Midnight Gospel
Episode summaries
Episode 1 Summary: Taste of the King with Dr. Drew Pinsky
I was a huge fan of Dr. Drew Pinsky from my time in California, where he had a radio show/podcast called Love Line, where he took on similar topics. The episode begins talking about the opioid crisis, where overprescribing opioids for PTSD and other psychiatric diseases caused a huge addiction problem. He points out how the pill combo that they get on the opiate and the benzodiazepines and the sleeping medicine... "A," kills. "B" perpetuates their pain, as they're disabled by it. A funny bit they mention is how, In the past, the Founding Fathers talked about pumping mushrooms into horrible world leaders.
Another topic discussed is the practice of mindfulness, described by Clancy as how one watches how one acts, feels, and thinks, becoming aware of the roots of many emotions.
Clancy then shares details about his struggle with anger and how he can remember
his printer didn't work one day. " I remember screaming alone in my apartment," he said, "breaking my printer in just a rage. That's a thing that's inside of me, and that's why psychedelics have been very useful to me. But also, meditation has been incredibly useful because now I can sit and meditate. Then maybe the dogs will bark while I'm meditating. I can watch the irritation sort of flower inside of me. Then when it's there, they say, "Look at it as though you're sitting in a forest and you're getting to watch a rare animal...walking out into a clearing." ...and instead of going into reactivity mode, which is, maybe, to stop meditating and scream at your dogs, or you would do something to make them quiet. Instead, you just watch. Buddhism compares anger to a sweet flower with bitter roots, so we follow the sweetness down. In Buddhism, the idea is all of those mental forms of analysis of these things are kind of secondary to the very simple observation of the way any emotional state or thought or bodily feeling has a similar pattern in that it heightens, dissipates, and goes away."
Then he moved to talk about sangha or the spiritual community acknowledged in Buddhism to help focus the attention when Dr. Drew mentioned that for him, a lot of that "magical" stuff happens in an interpersonal context. Let's encourage each other to get as close to the truth as possible, meeting reality on reality's terms.
"We're trying to do this process where we keep going backwards until we can't look at ourselves anymore. We want to go to this complete observer state until you get to the thing... Awareness of awareness. And then you become pure awareness, and the concept is that what we really are and that this entire material universe, including our body, is a kind of Phenomenological field of phenomena. A field of phenomena being encapsulated within this consciousness, and so the idea that I am alone, or the idea that I am an individual, is actually, interestingly enough, false. It's a distortion. 'Cause, you're the thing and the observer simultaneously meeting together, that creates the illusion of self. You feel shit like that when you're high on acid," Clancy affirms.
The last words they conclude with are... "There's no such thing as a bad drug; it's the circumstances!"
Episode 7 Summary: Turtles of the Eclipse with Caitlin Doughty
I learned who Caitlin was after watching this episode. Still, we share quite a fascinating obsession with death as she plays "Death" in this episode.
The link to her website here is below:
As losing people to death is so painful, Clancy starts by asking for advice for people dealing with death in their own lives? And Caitlan answers with, "the best thing you could do for yourself in your entire life is to be super present for those moments. 100% in, sitting with the dead body or 100%, sitting with the placenta and the newborn, mewling, covered-in-mucus baby.
She then takes on the topic of the modern "Death" conspiracy and how current funeral home practices have maliciously impacted our way of dealing with death. She then advocated for in-home traditional washing and staging methods instead of embalming. "Keep in mind," she said, "humans were
taking care of their own dead in this way for tens of thousands of years and that This is just the norm. It's only been in the last 100, 120 years that embalmers were really able to push the idea that what they were doing by embalming the body is making it safe for the family. Disinfecting it. Making it acceptable and safe for the family to see. Whereas before, it was mostly women who were in the home, just washing the body and waking the body and laying it out, now, all of a sudden, you have men coming in, who aren't part of the family, who are different professionals, saying, "It's not safe for you to do it. We're gonna need to come get the body, prepare it through this process of embalming, and charge you for it." So, all of a sudden, it now starts to, in the early 20th century, move towards this financial model. "
She then highlights the spiritual benefits of traditional methods by stating that "because the people who do it, the people who have some inkling that they might want to do it but aren't sure and then they're given the permission, they end up having this magical, transformative experience. It's like chocolate and puppies. That's the kind of feedback that you get."
And for her last statement in the episode, she insists on the following message: "Stop fighting it. You're gonna be okay. Face the void. Besides, you're not gonna die yet."
Episode 8 Summary: Mouse of Silver with Deneen Fendig
This episode is perhaps the most heartwarming of the whole series as Clancy (Duncan Trussell) 's late mother joins him on an emotional journey through the wondrous cycle of birth, life, and death. An episode so content-rich that I use many parts of it in my meditation practice. The meditation video I use is linked below.
Toward the beginning of the episodes, Duncan gives my favorite description of childbirth; "So this is the process of an American baby. American baby gets blasted out of the pussy, sprays in the doctor's face, and then gets the tip of his penis cut off. "Snip off the tip of his penis and wrap him in a pink blanket." It's like some evil initiation into a terrible fraternity.
His mother then describes the impact of his birth on his older brother, "There is something that happens for that firstborn child that changes them forever. Because suddenly you just have to share resources. Suddenly you are called "big" when you're actually little. And so, it's a mind fuck right then and there...I mean, an 18-month-old is in no way big. They're still in diapers, and they're still babies. And, all of a sudden, they're really required to be something they aren't, which changes them forever. "Be a big boy." A big boy or a big girl. Be unselfish. Help Mommy with this baby. Don't ask for anything. Don't wake the baby up. Try to be something that you aren't. And it changes people forever."
She also confirms that the formative years create the beginning of a pattern that goes throughout your life. "I would say that the first five years of our lives shape the personality structure in such a way that any kind of spiritual work that you're gonna do later" she said, "...is going to involve looking back at the patterns that were set down in your family of origin and There's no way to avoid that. Because anything that you were reinforced for in a positive way, you're gonna lock in as the way a person should be. So if people thought you were especially wonderful if you brought Mommy the diaper for the new baby, then that's gonna tend to make you more responsible. Maybe more responsible than you ever tended to be, Maybe super responsible, or maybe compulsively responsible. So you start with where you are, but if you don't go back and see what's real and what's not real, then you're missing your way into reality, which is what spirituality is all about, as far as I'm concerned. It's distinguishing what's real from what's not real. And that's why a teacher is needed, and the teacher needs to be devoted to truth."
The rest of the snippets are in the video below.
