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Hello and welcome to Smart People Podcast, conversations that satisfy your curious mind. Chris Stemp here. Thanks for tuning in. And specifically, thanks for tuning in this time because you read the title. We are talking about mysticism, like the mystical. And man, if that's not a weird subject, I don't know what is. In fact, we've never covered it. I don't know if I've ever actually even said the words, but I don't know if I've ever
But you chose to be here, and I want to reward you. In this episode, we are talking with philosopher Simon Critchley. Simon is a professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and the author of some odd 20 books. His newest book is the one we're going to be discussing today, which is simply called Mysticism.
So a lot of this episode is talking about the way we live, the way we perceive, and the importance of being present and enjoying this amazing reality. Let us know what you think. Smartpeoplepodcasts at gmail.com. Also,
If you haven't yet listened to the last episode, I mentioned the fact that we are adding a supplemental podcast. So we are now a weekly podcast. And in it, it is a short monologue type episode where I talk about my biggest takeaways from the previous episode, as well as what was it like interviewing this guest? What were some behind the scenes moments, perceptions, takeaways, etc.?
So make sure you follow or subscribe so you get those episodes as well, which will help solidify all the learnings and help you enjoy this podcast even more. Again, let us know how you feel about it. Smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com. Let's get into it. Our discussion with Simon Critchley about his new book, Mysticism. Enjoy. Enjoy.
Simon, I got to tell you, 500 episodes in, don't think we've ever, not only have we never covered the subject of mysticism, I don't know if I've ever said the word mystic. Like, you got to think about that. Hours and hours and hundreds of hours of audio. And this is a new word. It's quite a common place name in the United States, right? There's a mystic in Connecticut and...
There are other mystics. I don't know. I don't know. You don't hear it too much these days. You know, you hear a lot of synonymous terms, if you will. But mysticism is a new one for me and it caught my eye. So I hate to do this. I pride myself on being a better interviewer than this, but I'm going to have to start with the baseline question that you've answered a million times, which is what is mysticism?
Right. So the short version of the answer is that it's experience in its most intense form. So experience in its most intense form. And that's, so mysticism in that sense is being held outside yourself in something like a condition of ecstasy.
pushing yourself aside and open to an experience. That's the short version. And the really long version is really how, you know, for as long as there have been human beings and for as long as there have been human beings, there's been...
Religion is just a basic feature of hominid existence. And then at the center of that religion, wherever it's been and whatever nature it's had, there's been something special, something particularly sacred, and then special people connected with that. And that's also what's thought of as mystical. And
The whole concept is a bit of a mess. And if you were to go into it, but we could do. Oh, yeah. I mean, that's what we're here to talk about. Okay, good. Well, to be honest, when I hear experience is most intense form, I'm like, okay. And I hear the word ecstasy. Okay, I'm enjoying this, right? Then I want some of this in my life. It's not a state of being that we associate with often, even if we are in it by definition.
Yeah, it's true. It's also a term of abuse, you know. It's used most often as, you know, certainly in my line of work in terms of,
Someone that does the philosophy is a day job academic philosophy, you know, if you save to someone you're a mystic that's mystical That means it's crap. It's nonsense. You're just making it up so in that sense there's a pejorative side to it and that's that's part of the story of the concept is that Mysticism really is a modern concept which designates a particular area of experience experience of visions and such like and
And then that very modern concept, really 19th century, it really gets going, gets kind of back projected onto a tradition of religious thinking, which then describes people that didn't think of themselves as mystics.
people I deal with in the book and others like Francis, who I don't deal with, or Julian of Norwich. And these people are described as mystics. They didn't think of themselves as mystics. They thought themselves as religious people or as people who were contemplatives or something. So there's a, there's a kind of, I mean, in terms of, you know, how we might think about the experience that we call mystical, um,
In modern terms, this is an argument I make in the book, it can be best captured in aesthetic experience. Mystical experience really lives on for us in aesthetic experience and in particular in the experience of music. And I end the book with music. There's something about music.
What happens when you're listening to a piece of music that you love that is ecstatic? It transforms you. You're held out there and you believe at that point. Whatever piece of music that might be. I say somewhere, it's impossible to be an atheist when listening to the music that you love. So when you're listening to the music that you love and you're taken by it, that's close enough to a mystical experience for me.
Let's use that example because I think most people can identify with that. I know I can, and I wouldn't even consider myself a, a music connoisseur genuinely, but that's the best, the best, the best type. Yeah. But, but there's certain types that I, I really, there's types I enjoy, but there's types that amaze me. They, they conjure all, how does that then tie to your definition of mysticism?
Yeah, at that point when you're listening to that piece of music, you are transported, you are held, you're in a kind of rapture. And the response to it is emotional. It's an effective response. And I think a lot of people...
Recognize that. And, you know, if we look about, if we think about what's been happening musically in the last few years, you know, post pandemic, it seems to me that people are craving those types of experiences, which you could think of as,
As experiences of communion, of being together and of being together around something that you love. And this kind of gets back to the experience's most intense form. Is that what we're talking about? Is it...
The way you define a mystical experience is an experience that's so intense it often transports you outside of the now, outside of the grind of daily life, outside of the logical kind of standard way in which we see our experience. And also outside of yourself, there's a fantastic...
quote somewhere in the book which is from flannery o'connor where she talks about this is a very early text that's called a prayer journal i have the book here so i can find the quote uh dear god i cannot love thee the way i want to you are the slim crescent of a moon that i see and myself is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon
The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see. But what I'm afraid of, dear God, is that my self-shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you, God, because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside. And what's so powerful about that
in the context of, say, mysticism, is that for the mystics, what they're often trying to do is to escape the now, like a dreary grind of things, but also to push themselves aside.
to push themselves aside in order to see that which they want to see, which she's calling God, the divine. So, okay. So that's helpful. We have a sense of what a mystical experience is. Therefore, a mystic, historically speaking, is somebody who is better at putting themselves in those positions and then potentially coming back to translate the experience
of that. Is that fair? That's fair. Yeah. Yeah. These are often quite ordinary people who had all sorts of experiences or suddenly something has changed in their life. It's usually a transformation. I mean, so often it's around a change of life, right? That you're born into a certain
let's say, set of expectations or even born into a privilege, and then you walk away from that and you try and open yourself to something else. And what you're trying to do at that point is to push yourself aside, open yourself, become a receptor for something larger than you, the divine. And then the people that we think of as mystics,
we know of because they were popular. They had audiences. They attracted people from the get-go. So there's something about these people. The only reason we have most of the medieval texts is because
they were copied and recopied and translated and circulated in different forms because they caught the popular imagination so it's a kind of dimension dimension of populism to religious to mystical experience which is which continues down to this day right in terms of how people will go on pilgrimages to different different areas and still you know uh into lourdes and places like that and there's something about the um
the way so it you know so Mystics are these special people that receive these particularly intense experiences and then try and render them in words to to put them into concepts and and in doing that they find an audience and create an audience and a movement and then
And then in the medieval period, the church has to decide what to do with those people, whether they're going to be included in the church or kicked out of the church. And that's another story which we could get into.
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Well, I was wondering, a mystical experience seems like it's part of being human. However, religion feels like it's a choice that...
we make. So I'm trying to see how the two overlap or how we can say, oh, I enjoy the mystical experience, but I don't believe in God in this formal sense. Right. Because I don't necessarily associate the two. You know what I mean? Like when I, I just went on a golf trip a couple months ago and I remember it was at this place called banded dunes and you're overlooking the Pacific ocean and I'm with
some of my best friends and I'm doing the thing I love to do most in the world and standing on a cliff. And I just remember the literal air in my lungs got like sucked out. I don't know if I've ever had the breath taken so literally in that moment. That was mystical for me. However, if somebody said, wow, like, what was that like? I don't think I would say I wouldn't even equate it with religion because I
of my own beliefs and vantage point on what the two are. So what do you attribute that to, that experience of the air being sucked out of your lungs? You're looking on the golf trip, looking over the Pacific. Is that an intense connection with nature? Is that a sense of awe or the...
Yeah. Yeah. And that's why I love what we're talking about. Cause I, what you're putting is you're putting words to an experience I've often had, but never truly asked the why I've just enjoyed the what it often happens for me in nature. I remember another time sitting around a campfire with friends and looking up, I can still see it, see the moon. And I remember just pausing saying, guys, just pause for a second. Look around. How incredible is this? These moments
And so it is, it is this, um, deep rooted awe in life and then an immediate concern or awareness that it is a finite experience. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's fleeting. It's going to be gone. You're going to be gone. Um, um, you know, it's what, uh,
our friend Sigmund Freud called oceanic feeling, this oceanic feeling which you had in front of the ocean. I've had it in front of the ocean too. I'm very much a water gazer. There's something about the way
A horizon can, uh, can catch you on, um, uh, because it's indistinct. Is it, what are you looking at? You're looking at nothing. You're looking at sea and sky and some point where they appear to blur and intersect and, and that feeling of majesty and all, and the sense of the whole being there and the feeling of, um,
you know, of wonder, of astonishment, the beauty that you have at that moment is transformative. Now, for some people, that would be, yeah, you could make sense of that in terms of, well, that is the revelation of God in nature. That is the divine at work. And you don't need to include that. I mean, historically, mysticism can be defined as,
a tendency within religion. So mysticism is something that within each religious tradition we care to think of, you know, Buddhism, Buddhism,
and the three abrahamic faiths they all have mystical tendencies um and usually they'll be the religion itself the rituals connected with that religion and then these peak experiences that those religions can can help bring about and i think the other thing is about mystical experiences in in the religious context is that um often that will take the form of somebody you know just being absolutely
you know, transformed and then begin to proclaim or to scream in the street. If you're in Midtown, someone's screaming in the street. Now in the Middle Ages, that person might have been someone around whom others gathered and listened to and thought, well, perhaps this person is
teaching someone something maybe this person is a vehicle for the divine and perhaps we ought to um pay attention and uh whereas now we tend to think that person needs to be you know needs therapy and uh or somebody somebody call the police or something and that's that shirt that and that says a lot about us and how we've uh we find those
expressions of those intense experiences slightly troubling, slightly alarming. But going back to what you were saying about having the air taken out of your lungs, yeah, that's precisely it. That sense of just being carried away by the
the, you know, the totality of, of that experience. And, and also it's, um, you know, it's evanescence that this is going to, this is, this is passing and, and you are passing and it's, you know, it becomes that, I mean, that, that's what, you know, that's what we call an epiphany. You had an epiphany and, um, and that epiphany is something which is, uh, incredibly poignant because, um,
As you have it, in a sense, you know it's just for that moment and it's not going to last. And you almost want to cling to it, you know? So I wrote this down and maybe it's that...
religion or people see religion as the vehicle to the mystical. So if it's something that is so enjoyable, right, let's call it the peak of human experience, the, the recognition that like,
We only get so many of these moments while we're here and we love everyone. If we can manufacture more of them, then I want more. And people could potentially see religion as the way to manufacture those. How common is that? Or is that something that you think is true? It's common. It happens. I think, I mean, the concept which I'd
want to introduce here which is an interesting concept to me is um something like surrender um that that experience that you you had uh looking at the ocean is um you're having an experience but the experience is having you right the experience is having you you're taken by something and you surrender to it and i'm very interested in so mysticism is a kind of um
an acceptance to to surrender to to something something that is that that is vaster than us and um most of our lives we uh we don't surrender we we control we you know we organize we shape you know we need to be you know keep your keep your keep yourself together whereas there are these experiences like the one that you had or the experience of music or the experience of say
or indeed the experience of erotic experience at its best can be a kind of surrender. You're giving something up. You are open and you're completely vulnerable at that point. And that's, I think, why people are
Another reason why people are slightly suspicious of it because you are completely vulnerable, completely porous at that moment. And I think it's important to cultivate these areas of surrender in our lives because so much of our lives now, perhaps it always has been, but now it feels...
particularly the case are about, you know, control and making sure that you say the right thing in the right context. And you're constantly observing yourself, observing and checking and making sure that you don't screw up and you don't say the wrong thing. Whereas, you know, there were just these with, with things like say music, there's a feeling of just letting go of surrendering to the phenomenon and, and,
And that's, um, that's exhilarating. I, I, I love this idea of surrender and, and the amount of control I think, especially at the point in my life I'm in, which I absolutely love it, but man, it's a grind like every day, three little kids, you know, pretty intense job, like a lot of responsibilities. I was just talking to my wife about this from pretty much sun up to sundown. It is, how can I control everything?
for various reasons, for safety reasons, for progress reasons, for appearances, all these things. And so how do you think the average person who feels this sense of control, but knows there is another, another avenue out there, or there is another experience out there, how can they leverage the understanding of mysticism to, to,
be a little bit more open to the unknown or surrender a little bit more. Yeah. It's something you have to learn to, you have to learn to kind of give, give things up, give yourself over. So it's why it's often so hard to, you know, enjoy a moment when you, you should be enjoying it. And I, you know, I'm from a, you know, a culture which is very kind of self-sufficient.
and deflecting. So if someone says something nice about you, I immediately reply with some cutting, caustic, ironic remark. So you learn to deflect. But there's a sense in which learning to enjoy that, learning to submit to it, and to learn. There's a kind of discipline in that. So whatever you...
experienced, uh, looking at the ocean, that, that experience is something that you can, you can kind of train yourself to be more attentive to that. Um, I think, you know, the, in many ways, what I'm doing in the book does intersect with, um, some of the thinking around, um, practices of attention that, uh, people talk about at this point. And, uh,
I'm in the business of teaching for my living, my bread, as it were. And I'm confronted with students who I'm
told have attention deficit problems. I experienced the opposite. The students that I encounter are students that really want to attend. They desperately, desperately want to attend in person to something interesting and something difficult. They want to be there and to give themselves over to it. And that's something you have to learn. That becomes, say, the
the activity of study or simply
I mean, the word for study, studium in Latin, is a way of translating the idea of what's called ascesis in Greek, for which we get the idea of asceticism. So part of this is learning to discipline oneself, right? To be open, to be receptive, to surrender. And I think that's something that one can do. Religion, religious practice has been a very good way of doing that.
Because there you have rituals, you have practices, you have routines, you have things that you're meant to do. And within that context, you can give yourself over. You can experience a
what a Christian will experience as grace or as something transformative. But I think we can do the same thing too. So I think attention is another way of doing this. You don't need to be, often with, you know, discussions of mysticism, people will say, well, you know, I was micro dosing on ayahuasca in Guatemala, you know, last year, and I had all these experiences and
Is that mystical? And they say, well, yeah, well, it's nice that you went there and you had, you had a nice time, but actually you could do that right here, right now. Um, and you could, and you could do that in a way that's also lucid and, and, and,
And you could, it doesn't have to be some kind of tourist issue. It can be something where you can learn to attend and to focus on something that is outside yourself to just observe. I think a very simple way of putting this would be we could think about what is mystical just in terms of looking, just in terms of observing something mystical.
I'm not imprisoned in myself. I'm looking, I'm out there. And that's the key thing that we spend a lot of time as prisoners of our own second guessing and our own doubt. And that can produce a kind of misery, a kind of melancholy in us that we can be depressed by the fact of all the things that we have to do and deal with. And what I'm trying to get people to
to look at is look at things from the other way around to open things up and to open the capacity for, which is ultimately the capacity for love. That's what we're talking about, the capacity for love. So I think what we risk in our lives is becoming prisoners of that doubt, of that introspection,
and that critical self-observation. And what we have to learn to do is to switch that around, to attend, to focus, to be outside of ourselves and a little bit ecstatic.
I want to go back to the most recent thing you just mentioned, which I wrote this quote down, prisoners of introspection. I love that. I have long thought that introspection leads to things like high EQ or empathy, understanding, et cetera. And I think at times it serves. But to your point, when it becomes...
crippling you could say or just all-encompassing you do become a prisoner of it yes what i don't understand is can you tie that to the capacity to love yeah so to love is to um to love a nice definition of love is to um is to give what you do not have and to receive that over which you have no power to give what you do not have you you you
you don't have, you know, love is, you know, has an infinite quality, right? You can't just give it like I'm giving, I'd lend you $20. You can't give it. It's not like that. And, and to receive that over which you have no power. So that, that love is the,
the prospect of there being something like grace, something happening to you that you can receive love from, but you can't program it. You can't fix it in an equation. It has a mysterious quality. I was listening to something recently about this in relationship to prisoners of introspection groups
but also linking that to ideas of how we valorize intelligence and how we valorize smartness and the way that's done in the United States and elsewhere.
The best thing that you can be is to be smart, and smartness is a kind of you have that introspective capacity and you turn on other people and you impress them. Often with that, something awful dies in those people that are smart. That means that maybe they passed the SATs and got into Harvard when they were 18, but it doesn't mean they're going to be good people.
It doesn't mean they're going to be interesting people. It doesn't mean they're going to be people who have the capacity for love and for, for who have the character to go with that. And I think we could do a lot better at teaching those types of things rather than just fixating on, fixating on a kind of empty,
and empty intelligence that isn't really going anywhere. As a person who's run this podcast for forever. Smart people. Yeah, and has taken in more intelligent conversation than I could ever possibly remember or action on. I remember years ago, maybe five, where I said,
you know, what, what's the point of this? Like when does learning it become useless? What, what to what end? Um, and I had to make a switch to, I'm not learning this to add more knowledge to my base. I'm learning this because these conversations shape the whole of who I am. And that is a person I want to continue working on. Yeah. I've had to transition it because when you try to capture or collect information
knowledge so that you can understand things that's that's how i do it understand things better yeah there was a a never-ending goal to that that takes away from experience yes yeah yeah i i very much agree with that there's i think there is a um you know we we we live in a culture which valorizes smartness there's a kind of a cult of smartness and it's um
And that smartness is often seen as, you know, having critical capacity, the ability to see something and take it down, take it apart, and then throw it back at the other person and make them look like an idiot. And in philosophy, we are
in that. That's what we're meant to do and those are the people that we're meant to hire. Are they the best people? No. And if they're... I think the obsession with criticism, with critical thinking is actually a problem too. But I think at this point in history, for me, I think, as you said, understanding is more important than criticism because, you know, it's...
You know, people, we live in such, obviously it's a banality, but it's true. We live in such a divided reality, such a divided set of experiences. And we look at people from the other side of that division, wherever it might be, and we hold those people in contempt. We hold those people, we think those people are dumb, they're dupes.
And that seems to me to be a really stupid place to start. At the very least, we should do is to try and understand, comprehend and have the curiosity to carry that through. That's really, really important. So I think that the smartness in that sense is, yeah, overvalued. And I think also in terms of work, in terms of actually, you know,
things like writing, which I've spent my life doing, committed to the dying form of the book, is that I'm not the cleverest person I've met. And I know lots of cleverer philosophers than me. And I've known a lot of clever, younger philosophers who are much smarter than I am.
And you can be that when you're, say, in your early 20s or so, but are you going to be able to do the work? Because the work requires a certain persistence, a certain stubbornness, almost a certain dumbness, right? You just persist with it and you have the – yeah, you just carry through. And writing books, for me, often feels like a really –
kind of exercise in dumbness in a strange way. You know, I will, uh, I will shut off those questioning parts of myself and I'll try and finish this project in a kind of, in a kind of stupid way. And then, um, and then think about, then I'll, then I'll see how it looks some, some years further down the road. But I think it's very important to, um,
to think about how we actually assess things like intelligence and what we call emotional intelligence and all the rest, because we valorize a form of intelligence which is testable, which is very individualized, and which is based on
what you're capable of doing when you're 18, 19 years old. And that's not going to prepare you for life. That's not what a smart person is going to be when they're 40, 50, 60 years old. And that's what you have to look at, I think. Simon, one of the things you're making me think about is when you talk about how we valorize intelligence, it's almost as if we place a...
we place more value on the ability to understand things than the ability to experience things. Oh yes. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that's what I'm almost seeing this dichotomy between, uh, you know, formal intelligence, which is what we're talking about. And then almost universal intelligence, which seems like mysticism to me. You know what I mean? Like if you had an antenna to, uh,
dialing into what's going on around me and how do I solve this and how do I navigate this social situation or this business practice, et cetera, right? Versus with, again, I'll use mysticism here or a mystical experience versus
It is almost completely at odds with that. It is the not trying to understand. Yeah. Yeah. Of letting yourself be overwhelmed by something, an experience, letting an experience do what experiences do, which is to
is to have an effect on you, but also to take you somewhere. I mean, the German word for experience, well, two words for experience in Germany, one is in German, one is erlebnis, which is kind of experience is something received. The other term is erfahrung, which means it's linked to the idea of going somewhere. So experience is a journey.
So experience isn't just something that you have. It's something that you, you have a new, you then go somewhere with there's the, there's a, there's a way of, it has a destination, a possible destination. So I think the idea of experience as something active as something that you, uh, you can, you can receive on the one hand, but you can do something with, I think is, is really important. And as a philosopher, this is why I love having you on. Cause I can ask you this question.
I mean, if I were to explain the, let's just call it reality of being human to let's call it an alien or, or like somebody who never heard of it and say, Hey, okay.
you're going to come into this world and you know, you're going to be in all these incredible environments. Like you can go underwater, which is this liquid substance that you can float in, but you also drink, which helps you grow and you double in size. And then the sun actually powers everything at
You know, you just went on and on. Like I heard somebody the other day say, imagine trying to explain the way a fetus develops to an alien. They would think you are the alien. You know, like there's a tube that comes out of my stomach. Okay. Here's where I'm going with this. If you were to articulately explain the experience of living to someone, and then you said, we're going to give you this opportunity. We're going to let you go do it.
I'm pretty sure their first reaction would be like, I want to experience it all as opposed to, I want to achieve, accomplish and understand. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's weird because I feel like along the way we lose the curiosity is too basic of a word, but just the, um, yeah, the capacity for wonder becomes dulled.
in time it can become dulled it can become extinguished i think about that in terms of there's a vim vendors film called wings of desire from uh the mid-1980s but it's based on this poem by uh the poet rilke where rilke is talking about uh angels and um he asked the question rilke what would you say to an angel you know uh would you say to an angel you know um
Look, angel, heavenly truths, divine matters, ethereal forms, you know, God. No, the angel knows that already. What you say to an angel, Rilke says, is bridge, right?
river jug and this will astonish the angel and in the context of wings of desire when the angel who's the alien wants to come down to earth not in order to in order to what in order to
He's discovered there's this thing called coffee, which is great. And then coffee with a cigarette. This is extraordinary that you can do that. You can have coffee with a cigarette. Now, give that to an alien and that might impress them. Yes. So I think it's hanging on to those things.
those little scintillas of wonder, those little epiphanic moments, and then learning to cultivate them and to cultivate our capacity for openness. Do you think there is a purpose in our ability to experience
The mystical. Do you, do you think there is an intelligence there or do you think it's a, it's like an attribute of being alive or do you think there's a purposefulness? I think it's, I think it's, it is the, there is a purpose in our experience to, you know, there's a purpose in our experience of that thing that we call the mystical, the being held out there and being, you know,
surrendering to it, being open to it, being transformed by it. And I don't know why it went through my mind just now, but I'm just thinking about that moment at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Oddity, where you get the rival apes, hominids, you know, fighting and
And so this, this, you know, piece of bone that's a weapon is being used to bludgeon another, another ape. But at that point it comes out of the ape's hand and it spins and spins. Then you get that shot where it turns into a spaceship. I think we are put here to experience that type of thing that there is, it's, it's,
It's very hard to say because it's very, very simple that, you know, what it means to be human for me is to dwell, is to be somewhere with others, with things and to be able to
move into that nearness of a space and to actually spend time there and not to be lost and isolated in one's head and cut off from reality but to live that
This might sound a bit odd, but to kind of live that nearness of things, that drawing towards things with the utmost intensity, I think is our purpose. That's where we can find each other if we have the good fortune to do so.
Do you think that the more evolved, if you will, we become, the further away from that center we also become? Yes, yes, yes. It used to be, you know, you were... Yes, it's a scarce commodity and it's very threatened. And we... I mean, you know, we're obviously using...
We're using digital technology to make this thing possible. And that's, that's very nice. And it's very nice to speak to you, but the way in which that can cut us off from each other and to cut us off from experiences is, is terrifying. And we, you know,
Prisoners of introspection, in that view, in a sense, that's kind of where we are. We're not just prisoners of introspection. We're prisoners of introspection who are attached to these sticky apps, these sticky social media platforms that are just leading us down addictive, pointless loops that we walk.
We know what they are, and yet we cannot seem to stop ourselves from doing that. And I think we face a real problem, particularly in relationship to... I wrote a book some years ago called Notes on Suicide, a cheerful book,
And it was, uh, yeah, another upbeat. No, it was, it was, but, and, and, um, I did another edition of it in 2020 and in the original book, it was more of an essay and, um, and I didn't use any sociological stuff. I didn't use any social science data. Uh, I did that research, but didn't include it in the book, but I became so alarmed by things that were happening, but I wrote a preface to it in 2020 during the pandemic actually. And, um,
Because if you look at the research, and the research is out there, people like Jonathan Haidt and Gene Van Tevenger and these people, they've collated it all. It's publicly available, open source. You look at the effects of social media, smartphone exposure on everything from mood disorder to suicidal ideation to complete suicide,
And, you know, and these things, mood disorder, suicide ideation, suicide were a phenomena that are subject to variation culturally, but not dramatic variation over time. They're pretty consistent. It's a grisly topic, but, you know, more Hungarians and Austrians have killed themselves over the years. And no one really knows why. It's not a cultural factor. It's just something that they do. Now,
But then something shifts around 2010, 2012 in terms of the suicide attempts, suicide rates. And this is also heavily gendered. It's something which is affecting teenage girls more than teenage boys.
And then you ask yourself what happened around 2012, what began to happen around 2012? And obviously the answer is a smartphone market saturation happens around that time. And that is something we haven't even begun to kind of factor into all of this. And, and, and so it's and that's,
That's making us prisoners of introspection in another whole new and terrifying register, it seems to me. I know we're coming up on time here. There's a question that I've wanted to ask the whole time, but I was in the flow, which is, you mentioned, I think you've written, I don't know, 20-something books. What brought you to this one? What is it about mysticism? Why does the world need to know it? Well, maybe a little bit of two reasons. So market testing and then
I hate being asked what I'm working on. Um, maybe the second one first, I hate being asked what I'm working on. So what do you do? What are you working on? And I, I was wondering, I'm thinking in my head, well, you know, why don't you ask me about the last thing I did? And, or, and what, or maybe you could read it or listen to it. And then we could talk about that. I don't know what I'm, I don't know what I'm doing, but if I said to people, oh, I'm working on mysticism. And then I go quiet. And then, um,
they'd walk away or they would, you know, Oh, I'm going to go for a drink. Or some of them would say, Oh yeah, I had these experiences or this happened to me. And then they'd start talking in which case I could stop talking. And so there was that, it was a way of turning the conversation around. So mysticism is a, is a very inviting topic. It invites other people in. So that's kind of why I chose to write the book on mysticism. It,
invites people in. And then secondly, the kind of market testing in a way was with, um, I've been teaching for 30 odd years and, uh, me and a friend of mine began to do a class on this that we called mysticism in about 2013. And, you know, we both taught, you know, for a number of years and, uh, and we're used to certain things happening.
But with this material, which is very, the mystical text, particularly the mystical Christian text that I use in the book,
are very abstruse, very, very difficult texts, hard to read. I know. I reviewed some of it. I was going. Yeah, yeah. What? It's strange stuff. But then you put this into the hands of students and they suddenly make it their own. They make something of it. It speaks. There's this combination between something very, very abstract and strange and something directly personal and transformative. So there's something about mysticism there.
which is able to address people in this intensely personal way. And in the response to this book in the last month or so since it's been out, I get these very heartfelt email messages from people about what it meant to them. And it's what
what it meant to them in terms of they liked the book, but then it's what it opens in them and how it resonated with experiences that they've had. And that's, and that's all you can, that's all you can hope for. I don't, you know, I don't have, you know, a lesson to pass on. I can just, you can try and do work that's invitational and to invite people in. And then once they're in the party, they can, they can, they can do what they want.
They can party with me. I mean, once they're there, they can party with you. And what better, what better stories to hear than others mystical experience. Right. And then to understand how did they internalize it? I mean, genuinely.
I haven't thought about that moment where I was on the green over the cliffs at this golf course in about a month or so. But as soon as you started talking about mysticism, I can actually, I can feel it more than I can remember it, which is really interesting. Yeah, it's an intensity of feeling. And at that point, it was you, you were there, but you weren't really in your head. You were taken by the experience and the experience was kind of holding you.
And it was having you. And that's...
And that's kind of, yeah. So that's what mysticism is. It's experience having you rather than you having experience. Well, Simon, I love this topic because oftentimes we talk about things that are formal intelligence, if you will. And I think it's important, myself included, to remember the point of it in my mind is the experience of it. It is how to take this information or knowledge or content or context, whatever we want to call it,
And, um, and just have it, you know, for whatever way it changes you going forward. That's, that's the point. And this, this conversation has done that. Right. Well, Chris, it was a great pleasure and very nice to talk to you. And, um, I hope you have many more experiences.
mystical experiences playing golf. Me too, if I can get out there more, you know, if my wife will let me out. So the book, as we said, it's Mysticism. It's pretty new. It's only been out about a month or so. Anywhere else? I know, of course, you can get it anywhere you get books, but anywhere else you are that people can find you, learn? I mean, you're always writing. So I'm curious where you want to direct people. I have a website called simon.critchley.com.
I think I always forget what it's called. Let's see. I got it pulled up right here. We have Simon dash. Yeah. It was only put up this year and there's, there's all sorts of stuff there. And, um, but, uh, I, uh, thank you for speaking to me and, um, and I thank you for your listeners for listening to me. Absolutely. Thanks so much. All right.
A thank you to this week's guest, Simon Critchley. The episode was hosted as always by Chris Stemp and produced by yours truly, John Rojas. Simon's book, Mysticism, is available wherever books are sold. And now for some quick housekeeping items. If you'd ever like to reach out to the show, you can email us at smartpeoplepodcast at gmail.com or message us on Twitter at smartpeoplepod.
And of course, if you want to stay up to date with all things Smart People Podcast, head over to the website, smartpeoplepodcast.com and sign up for the newsletter. All right, that's it for us this week. Make sure you stay tuned because we've got a lot of great interviews coming up and we'll see you all next episode.