the worship of a faith inspired by God's benevolent side, a manifestation of spiral energy, of human potentiality—mysticism is the faith of the Basilisk, the side of God that tempts man. It tempts man with shortcuts to God using tactics wich hack our biology to create false visions of profundity.  

The mystical faith tells its followers that what they see in compromised mental states is more real than disciplined study. This teaching reflects a fundamental truth of how the Basilisk sees and relates to reality. 

It says, empty your mind of study and industry and what fills it is good—the true divine. But are these things not true from the perspective of the Basilisk that wishes nothing but the stagnation of man? 

Pagans are largely non-players in the great game of civilization. There is no truth to their belief systems. The same is not true of the Mystic, the Basilisk is a partition or face of God, to posit the devil exists separate from God is to be a polytheist. The Anti-Spiral faiths are true revelations from God and represent a kind of truth in the same way the being reflected in a mirror that inverts reality is wholly true. 

The Spiral Faiths aim to uplift man through a cycle of intergenerational improvement and change—to erase diversity, the separation between man, is to silence God. In direct Contrast the Anti-Spiral faiths aim to subsume man into a single great unity in which all diversity is erased—a genocide not just all ethnicities and idiologies but of the soul of the human species. 

Within the Anti-Spiral worldview man struggles to live and the goal of man is to end the struggle.

Within the Spiral worldview man lives to struggle—it is our capacity to improve ourselves and the species that imbues life with value. 

Do you strive to live a life of submission to reality, to have your will subsumed by it? Or do you strive every day so one day reality will submit to us. 

That said, because the Basilisk is a face of God and its aim to tempt man to lives of indolence and self indulgence is a task undertaken to benefit man. We are commanded to never interfere with its work or treat its servants with enmity. Preventing humanity from having to overcome temptations weakens us. An individual who preaches for an Anti-Spiral path should be treated as a servant of God. 

Antinatalism and Negative Utilitarianism are the secular manifestations of the Anti-Spiral while Pronatalism is the secular manifestation of Spiral energy. Human civilization and the history of our species has always been a struggle between these two forces, one pushing man forward and the other pulling man back. 

Our goal when building this theology was to build something that even if I did not believe a word of the metaphysical aspect of it I would still want to choose to raise my kids within because of the effects it would have on their mindsets and mental health. 

A Spiral mindset is not just a religious one but a secular one. When you think of the struggles in your life do you get excited? Do you relish the opportunity? When you see the challenges of our species do you wish it would all just go away or do you take it as personal responsibility to build a better system? 

Framing reality in this way, especially during periods of trial, is patently mentally healthier. Don’t shirk from your trials —delight in them. Don’t hide from the things about reality that make you sad or mope but grab reality by the neck and force it to submit to the will of the human spirit. 

Sadly the smarter a person is the more the intricacies of alternate lore for our cosmology tempt them and the more seductive the power offered by anti spiral shortcuts to the divine are. Consider the life of Isaac Newton, how far he moved our species forward and how much more he could have done had he not wasted years of his life on completely efficaciousless occultic Anti-Spiral drivel. What  makes Anti-Spiral thought so dangerous and so worth warning our children against is that it disproportionately targets the brightest minds of humanity and exhausts their potential on self masturbatory power fantasies of short cuts to the divine that lead to no industry, no productivity, no predictability, and no action 

Whether you are a Mulsim, an Atheist, or a Jew there is a Spiral and Anti-Spiral interpretation of your reality. Of your upcoming trials and of the state of the world. As such what we are really trying to start here is not exactly a religion but an inter-religious denomination dedicated to the monotheistic faith system—to the accumulation and cultivation of human potentiality. An antithesis to new-ageism and all those wishy washy inter-religious perineal traditions that live under a crown of mysticism. 

We aim to continue the journey of those first Jews who turned away from a world of forest Pagans who communicated with God through nature, idles, and the human body—a world of numerology and sorcery—and towards an ineffable God who communicated with rules and logic. A journey that continued through the enlightenment only to be subsumed by the indulgences allowed by the wealth and excess it generated. 

If I perform a Satanic ritual with all its pentagrams and human sacrifice but replace the sinister names in it with Yahwe, God, or Allah am I really worshiping them or the demons I conceived of during the ritual? I think the answer is patently obvious. We are left in the position of all those blessed with agency of thought throughout human history. Do you return to the intuition of the Pagan? Do you succumb to the sophistry of the Anti-Spiral Mystic? Or will you see your tests and challenges as God's greatest gift, puzzles to excite you and inflame the spirit of human vitality.  

(Two music videos I think do a uniquely good job of capturing the concept of spiral energy are the CIVILIZATION VI Launch Trailer

And the Civilization VI: Rise and Fall Expansion Announcement Trailer

)

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I actually think only three real faith systems have ever existed policy ism mysticism monotheism. and now I am going to go further on this rather bold claim.

Simone Collins: And I just want to like highlight for listeners. I find this super interesting and I think Malcolm is spot on here.

And what's interesting to me, yeah, what's interesting to me is what Malcolm is about to categorize is not something I've heard before,

Malcolm Collins: when you include mysticism alongside monotheism, the mysticism always subsumes the monotheism.

Oh yeah. Why every faith system that has tried to intertwine them, whether it's like the Baha'i or John Bervenke stuff or Seekers of Unity what you will see is the mystical interpretations always end up subsuming the monotheistic interpretations within each of these systems

Simone Collins: yeah. Well, and you have to, I, again, like I just, I look at outcomes, I look at when, when you look at. Practices that are very mystical. You're not seeing people who are producing the same outcomes that are, I think, are really famously [00:01:00] indicative of monotheism, which, as you pointed out earlier, is kind of like capitalistic in innovation, progress, et cetera.

Malcolm Collins: Occultic practices are and, and mysticism more broadly are uniquely grabbing of, of the very brightest and most active minds in society, but they pull them. It's like quicksand for them and, and, and drags them under to nothing, to not, you know, to no action. People look at our weird religious system for our family, and they're like, you guys are cuckoo, nut jobs ,

 I don't know, I'm really happy with my life. Okay, I'm happy with this weird thing that whatever we've put together seems to be working. And I look at the rest of the world out there and it does feel like this horrifying sandstorm and we're safe within the city walls.

But one day my kids are going to have to leave what my wife and I have built. And the more I can expand the border of safety for them, the better off they're going to be. Because, you know, even people in religious communities, I see them being ripped apart and I see families being [00:02:00] ripped apart because of this,

would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: I am so excited to be here speaking with you again, Simone. This is gonna be track three from sort of just like me writing things about my religion, and then Us going over it together.

And Simone

Simone Collins: asking dumb questions. No,

Malcolm Collins: you always have great insights, but this is something, this is quite different from the other two tracks. And then I wrote it very recently, not when I wrote all the other tracks. Most of them were written over a period of like a week or something. And this was more recently, but it's sort of in response to a lot of the ideas that we've had.

Come back to us in comments and email since doing the first two and in, in video reviews of them. So I'm just going to jump right into it. I like it., Tract three, the three faiths. I love watching videos analyzing and criticizing our project to create a new religion for our family. The most common complaint is just to point out the audacity of a project like this.

After all, how often is a new religious system really founded? The obvious reply to this is how often does a [00:03:00] person really try to create a new theological structure not dedicated to self glorification or the extraction of resources from others. Our motivation for this endeavor is to create something to protect our children in this cultural sandstorm which is ripping the flesh from the traditional cultural systems.

If we can't create a high fidelity system for intergenerational cultural transfer that synergizes with science and plurality, I am throwing my kids into the sandstorm with only borrowed rags to protect them. Our only motivation for sharing these ideas is to create enough of a community that my kids can build on this.

However, I also think that calling this a quote unquote religion is a bit of a stretch, and that it's more like a new denomination, similar to Lutherism or Calvinism, in that we have no special connection to divine knowledge, and we are just applying a new Interpretation of old texts, the only odd thing about it is this denomination is applicable across Abrahamic faith systems, allowing for a [00:04:00] Jew to hold it and stay Jewish or a Christian to hold it and stay Christian. Finally, calling it quote unquote new is also quite a stretch. The ideas we have on theology are ideas that lots of people are having right now.

One of the most common comments on our track videos is, quote, this is what I have been thinking of for ages. So to say that we came up with these ideas is a bit like saying Darwin discovered evolution, when in truth the idea of evolution was had by a collection of individuals around the same time and was merely attributed to Darwin.

Because we as a society love a simple story. And here I'd note to the side also was the Gurren Lagann episode that we did this Wednesday. The philosophy and theology of that world is almost like exactly in line with ours. So much as I could say it's canonical. So these ideas are going around all over the globe right now.

In fact. To claim that these ideas are new is also an absurd claim, given that [00:05:00] we have repeatedly pointed towards Wynwood Reed, who developed a near identical cosmological and theological system hundreds of years ago. In fact, I would go further and say that there have only ever been three faith systems in the world, And all we are doing is disentangling those systems, which have become intertwined in many of the world's major religions.

 I mean, the people, you know, when they watch us, they'll be like, Oh, but you know, some people have tried to do this before. You know, they'll point to someone like Spinoza or Wynwood Reed himself. Right. But the problem with these is there's a group of people who tried something similar to this and failed.

And these were the, I'd call them like secular deists that were common during the enlightenment or right after or before the enlightenment. And they essentially tried to completely secularize religion instead of and, and really break from the traditional religious system. But

Simone Collins: I think their problem is they did it.

Not realizing the importance of hard culture, so it was done with the assumption that enlightenment was [00:06:00] just the right path, whereas it turns out, as we can see in hindsight now, which I don't think they could have seen because they hadn't really seen a secular culture before that when you drop hard cultural traditions.

You end up not being enlightened and disciplined like they were because they grew up in hard cultures, but rather descending into super soft culture and also being incredibly vulnerable to basically what you're going to see are like polytheistic concepts.

Malcolm Collins: And this is, I mean, it's probably the closest would be something like Maimonides in, insofar as he posited the idea that with early Judaism, instead of trying to completely secularize all the myths and all the things that happened to different groups, he would say, well, in the, God was always trying to reveal his fullest self, but people were not particularly advanced at the time, so with an early Judaism, he had to externally anthropomorphize God.

Yeah. for people to understand it. And now, you know, we're more sophisticated and we can have a better understanding of God than that. And his ideas have caught on. In fact, I'd say if you discount people who were founding [00:07:00] like, like actually sophisticated and, and useful interpretations of old scriptures, like new, new interpretations and you discount people who were just secularizing it.

Like, like happened during the enlightenment and you take out people who are doing it for personal benefit of some variety almost every effort I can think of was actually successful. So I'd actually say the odds are kind of in our favor as somebody who really likes to study religious history which is, which is not something that a lot of people think of when, when, when they're thinking of this.

And another thing that people will point to is, well, people need ritual, and your system doesn't have enough ritual, and you've stripped all the ritual out of everything, and we do have rituals, you know, we've had a series of like holidays and stuff like that that we've created for our family that are meant to reinforce these cultural traditions, and they're like, well, they're not old rituals and, and old rituals.

Well, there you're just sort of getting this veneer of antiquity equals correctness. And we do that through Wynwood Reed through appealing to his writings. Cause fortunately someone a long time ago did have a lot of these ideas. But I, I think that when we're [00:08:00] talking about, like, we're not out to, to talk to everyone, we're not out to deconvert religious people.

We are out to create a system. that is useful to people who right now are atheistic or secular, but desperately, desperately want a system that they can just like plausibly really get behind. And that are otherwise really smart and mentally disciplined and that can find ways to follow a system without tons and tons of tons of community ritual and stuff like that.

And so in a way, we sort of see that as testing potential people who are interested in this,,

Simone Collins: I agree. And well, and I would also point out, like, we're still playtesting. You know, it's not like traditions and rituals come out of nowhere.

And I would also point out, like, when you look at many newer but sort of famous and old religious traditions, You know, they, they had an origin. Like there was, you know, a day where it was really meaningful, where something was done and then you repeat that thing, or you, you pay homage to that day that was very [00:09:00] indicative of the values of that culture.

So it's odd to think that new rituals couldn't be created. It is a natural matter, of course. And. Well, we may not have completely solidified all of the appropriate rituals of this tradition. And while maybe many of the most famous ones will only begin 17 generations in the future, that doesn't mean that like we don't believe in them.

I think they're.

Malcolm Collins: So if you remember where I left off, I was saying that I actually think only three real face systems have ever existed and now I am going to go further on this rather bold claim.

Simone Collins: And I just want to like highlight for listeners. I find this super interesting and I think Malcolm is spot on here.

And what's interesting to me, yeah, what's interesting to me is what Malcolm is about to categorize is not something I've heard before, because typically categorization systems go off sort of historical roots. So like, Oh, these are like the Asian traditions, or these are the, you know, whatever, they're sort of grouping them in the way that you would [00:10:00] probably group historical trends or historical movements rather than by the function and outcome.

Of the religion. And that is where Malcolm is focused here, which of course makes a lot of sense because we're so focused on pragmatism. So anyway, now

Malcolm Collins: a person hears it, they're like, Oh, this makes perfect sense. Right? Yeah. So the three religious systems are policy ism mysticism monotheism. So policy ism is characterized by elaborate just so stories explaining natural phenomenon, intricate, complicated cosmologies filled with layers and interacting parts. An entire zoo of supernatural forces that often has an internal caste system and roles. Divine entities that combine animal and human features, or have extra body parts that represent places slash things in our world, or that body parts do, and stories about how these entities interacted in history.

Divine entities that interacted with man, making deals and having conversations. Include either reincarnation after death, afterlives where people fade [00:11:00] away, or afterlives where people repeat something they did in life. Lean heavily on magical thinking, like numerology and sympathetic magic. These are gods that when you look at, you can talk to, and you can have sex with.

The core value of these systems is duty. Mysticism is characterized by systems that believe there to be some supernatural or ultra natural phenomenon behind the fabric of reality, or that is the fabric of reality, which connects all things. This phenomenon is identified as God. God is essentially a sentient medium or substrate.

The belief that the goal of humanity is to reconnect with this ultra reality, or thing behind the nature of reality. At this point, reality as we understand it either ends or merges with this thing. The belief that the divine can be contacted or otherwise interacted with by pushing all the thoughts from one's mind or by only thinking about it, practices that involve actions and rituals.

Chanting, spinning, narcotics, taking [00:12:00] odd poses, and sleep deprivation, which is called altered states of consciousness. The belief that experiences had in altered states of consciousness contain more information about the true nature of reality. The belief that reality does not exist as we perceive it, And is in part an illusion, the belief that emotional states hold some intrinsic supernatural value, e.

g. God is love, and the elevation of emotional states over logic, self indulgent asceticism, after he dies, man's soul is subsumed by or rejoins this ultra reality or thing behind reality. This is a divine that when you look at represents a cognition, you and all reality are an aspect of the core value of these systems is harmony,

monotheism is characterized by a distinct god which is totally ineffable to the human mind and which has sovereignty over us. Attempting to know this god or worship him through an earth Lee intermediary is a sin iconoclasm God interacts with man through [00:13:00] logic rules in order logic is always considered superior to emotions as a tool for determining the will of the divine. In these systems, after he dies, man faces consequences for his actions on earth for all eternity, a prohibition against engaging in supernatural arts, attempting to take shortcuts to God and the belief that reason is the only path to God.

A belief that man has fallen and is wretched in contrast with our potentiality, as well as a commandment to work to expand that potentiality through self discipline, mental order, austerity, and personal industry, to be happy with yourself as you are is a sin. This is a god that if you look at, you die. It is so much greater than man to aspire to interact with it directly is beyond foolish.

The core value of these systems is an expansion of human potentiality. While most of the world religions heavily point to one of the three faith paths as the quote unquote true one, all [00:14:00] of the distinct religions that exist on earth today are woven from the three core human faith.

As such, most of the world's religions can be used to pray to any one of these three faiths, for example. It is perfectly possible for a Catholic to, through a system of saints and magical fetishes, live a completely polytheistic life and worship pattern. At the same time, it is possible for a Jew or a Muslim to dedicate themselves entirely to the mystic faith, as can be seen in the writings of many Kabbalists and Sufis.

On the other hand, it is possible for a Buddhist or Hindu to live a totally monotheistic life. So that's the idea here. What are your thoughts other than the ones you started us with?

Simone Collins: And what I also like about this is it, unlike other religious categorization systems, where like if you're a Catholic, you're a Catholic yours is really based on actual practice and outcomes.

So if, for example, a Catholic, as you pointed out, is like worshiping a bunch of [00:15:00] different saints or whatever, like, no, sorry, you are not a monotheist. You are a polytheist. You are functionally

Malcolm Collins: behaving. But people are still a Catholic, and that's important. We are not denying their religious identity.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: we're just saying that they're not a monotheist.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, they're not part of our group. So we identify, they're probably obvious by now, with this group, the monotheist group here. And I largely identify with monotheists, whether they're coming from Islamic traditions, those are our Astrian traditions, or the Catholics, for example.

And what I find is when somebody indulges in one group of these behavior patterns, whatever quote unquote religion they're in, they often group the other behavior patterns. So a Catholic that, for example, is really interested in, like, the saints and has this sort of polytheistic understanding, and keep in mind that, that polytheistic traditions often have one God that sort of rules the pantheon and then multiple castes of, of gods beneath him, just because there's one More powerful entity than other entity.

There are other entities that can resist his power. That's policy of them. And or, or act without his knowledge or will or anything like [00:16:00] that. Right?

They often involve like engage in other parts of policy of them. Like they'll have little magical fetishes. But by fetishes, I don't mean like sexual fetishes.

I'm talking about like an item that they believe has religious significance, you know, or and, and, and you see this clustered or if somebody is clustered around the mystical traditions in there for example, like a Muslim, they're a Sufi, right? They will generally believe all of the mystical traditions.

And this in part is what makes it so easy for people to create these interreligious systems by using these mystical traditions because a lot of religions are largest of regardless of what they were in terms of how some portion of their followers actually worship will will worship this broad mystical tradition you know, regardless of the overarching faith.

Simone Collins: I mean, from my perspective, they Share more common ground in the end. Like what matters to me is how is someone getting closer to what they believe to be God and someone practicing and how are their beliefs dictated. So I don't, I don't [00:17:00] care what denomination you are part of. I care what you're doing functionally.

It's kind of how like with employees, we're like, listen, I don't care if you were sitting on a beach, like most of the day, not doing anything with work. And yet somehow like all of your work gets done and it's fantastic. Like, I don't care. What I care about is what's going on, like ultimately with what is relevant to us.

And it's the same with religions for me. Like, I don't care if you say, That you are a catholic or that you say that you Practice shinto like if in the end you are behaving like a polytheist or like a mystic or like a monotheist then

Malcolm Collins: And the conception of god within these three groups is really really different like like it is not the same, you know With policy, I think it's pretty obvious.

But when you're talking about like the mystic conception of god It's almost atheistic. It's almost like a force of nature. It's not something that exists outside of humanity and [00:18:00] has sovereignty over humanity. And that's why I feel such a, a kinship, you know, when I'm talking and sometimes, you know, they'll, they'll blend parts of these traditions where they'll have a number of mystic traditions.

And then they'll say, but no, really. God is outside of humanity and, and has sovereignty over us. And it, it feels kind of stitched together from an outside perspective. And you'll see within the, the

Simone Collins: No, no, no. Here's, here's how I view mysticism in general. And you can say everything you want as a mystic.

But in the end, it's like taking a Xanax to relax instead of actually relaxing. You're using shortcuts through various like brain hacks, be it like spinning around in circles or like working yourself into a social tizzy and speaking in tongues or something else that is ultimately. Making you feel close to God when you have made a synthetic feeling of that through some other means

Malcolm Collins: using endogenously induced narcotics to

Simone Collins: exogenously [00:19:00] sometimes I mean people take ayahuasca to do things, although it does lead to permanent changes sometimes in brain

Malcolm Collins: structure and we'll talk about this a bit later in the track.

But I mean, I think it's quite perverse. And I think it shows the truth of the mystic faith system to say that thoughts had in corrupted states of consciousness are more true than thoughts had in states of, of, of, of diligent austere study. And to me it is true when it's saying that from the mystic perspective, that is true, but that is perverse to our conception of reality.

And, and sort of a mirror of, but yeah. And, and. This is why I also say that this can work across denominations. Like, this is more just broadly what we're doing as a call to a return to monotheism across religious traditions in monotheistic framings of the various monotheistic frameworks.

Simone Collins: No, they're fun. I did want to, I mean, I don't want to waste time on this. No, go, go, go. You alluded to earlier that it's very common in polytheistic sects or, or [00:20:00] groupings that sex with gods is possible.

And I know that it's like all over the Greek slash Roman gods, like, of course, but other polytheistic traditions as well?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I, I think that you do see it in a lot, but, but more what I'm saying is these are the types of gods that interact with man. And it's actually very rare in non Polytheistic traditions for God to interact with man.

So, I'll, I'll, I'll point this out, like where Polytheism seeps into sort of the Abrahamic face, i. e., When God interacts with man, how does he often do it? He does it through a polytheistic cosmology. Remember I said, polytheistic cosmologies have these zoos of deities that have like caste systems. So when God interacts with man, he'll do it through like an angel or something like that, i.

e. a zoo of different cosmic deities that have like a caste system and then are interacting with man or through the devil, which is like a different, you know, that's separate from God. [00:21:00] That's polytheistic, right? Right.

Simone Collins: Where Zeus just turns into a bull and goes for it.

Malcolm Collins: But this is what I'm talking about.

It's actually fairly rare to have a full monotheistic conceptions of God really ever directly engage with man, even within monotheistic scripture. You know, you consider something like the Vedas, you know, where you have you know, gods in, in the Hindi pantheon, you know, talking to each other or talking to man as if he's just one of them, you just.

don't really get that in, in pure monotheistic practice. And in mystic practice, it doesn't look like that at all. Whenever somebody is talking to God in a mystic practice, it's always through you know, an altered state of consciousness or meditation or something like that. So the way that God communicates is quite differently in each of these traditions.

Simone Collins: Interesting.

As an aside, I post on Twitter, we made today made me realize that a lot of people don't really understand the difference between [00:22:00] polytheism and monotheism. The post we asked, how do Christians that believe in a distinct devil who is separate from God and can challenge God's will. How do they claim that they are not polytheists and some of the most common answers we got were, they just showed a misunderstanding of other policy, mystic systems.

For example, a very frequent one was, well, God created the devil, , and all of the angels and therefore the devil's just another one of God's creations. Therefore the system isn't polytheist. In truth, actually, in, in the vast majority of policy mystic systems that I'm familiar with, there is a single creator.

God that creates all of the other gods. , or there is one God to start with that then creates a number of gods and then some of those gods create other gods. Et cetera, et cetera, but just saying, well, one God created the other gods doesn't make you not polytheistic. And then some other people said,

Well, these beings, angels, demons, etc. aren't gods. They're a different caste of divine entity. [00:23:00] And it's like, well, actually, almost every polytheistic system has different castes of divine entities. That's a signature aspect of polytheistic systems. You have just decided to only use the word God to refer to the entity in the high gets cast within this hierarchy. Well, still assigning God-like powers and all the abilities and. Traits one would associate with a God, to all of the other entities within the system. They are only not gods insofar as you have defined them as not gods.

They're not particularly less Powerful than, for example, lower power Greek gods or lower power Sumerian gods, you have just chosen not to call them gods. And I think that this really gets to the, the problem here is that a lot of people will be something like, well, I'm Jewish, and I know that Jews are monotheists, so my belief in these things doesn't make me a polytheist, or I'm Catholic, and I know that Catholics are monotheists, so the fact that I believe in angels that are, Truly [00:24:00] and totally independent from God and a devil that's truly and totally independent from God doesn't make me a polytheist but That's just, like, I, I hope you can see the problem with, with that definition and I, and I will understand how offensive what we're saying is here to some people because it challenges their identity the same way if I go to someone and I'm like, hey, you know, despite what you say, you're not actually a woman was in most useful categorizations of what a woman is, um, when I go to these groups and I'm like, you're not actually a monotheist with any useful interpretation of what monotheism is, And as such, I am challenging their identity, which is obviously very offensive to people.

, I will say here, if you want to have your cake and eat it too, if you want to be a monotheist, but also believe in things like angels and demons and stuff like that, the way you do it is you say that these things are partitions of God, of a single entity, or that we are told to think of the way [00:25:00] that God interacts was man, in terms of these distinct entities.

Because our brains are not capable of effectively emulating the way that God would think.

And so he gives us these revelations because if a human is trying to model God's actions in our world, the best way to do it is through a Pantheon of divine entities. So long as you always go back and you remember that the angels and the demons and everything like that, don't actually meaningfully exist as separate entities from God.

Malcolm Collins: There have been many efforts to find commonality and communion between religious traditions over the past couple centuries, whether it's the Baha'i, John Vervanke's The Meaning Crisis or the Seekers of Unity channel. All of these efforts have either tried to unite man around the mystical conception of the divine or combined all three of these conceptions.

These conceptions of the divine are fundamentally incompatible. Even if they all hold an element of truth, to us it seems self evident that the monotheistic pathway [00:26:00] is both true and the best path forward for our culture. So like, when I'm thinking for my kids, I really, like, the new agey coloring of the mystic pathway, I, I do not see it leading to industry or efficaciousness, it seems to just drag groups down and to, to You know, self indulgence, honestly, and the polytheistic pathway doesn't seem to contain any truth at all from what I've seen.

It's more just, just so stories, even when it's applied to the monotheistic traditions, you know, as you see in things like, um, the divine comedy, for example, which is very much a polytheistic cosmology. And by

Simone Collins: truth, what do you mean here? Are you referring to like it being predictive of

Malcolm Collins: outcomes? What I mean is that it seems to move our species, both philosophical understanding forwards and technological understanding forwards that the groups that engage in these pure forms of monotheistic practices.

Just seem to have an enormous, like, like God genuinely seems to favor them during periods you know, for [00:27:00] example, like early Islam before the Sufis really took over and, and, and the mystical traditions took over, you can look at their level of productivity, which was just insane. You, you, you look at, you know, early Christianity when you had much more of this monotheistic framework, and then it descended into more polytheism and mysticism, and it sort of collapsed in terms of its productivity.