When the world is screaming “It’s all black or white,” how do we remember that we mostly live in the grey area? Brenda Davies might be onto something. She’s the author of “On Her Knees: Memoir of a Prayerful Jezebel,” which chronicles the pendulum swing experienced as she left Christian purity culture and then embraced LA’s hook-up culture. She’s also the creator of In The Grey a Youtube channel and podcast that “champions curiosity, sex positivity, compassion & healthy debate.” Whether it’s with religion, or sex, or our relationships, Brenda is encouraging us to open up our thinking. We get into the ways we disconnect from our bodies during sex - and disconnect from our intuition when people want us to adopt an ideology that may not serve us. This is a fast, fun conversation and we’re excited for you to meet Brenda. Show notes: Brenda’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/godisgrey/ Brenda’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/GodisGrey Episode link: https://www.tmstpod.com/episodes/41-brenda-davies-purity-hook-ups-and-life-in-the-grey Spotify playlist for this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7FOeISM1Ots0yBnQc1Dg3p Tell Me Something True is a 100% independent podcast. There are no corporations or advertisers backing this community. We are 100% funded by the TMST community. Support TMST today so you can hear the uncut interviews, attend private events with Laura and help keep TMST ad-free: https://tmst.supercast.com/
Tell Me Something True with Laura McKowen
Peter Rollins on Grappling with Uncertainty
[00:00:00] Laura McKowen: Hey, it's Laura. If you're listening to this, you're not hearing the complete unedited version of this conversation. If you want in on that, you can get it by becoming a TMST plus member. Just head over to our website at tmstpod.com and click support. All right. Enjoy the show.
[00:00:25] Yeah, you're our first repeat guest.
[00:00:29] Peter Rollins: Oh, wow. I'm very excited by that and I'm honored.
[00:00:40] Laura McKowen: Hello everyone. It's Laura and we have a big treat for you today. But first I want to let you know that we are still planning on airing that discussion from south by South by Southwest. We are not holding out on you. We just don't have the audio yet. And as soon as we do, it will be in your ears. So to those who have been asking, thank you for waiting patiently, that is the deal.
[00:01:09] And as soon as we have it, you will too. Okay. So here's the treat. We have our first ever return guests to TMST the much adored and much requested Peter Rollins. For those of you who don't know Peter, well, you're welcome first, but he is an Irish author, a philosopher, a public speaker, a theologian. He's one of those people that it's kind of hard to pin down.
[00:01:40] And he got his international reputation for turning the traditional notions of religion on their head. But what I have found about him is that he turns so many ideas that we sort of take for granted as a matter of course on their head. And most of our conversations have been around examining sort of basic truths.
[00:02:03] And this one is no different. We brought him back not only because you'd requested him and I loved talking to him, but because we wanted to talk about certainty or uncertainty rather and how we contend with it. And we went deep into the role of liturgical structures, which if you're like me, you may have.
[00:02:29] Well, I don't know. You might have, you might be very clear on what that means, but I have this vague idea of liturgical structures as something to do with religion and the church. But not really understanding. And he explains it. We spent a lot of time on it. He deconstructs what they actually are, which is at the highest level, the routines and practices that we have in our daily lives.
[00:02:54] And we talk about the importance of them, the both the practical importance, but really the psychological importance. And in some ways the archetypal importance and this conversation went on for over 90 minutes. So we did have to cut quite a bit. If you want to hear the full thing, including the parts where we talk about the struggle to be close, but not too close to other people, anxiety and trauma, you can become a paying subscriber by going to TMSTpod.com and joining.
[00:03:35] If not, there is so much goodness in this version as well as always, we appreciate you being here so much. I hope you love this second go round with Peter Rollins.
How are you today?
[00:03:58] Peter Rollins: I'm good. Is, are we officially? Yeah. Great. I can officially say Hello. I officially said Hello, of course, but now I can officially say hello to you. And it's great to be back and see you. And chat again.
[00:04:14] Laura McKowen: You asked a couple of days ago, you said, was there anything special you want to talk about? And I said, yes, you want to talk about uncertainty.
[00:04:20] Peter Rollins: Yes. I was very happy when you said that. Because I used to go, oh, you know, I'll chat to anything, but you said uncertainty. And to be honest, there's something I've been, I'm writing a book at the moment and this is something I've been doing some work on as well.
[00:04:32] So it's on it's in my mind, I'm doing some courses on it. So yeah, it's up my street just as a little hint of where I would like to go. In case it gets boring for people, I'm going to tell them the end so that they keep listening. I would love to outline four different types of uncertainty and the last one is the most interesting and the first one's the most boring. And the last one's the most interesting. And the last one will help us understand anxiety, how to be desirable to your partner, what, what makes, what, what invokes our desire? So that's where at some stage we will get into that.
[00:05:11] Laura McKowen: Stick around folks for that.
[00:05:13] Yeah. I would love that. Well, we'll head in that direction. We have the scripture that says that you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. We’ll start there, which goes beyond so far beyond any bounds of like religious dogma or structure or anything like that. It's a human desire. But what you alluded to is that sometimes when we think we're seeking truth, what we're seeking is certainty.
[00:05:42] And so let's talk about something that what was in that video actually, which has liturgy and first, I want you to define what liturgy is, what you mean by liturgy.
[00:05:54] Peter Rollins: Okay, good. We've already jumped into lots of very interesting things. What I mean by liturgy is our rituals of life.
[00:06:04] It might be going and meeting a friend every Tuesday for coffee. It might be playing poker every Friday night with your friends, go into the confessional to the coffee shop, you know, whatever it is that, but certain rituals of life that we have. Some, some of us, it might be going out every Friday or Saturday night to a nightclub and dancing and listening to music.
[00:06:25] So when I talk about liturgy, we're liturgical creatures. It's almost like we need help often, either in confronting our truth, which we'll come back to in a second or in trying to hide from it, those are two very strong impulses. So, you know, for example, the liturgy of the nightclub, is sometimes a liturgy that people engage in because they're in a job that they really don't like to nine to five, five days a week, they have to do something that makes them feel dead inside.
[00:06:58] They're making money for somebody else. They're not making enough money to pay their rent. They've got financial insecurities. They're not meeting people except as objects to do work with, you know, so you do meet people, but their, their functions and you're a functionary of this system. And so your life is very, very difficult and you blow off steam on Friday and the Saturday night you go out, you drink, you get drunk, you listen to loud music, you have a cathartic experience.
[00:07:26] Which allows you to then go back into your life and do the nine to five again. The problem with that liturgical structure is it doesn't really help you confront things. It helps you avoid them. So what happens is you probably get into a rut where you do this every weekend, every Friday, every Saturday night, maybe even twice a week, and you use maybe alcohol or music or casual sex or whatever it is to try to avoid your truth, the truth of your suffering.
[00:07:57] But if I can contrast that with them, I always like to [00:08:00] contrast it with the Irish pub. A few of my friends, I came, and you know, one of my good friends, Jay Baker, who's, you know, he's been dry all his adult life. You know, he's an AA, but he loves the Irish pub. My friend Barry’s the same, he doesn't drink, loves the Irish pub.
[00:08:13] And the thing about the Irish pub is it kind of has the scene, the surgical structures and light club. It has music. It has alcohol, it has conversation. But often to a different end. So in an Irish pub, you might go in and have a drink, not to skip your problems, but to talk about them. You know, you have a drink, you have a coffee and you sit and you talk about your life.
[00:08:37] The music is not designed to help you be so light. And so pop that you kind of, again, just get into an ecstatic forgetfulness, but it's some sad Irish guy talking about how he lost his one true love to cholera on how you'll never love again. Right. So then you, the music connects you with your suffering and you're able to have good conversations, not like in a nightclub where you can only say the most basic stuff because it’s so loud. You can actually have a good yarn and talk about life. There are two liturgical structures. One I think is designed to help you avoid the truth. And the other is a liturgical structure that audits best can maybe help you encounter the truth that you would otherwise want to deny the truth of your suffering relationships or life.
[00:09:26] Laura McKowen: So do you know where the etymology of liturgy comes from? Because I've always thought of it as function of the church.
[00:09:35] Peter Rollins: Yeah. You know, the only thing I know, and I don't even know this very well, but I think there was a, you know, you go back far enough and often there's a real linking between drama and theater and theatrical stuff, and then religious ritual and there is a real kind of like melding into those two things.
[00:09:54] Laura McKowen: Is it fair to say everyone has a liturgical structure to their life consciously or not?
[00:09:59] Peter Rollins: Yeah, I would say that. Absolutely. We have and it's almost because I mean, science is strange at first, although not at all. When you think about that we like if we could directly encounter our emotions and our fears and our loves and our desires, we actually wouldn't really have much need for music and arts and poetry.
[00:10:21] And like, there's lots of things that we wouldn't really need, but and even people like professional criers at funerals or the, or the laugh canned laughter in the comedies, right? These, these all function in very interesting ways with the idea being that we often need a song or a piece of art or a hug or the look of a stranger, whatever it is to access something that we couldn't assess on our own.
[00:10:51] And so really liturgical structure is simply some something that enables you to unlock something that you can't really do on your room.
[00:11:02] Laura McKowen: That's interesting. First of all, I didn't know that there were professional criers at funerals. To help people cry?
[00:11:10] Peter Rollins: You know, it's really interesting. The idea, even with a professional mourner is almost like I can't access my own tears.
[00:11:19] I cannot access my own suffering, but so somebody else through their tears, I get some cathartic release. I begin to very subtly be able to mourn to be able to do my own mourning. So the professional crier, it's not in our culture, but in some cultures, when you have that it's strangely it's like, I can't even cry. I don't even have the ability to, to, to suffer yet.
[00:11:49] Laura McKowen: This is fascinating to me. It's almost like the manifestation or the animation or the I don't have a better word of archetypal energy, like that presents itself in, in some kind of physical form or in meta physical form or something like music, art, so that we can, it's almost like it has to be abstract for us, for it to, to enter us. That's so interesting. This liturgical structure because I was thinking when you first started as more of a, like it's a routine or a, a container for your life, like a rhythm that you set up is that?
[00:12:37] Peter Rollins: No, you know? Yeah. I mean it kind of, I think that that is part of it, but at that deeper level, I think it has a function, not just a containing function, but I'll call it an alpha-beta sizing function.
[00:12:50] I'm not sure if we talked about last time. Did we talk about the beta beta elements and alpha elements? Do you remember? I'll mention it quickly and I apologize to your listeners if we talked about before.
[00:13:05] Laura McKowen: We didn’t. I would have remembered that now we didn't do anything like that.
[00:13:07] Peter Rollins: Well, basically I'm using these words from a canonical thinker called, Wilfred Bion, who is a psychoanalyst. And he talked about, he talked about beta elements and what he means by a beta element is when you're a child, when you're an infant, even when we're adults, but particularly when you're an infant, you can be overwhelmed by experience that you cannot understand, and it might be hunger.
[00:13:32] It might be coldness. It might be loneliness. It might be, you know, whatever it is, there's, you're overwhelmed with something and you can't speak it on a, on an infant will end maybe cry as in have a temper tantrum, whatever. And Bion says that, so these beta elements they're there in the child, they're in thought, but they can't be thought, you know, now then Bion says that the mother or the mothering whoever the mothering one is you know holds and soothes the child sings to the child and also begins to help the child understand what's happening to them, responding to, to that beta element.
[00:14:13] And he calls this the alpha function. And the reason why I love these words is at first, they signed up, starts with the beta element, the alpha function of the mothering one, which that then turns the beta element into an alpha element. But when you put all of this together, it says the mothering one alphabetizes the trauma of the child. In other words, they put into language, the overwhelming trauma that the infant is experiencing. And that for me is a little bit what liturgy can do. It's an outlet for alphabetizing function that enables us to encounter and make sense of our suffering while never fully, never fully rendering it into the mind into the symbolic, but, but partially helping us get a purchase on it.
[00:15:01] Laura McKowen: That's great. What is the purpose when you talk about liturgical structure? What's the purpose?
[00:15:07] Peter Rollins: One of the purposes is mourning and Freud is very good on this, that the, what happens when we say suffer and we all suffer, there's the traumas that happened to us. And there is the trauma that is us, the trauma that is being human.
[00:15:21] And when, when we're not able to mourn to remember and to mourn and to work through something, it remains in us in an unconscious way. So you know, everyone knows that free is gone, but not forgotten when someone has died, but you remember them. This realm I'm talking about as the forgotten, but not gone.
[00:15:46] It's where you try to forget your suffering. You try to move on and pretend everything is good and fine, but it remains within you, and it erupts in explosions of anger, in tears for no apparent reason, in some behavior that is very unlike your day to day activity, it's forgotten but it remains like a poltergeist.
[00:16:05] And so basically the liturgical structure by helping you mourn, it turns the poltergeist into the holy ghost. And what I mean by holy ghost is a ghost. The presence that is absent, a ghost is a presence that is, you know, so it's somebody you love. He isn't there because they say that knock our lives out of shit.
[00:16:27] But when through this kind of these activities of art and poetry and music and friendship, we're gradually able to, to kind of like begin to confront those things begin to speak them begins to cry over them. They stop having this negative part. And actually they become what's called sublimated. They actually become, uh, they become elements of our betterment on our transformation.
[00:16:54] Laura McKowen: Yes. Got it. Like integration. It seems like what you're saying is that the healthy or the positive, the advantage to the liturgical structure so we can metabolize, but we can only metabolize when we tell the truth about what's going on. So let's go into uncertainty. How do, what is the relationship between liturgical structure liturgy and uncertainty?
[00:17:20] Peter Rollins: I’m excited.
[00:17:23] Laura McKowen: People who can't see, but Peter just pseudo clapped his hands together.
[00:17:29] Peter Rollins: I’m overwhelmed. So I'll get rid of the two boring types of uncertainty very quickly within two minutes, which is so there's a type of uncertainty in which you don't know something because you haven't looked at a YouTube video or read a book on it.
[00:17:44] And that's generally what people think of with uncertainty is that's oh, I don't know what's happening outside my door at the moment, because I haven't looked there could be somebody walking past there there's certain things that you just don't know and the effect or the emotion that I think is mostly connected to this.
[00:18:00] I'll call it contingent unknowing contingent uncertainty is curiousity. So I would attach the effect of curiosity to that type of unknowing. And I get, I watch all these weird YouTube videos of like weird subjects. Cause sometimes I go, well, how does a computer work or what is happening in a cell? You know?
[00:18:18] And then I have a curiosity. So there's that type of uncertainty and unknowing. Then there's a second type, which I'll call maybe meaningless uncertainty. And which is where you don't know something. Someone's maybe making it clear when you don't know if it's right or not, but, uh, it's impossible to know.
[00:18:40] So if you talk to someone who's maybe has a psychotic brick, and they're saying that, oh, someone's planted my groups in my brain and they're controlling my thoughts. And then you say, well, well we can test for that. I got a device. It will pick up electromagnetic signals and then the person goes, oh no, no, no, no.
[00:18:55] This device is so technologically advanced that it doesn't give off those signals. And so I go, well, we can give you an x-ray and we'll see it. Oh no, no, it doesn't show up in xrays. This is an example where it's an unknowing that is meaningless because the person it's unfalsifiable right. So there's that kind of annoying and the effect that's connected to that as frustration, I think.
[00:19:16] So, you know, when you're you starting to get really frustrated, but those are the two boring ones. Then we get onto the interest in ones that are to do with liturgy. And two who are talking about the first is the one we've talked about a fair amount, but which is the type of unknowing that doesn't come from a lack of knowledge, but from an access it's an unknowing that comes from.
[00:19:40] So for example, I can't love someone I don't know. Cause I don't know them. Right. So there's an unknowing, cause I don't know them and that'd be, I want to go out with somebody and I'm like, I'm lonely and I want to fall in love, but I don't love a person. I just, I love the idea of love. I don't love a person.
[00:19:56] And then when I meet someone, I momentarily think, oh, I know you a nd you know me and we're one. We know each other, but then you realize, oh my goodness, there's a knowing of knowing, there's so much of you, I don't know. And being with you is kind of like I realized that there's an abyss of unknowing that I'll never penetrate to the bottom of that is the type of mystical, unknowing and uncertainty that doesn't come from a lack of knowledge, but from sometimes from an access.
[00:20:26] So this is the move by the way, from classical physics, which says that we can understand everything in principle that's in the world. We just can't understand the fundamental event that made everything understandable to in quantum mechanics that says, no, there's an unknowing this built into inherently into reality itself so that we come new fully the velocity on the position of subatomic particles, because there, and that's not a lack of knowledge, that's an access of knowledge.
[00:20:57] That unknowing is woven into the very fabric of reality itself. Yes. Yep. So that's the third, that's the third onto, and, and that that's very the mystic that's the apocalyptic unknowing.
[00:21:10] Laura McKowen: Yeah. That’s what you said about that, it's a great example or way of explaining it about when you fall in love or you.
[00:21:20] Yeah. When you fall in love and the, the experience of feeling that there's so much that you'll never know about this person and that it is different than just curiosity, different than frustration it's mystical.
[00:21:33] Peter Rollins: There may be the effect for that I think is awe, so if an effect of the first is curiosity on the effect of the second is frustration, the central effect of this third one is awe.
[00:21:50] Laura McKowen: Yeah. Yes. That's so good. And ours is, I mean, from the stoic philosophers from art is something that is talked about in philosophical and spiritual contexts as being. Like an essential part of living a good life or living a meaningful life.
[00:22:07] Peter Rollins: Yes. Yes. And it's, and it's like, that's what, cause when I hear people talk about uncertainty sometimes because, you know, they're, they, they think, oh, we don't know because there's a lack of knowledge.
[00:22:17] Right. And that I'm not makes total sense because that's, we don't know everything. Of course we don't know hardly anything, but that's not what the mystics are talking about. That's not what someone like slim is talking to biter. There's this notion there's something in reading. That's. I mean, Aslam says this beautifully, he says there's things that exist in the mind.
[00:22:33] But not in reality, like those paintings behind me. I know if they didn't exist, like if I wanted to paint those, they were in my mind, not in reality. And then he says, there's things that exist in the mind than reality, which is when I do paint them, I didn't paint at those, but if I did, they exist in the mind, in reality, and then Aslam says it is possible that something exists in reality, but cannot be contained by the mind.
[00:22:59] And that generates a different type of answer unknowing how does, but it's an unknowing of access and Aslam says that as the mystical experience. So even Rudolf Otto in his famous book, The Idea of the Holy, he kind of starts off by saying, unless you felt overwhelmed by the influx of an event, it doesn't say it in these words, but it basically says the same thing, because unless you've had the mystical experience, this book's not going to be of any interest to you because it's kind of an event that.
[00:23:31] That you feel overwhelmed by is the beginning of the mystical experience. So I really liked that, but it's not my favorite one, but go ahead. Say, say…
[00:23:40] Laura McKowen: No, I'm just I love this because these types of conversations have historically think been reserved for religious contexts and there's so much skepticism around them because of the way that they're may be presented in or interpreted in religious contexts. And so, and there's this idea that yeah, you believe in fairytales and magic, if you believe, if you believe quote unquote in something like this, where to me, when you present it like this, it's just, it's a fact it's much it's is as much of a scientific fact as anything that there just simply are things in, in the world that we cannot explain understand, interpret in our minds that we it's, it's beyond just the fact that we don't know the information.
I love it because it, to me, it's an argument for, I don't want, I don't know if I should say this. I don't wanna offend anyone, but this is just where my mind is going. Like the atheism where atheism is talked about is just, I don't totally actually understand atheism, enough to talk about it intelligently, but to think that like, it's a denial of mystery at the, at least that's how I put it or how I interpreted denial of mystery.
[00:25:03] Peter Rollins: Yeah. So I, and funnily enough, I'm, I'm doing a course at the moment is called the Atheism for Lent, and it's kind of, it goes over various expressions of atheism. Because, you know, as you can imagine, there's like different shapes of atheism, just as there's different shapes of theism. So one shape of atheism.
[00:25:22] You know, the one you're mentioning and it's kind of a, it's got some interesting stuff to it, but it's basically just a denial of a conceptual theism. So there's religion where it goes like this, this is theism. This is who God is and then the atheism is a rejection of that. Interestingly, the first theologically atheism is the mystics because the mystics say that yes you have to be in the atheist because every influx.
[00:25:47] of an intuition that overwhelms your concept means that anytime you conceptualize that you have to reject it because the concept never matches up. So this is where I see atheism and theism are interlinked in someone like Meister Eckhart, where he says, every time you say God, you have to immediately say, no God, you have to.
[00:26:05] He says, nominate and denominate church called denominations to demian. So it's the idea is that that actually there is a form of there's different forms of obviously atheism, but actually within religion, uh, within mysticism, atheism has always been taken up because they go, yes, of course. As soon as you have a theism, a concept, you have to denome it and then theology becomes a few poetics are type of, as we mentioned earlier, semi-permeable memory, and that helps you to navigate the proximity with this overwhelming event on help you alphabetize it.
[00:26:46] Laura McKowen: That's great. I it's personally just super helpful for me right now because I'm trying and part of what I'm writing about when it comes to, um, expressing, say universal love, or like I don't in the context of recovery, I, I'm not comfortable talking about God in the sense that that God is like, it's, it's too limiting.
[00:27:12] I, I'm not part of any, any religious structure or formal theology, but I very much believe in, I don't have a better word for it other than God. So it's like talking about as this mystical experience, it just it's giving me new language that it's, that it's very much not a binary.
[00:27:29] Peter Rollins: Yeah. And you know, and this, this is interesting that the word God, always a difficult word to use, but actually at its best the word God is a signifier that signifies that any signification that has is not enough. So what I mean by that is that technically when, when someone uses the word, God, it should be in a sense of a signifier word that describes how I knew word can describe it. And this is the very foundation of linguistics actually is the idea that like democracy is a word that we can never fully describe freedom just as soon as someone thinks that they can describe or are, or actualize freedom, you'll find tyranny just round the corner.
[00:28:23] Mikel Ellcessor: Hi, I'm Mikel. I'm the executive producer of Tell Me Something True. And I co-created the show with Laura. We built TMST and our online community with the hope of creating a sane spot on the internet. We're really passionate about the ad-free nature of this work. Our belief is that this project worked best if we're not hustling to keep advertisers happy, and we keep our attention on you, the TMST community, and this is where you can play a major role. TMST plus is the membership group that helps to keep this podcast going. Whether it's through a monthly membership or a one-time contribution, TMST plus members are vital to this experiment. As a TMST plus member, you get to join Laura for member only events, send in questions for the guests, hear the complete unedited interviews and connect with other TMST community members. You know, sometimes we feel like we can't make a difference in the world. With the TMST plus membership, you can be keeping this space alive and thriving for a one-time gift or for as little as 10 bucks a month, you can find the link in the show description and then please head over to TMSTpod.com right now to support the show. And thanks.
[00:29:53] Laura McKowen: Man, what a predicament we humans are in with the tool. The primary tool we have is language, and we can get pretty damn close, but it's never, it's only ever a symbol our best guess at a symbol. Yes. We, we only, we, we, when we think that that is the literal truth and we can, you know, it, it just never is.
[00:30:17] And when we think that it's a literal truth, we get in trouble. Like when we, when we, I guess I'm just looping back to this uncertainty thing, like we can only ever try, you know, it goes like to the tap, the doubt, the January is like the, you know, basically. Thank you know, it, you don't know it. And if you say it, you don't know it.
[00:30:38] If you don't know it, you know, the, the doubt, what you know is not the Dow. It's like all that mind bendy stuff.
[00:30:42] Peter Rollins: And the crazy thing is all of those ideas that, that, you know, some people, you know, like, you know, sometimes, sometimes feel right off or not, whatever they're, they're actually not, as you mentioned, they're not specifically religious, so, and again, in linguistics, you can never eat an apple, right?
[00:30:56] So an apple, as soon as I'm in language, when [00:31:00] I eat an apple. I'm not just eating an apple, I'm also, it might signify health, or it might signify a certain lifestyle. It might signify a rejection of my parents who may be fed me chocolate. It might be something that I like. I like fruit in the kitchen. Cause it looks nice.
[00:31:17] If I buy a pair of jeans, I'm taking these actually from a great philosopher, told me to go and use these two examples. I just realized I was using them with. Yeah, but if you go into like even a Target and buy a pair of jeans, you never just buy a pair of jeans. So what are jeans like? Jeans are, are, are, are an item of clothing that at least originally were technically.
[00:31:39] It's signified that you don't really care, like their work clues, right. Jeans or work clothes. I'm just, I don't mind. I just buy the jeans, but of course, as soon as you think like that, you go, and you're not just buying jeans cause you don't care. You're buying jeans because of the symbolic significance of I don't care.
[00:31:54] And even if you buy rubbish clothes and go, like, I really don't care again. You're making a statement about your values as someone who doesn't put a lot of thought into do superficial things that all of this simply means is that, that, that nothing is ever quite what it is. Everything is what it is. And also not what it is.
[00:32:11] So it's not just some religious kind of weird notion. The Dow it's, it's also by how we eat an apple. That's why everyone's always telling you the truth, by the way, everyone's always telling you the truth, because everything they do is telling you something.
[00:32:28] Laura McKowen: Everyone is always telling you the truth.
[00:32:30] Peter Rollins: The only thing they're not telling the truth with is with their, what they say, but they're telling the tricks of the topping of their fingers with whether they wear jeans or eat an apple, you know?
[00:32:41] Laura McKowen: Yeah. All right. So how do we bring this down into real life? What maybe what we're going through right now is in a culture, the, the moment we're in why are you interested in talking about this right now.
[00:32:57] Peter Rollins: Oh, yeah, that's a very good question. And yeah, and I something that I love about what you were saying is like that this is, this is relevant to everybody. So the guy that philosophers Jean-Luck Marion, I mentioned briefly, he, as soon as he starts talking like this and he calls it saturated phenomenon, he immediately goes, hey, don't think I'm getting all religious on you.
[00:33:17] Now he happens to be religious, but he says this is whenever you look at a piece of art, he says, if you go to, if you knew everything about a car engine, like you've read the books on car engines and you bring your car in to get fixed. And then you try to shoe off to the mechanic that you knew loads of about cars.
[00:33:33] And then imagine the mechanic saying I don't know what you call up. I have no idea what I just I've been working with engines for 20 years. I knew who they work. Right. That's an influx of vintage newer concept.
[00:33:43] Laura McKowen: Yeah. So that, okay, got it. I was wondering where you're going with the car thing, but right. The mechanic.
[00:33:49] I don't know all these words that you're talking about. I just know that this is the thing that's wrong and I don't even know why I know it.
[00:33:54] Peter Rollins: And he talks about four different types of this saturation? And then he says, let's just appearance. If it exists is where all four happening at once. So it's a saturation of saturation.
[00:34:07] So that's his idea. But then the question of what does this got to do with life and where we're going to do that? Can I talk briefly about the fourth, the fourth type of unknowing, which we haven't touched on yet, which is the most interesting. And I think has something really important to say today? This fourth one, I want to call a abyssal, the abyssal on knowing or uncertainty.
[00:34:32] And whenever I mentioned earlier in the podcast about higher a child, Is there always being looked at and there, and that's important for them becoming a self because they become, it's not just that I am looking at other objects. Is that why I'm an object as well? I'm a thing in the world I exist in the world.
[00:34:50] If we don't have that, there are people that have ontological insecurity there whole lives.
[00:34:56] Laura McKowen: What do you mean by ontological? I don't know that it's a word most people have in their vernacular.
[00:35:01] Peter Rollins: Yes. Sorry. Yeah, it's basically, so it means being that on the, in philosophy, it's about the science of being, but R.D. Laing, who is a really interesting, psychotherapist and psychiatrist.
[00:35:12] He wrote a book called the divide itself and he says, ontological insecurity is when your sense of being is very fluid and under threat. So this is what's called psychosis or schizophrenia structure. And a schizophrenia structure is where somebody. Sometimes they don't know where they start and where they stop.
[00:35:33] Sometimes they're in their body, out of their body. They experienced depersonalization derealization they, you know, those are, those are all kind of on the there's fear of inclusion, where there's a sense in which they can become everything for another person. So they're terrified that they will lose their sense of identity.
[00:35:52] They or there's a fear of, that, that if they lose somebody, their entire world will collapse and they will be nothing. So they have the what's called primal agony. Sometimes even falling asleep is terrifying because there's a certain sense of will I wake up? Like my sense of self is so insecure that when I fall asleep, Will I will I reawaken them. So now that's ontological insecurity, which kind of all kids have. And then as I say, many people have as adults as well at 10% or whatever.
[00:36:23] Laura McKowen: Yeah. If you, ideally, as you grow, you develop, uh, an appropriate sense of self. You're able to relate appropriately. You're attached. You have appropriate non, I don't want to say appropriate attachments.
[00:36:38] You have as stable attachments, secure attachments, and so on. It affects almost everything about the way one might experience life.
[00:36:46] Peter Rollins: If you don't have that what you have to do, which you can do is find artificial limbs, artificial ways to do it. So sometimes some people, but there's a real strength in having ontological insecurity, by the way, because it's more close to the [00:37:00] truth.
[00:37:00] Because the sense of self is a bit of an illusion. So that person experiences that, but it comes with suffering. That's the problem. And it's you know, they so great artists like some like Kafka experiences, ontological insecurity, when you read Metamorphosis or whatever you can tell, he has a real sense of not, not having a sense of self.
[00:37:19] Like it's a very ruptured, skitzo his sense of self and he's a great writer. James Joyce is the same Francis Bacon paintings. If you look at Francis paintings, they're all about ontological insecurity, you know, the dissolving of the person. So that the infant is experiencing one of the questions of the infant for my favorite thinker, like Khan or one of my favorite thinkers in the.
[00:37:44] That the, the child is always asking, who am I for the other? What does the other desire of me? Because they knew they're desirable. They're being looked up, they're being gazed upon. And they, there's obviously a lot of desire around kids, but they're also going like, what, what exactly do they [00:38:00] want? How can I perform what they need to do? And also sometimes how can I get away from all of that desire? Right? It's too much.
[00:38:07] Laura McKowen: Too much too overbearing. So again, negotiating that clue that the closeness and the distance between ourselves and others, right?
[00:38:15] Peter Rollins: The presence and absence. The funny thing, this is, what's really interesting to me. I hopefully it's interesting to your listeners and whatever it is.
[00:38:23] I've been trying to work out for a while. It really kind of understand what, what our human desire is, how it functions I'm by the human desire. I don't mean desire for coffee or tea. I mean, sexual desire. I mean, fantasies, I mean, the things that you will, you kill your own granny to do the things that make you kind of like disorient your life.
[00:38:47] The things that, not the things that are healthy, but the things that are unhealthy things, because we often desire what we don't desire. We often fantasize about what we would not want to happen. This is interesting because desire is not something desire is nothing and sense of. I desire what I don't have.
[00:39:04] So when you, that you desire the desire of somebody, you desire, their lack, you desire the element of them that wants. So whenever I, you know, I think I've mentioned it before in your podcast, but the most precious material is the desire of the ones we desire. That's what we really desire. Like we desire the desire of those we desire.
[00:39:26] Laura McKowen: Oh my God, you have to slow down on that one.
[00:39:27] Peter Rollins: Oh yeah. So, you know, sometimes we think that what we desire is money or fame or something like that. But, but the most precious material in the world is the desire of the one we desire. So when we, when we love someone, we desire to be the object of their desire.
[00:39:46] We desire their desire, which is a very weird mix because you're desiring something that isn't something, isn't the thing you're desiring they're longing itself.
[00:39:57] Laura McKowen: Yeah. How strange.
[00:39:58] Peter Rollins: Yeah. So here's the crazy thing. And this is what's really interesting is that. That, that we, we desire the desire of the one we desire.
[00:40:07] So say it's the mother and we desire their desire, but also it can be too much as we've talked about. And we need that. We need to differentiate hopper room space. As we grew older, um, our desires are connected to this in some way. So I'm going to use an example of a guy and somebody, I know who, when he was at school, he went to an old boys school and he would go to this bus stop and he would sit and wait for the bus.
[00:40:35] And there was a girl's school beside the voice school. And so some girls would be there on the one-time use at the bus stop. And the girls were laughing. They were looking over and laughing. They may not have even been laughing at him or whatever, but he thought they were laughing at him and he was embarrassed and left the bus stop and he walked.
[00:40:52] But then, but this was something that repulsed him, but also attracted him. He was actually quite turned on by the sexually aroused by this experience. Right. And at the same time as also being terrified of him. So over analysis, um, on some conversations of wasn't analysis conversations, really, but go, like, what does that connect with?
[00:41:12] And he would say that when he was young, one of his earliest experiences is with a sister that his sister would bring around her friends, and he would always want to hang out with them. And they were like older than him. And so they would, one time they went, he would knock on the door and they let him in and they were laughing at him and they were kind of making fun of him and asking him embarrassing questions.
[00:41:33] Well, what happened here is this, this experience of his sister's desire. He knew that he was the object of his sister and his sister's friend's desire, but he also didn't know what they desired from him, what they wanted.
[00:41:47] Laura McKowen: So you didn't mean sexual desire, you just mean interest.
[00:41:49] Peter Rollins: Yeah. Just as interest his interest.
[00:41:52] Yeah. So he, this is pre sexual. This, this original experience, a second experience was like, there was a small sexual element to it, but this first experience wasn't sexual at all. It was pre sexual, but it was, um, but he was desirous of high-end art with a sister, but also a bit embarrassed. And this, uh, the first experience is called Freud, called a dusting, which is the abyss of the other's desire.
[00:42:14] Right? What does my mother want for me? What does my brother want for me? What does my father want for me? What does my sister want from me? And then the technical term for the second one, which is what happens to this guy when he was older is, it's a French term object petit a, which just means small object, but it's never translated because it's a technical term.
[00:42:35] Is the little thing that we're really desirous of, um, that we can't quite name. And so in this example, what you see is very early on this guy was experiencing the desire of his sibling, of his sister. And he was like, what am I to my sister? Right? What does she want? She's getting some pleasure, but I'm not sure what it is.
[00:42:57] And that then was mapped onto his later experience where he was saying, what do these girls at the bus stop want? Right. It doesn't quite know, and it's kind of terrifying and it's also quite attractive. So this, but the same question remains is what does the other wants? And this is the fourth type of unknowing uncertainty, which is the uncertain.
[00:43:16] Who am I for the other? What does my partner want for me? What does my mother want from me? What does my father want for me? What does, what a society want for me? Should I have this job? Do I love this person? This, um, on the effect of this is anxiety. So if the effect of the first uncertainty is curiosity on the effect of the second is frustration on the effect of the third is all, then the effect of the fourth is technically neonate anxiety.
[00:43:45] Anxiety is, I don't know what I am or who I am for the other. And this is a type of radical unknowing that we all experience to greater or lesser degrees in the world. Yeah. I know. It's interesting. That's a lot, that's a lot on here, but here's the trick. If you want to hear the, secrets very, it takes a long time to actually realize this, but is that the secret is that it's not just that.
[00:44:11] I don't know what the other one. The other doesn't do what they want. So I'm always anxious going, what is the other want of me as if they knew what they want and they have this solid answer. And if only I could be what they want, then I'd be happy. But then I realize they don't know what they want.
[00:44:27] Either. They're as divided as I am. And their desire is connected to what they thought their parents wanted. And we're all in this thing, thinking that there's, that's why it's called an abyss. It's an abyss. That's why it's called the abyssal. It's an encounter with a type of nothingness, a type of, we think it's there, but it's not.
[00:44:44] There is new way to be, that will make you fit into society. And actually, instead of trying to adapt ourselves to the world, what we really need is productive maladaptation. You can never adapt to the world. You can never be the object of the others who'll desire. And, and because they don't know what they desire, but we can somehow overcome anxiety by embracing it and enjoying the fact that we're all in the dark, in the abyss together.
[00:45:11] Laura McKowen: Why do we experience that anxiety? Like why does that cause us anxiety?
[00:45:18] Peter Rollins: So I would say the anxiety at its most basic is the experience of not knowing what we should be or who we should be. So and so in philosophy it said some of these quite simply as like you can fear something, but you're anxious of nothing.
[00:45:35] So in other words, you can fear being robbed, but anxiety is the fear of nothingness itself. So anxiety Soren Kierkegaard says that that anxiety is the evidence of our freedom. He actually calls it spirit. What is spirit is the fact that to be human is to not know what it is to be human. A dog is a dog.
[00:45:54] A rock is a rock. A cat is a cat. You know, we don't say someone as an uncat, like, oh, that cat is very in the cat, but we talk about people being inhuman. So to be human is to be a question to yourself, to not know. What you should do, who you should be, where you fit in and the genius of Kierkegarrd, or as he says, this is why we should never try to overcome our anxiety.
[00:46:18] Because if we overcome our anxiety, the payoff is being in a zombified catatonic state. Rather we overcome anxiety by some high alignment. It's a brief by, bringing it into us by saying, oh, this is evidence of our freedom that we, we, none of us quite knew what we should do. All of us have imposter syndrome.
[00:46:40] All of us feel like we don't quite did we act correctly at the party? I say quite the right thing. I went to a party recently that was really. But I felt at the end, for some reason that I had maybe said something that that was inappropriate to the host and I'm going to go and I'm sitting there thinking I'm probably everybody at the party in different ways comes back warranted.
[00:46:59] I you know, was I okay? You know, I know,
[00:47:03] Laura McKowen: Can you imagine if we could witness like those bubbles above people's heads of just anxiety, meters and the scripts at a party, it would be so fucking funny. I like, I want to just comment on what you said, because yes. When you experience anxiety, it is this, the utter frustration of it is that it doesn't have a name when you can name.
[00:47:27] If there is something you're actually afraid of you feel better, because then you can reason through that. You can talk about it, you can pin it and you can contain it. It's got a container then, but the true anxiety has no container. And that is the, that is the anxiety part. It's just this dread or this doom or feeling that that's something is just wrong.
[00:47:49] Peter Rollins: Yes, yes. A hundred percent on this is, and this is why this last one in particular, I think it's important to think about for today because our, we want to avoid this anxiety at all costs. Kind of think that we knew what the other wants and what we want.
[00:48:06] And then we can condemn people. We think they're this. And they're the, and we create purity cultures of clean and unclean of inside and outside, all ways of avoiding anxiety of saying that, that to certain extent, right? We're all in a society together. We're all neighbors. You don't have to like your neighbor, right?
[00:48:25] But we're not enemies. An enemy is someone you can get rid of and destroy. And neighbor is someone you have to share social space with that. We're in this environment of like where we're having to navigate each other. And there's an idea. There's a book that's coming out soon called by Richard Boothby called Embracing the Void.
[00:48:42] And in this, he argues that love of neighbor at it’s most basic, what it means to love the neighbor is to be able to confront the abyss of their desire and be able to, you know, not reduce them to some sort of expression of yourself or whatever is to somehow to love your neighbor is not to love them in so much as they're like you is to love them in their abyssal dimension, in their, in their anxieties, in their own unknowing to somehow be able to tolerate that and to argue and discuss with them.
[00:49:17] And this is where I think in a society that cannot tolerate anxiety, some of the results are overprescription of drugs, scapegoating of people who are different from us, and, you know, a desire to lock ourselves away from those difficult encounters.
[00:49:38] Laura McKowen: Yeah. And so do you, I don't know that you have the answer to this, but maybe you have some thoughts.
[00:49:45] Are we actually more anxious now than we've ever been? Or are we, or are, have we just pathologized anxiety?
[00:49:53] Peter Rollins: Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, so in Paul Tillich's book, The Courage to Be, he beautifully, kind of articulates that anxiety manifests in different ways in our lives, who was historically and individually and he outlines three.
[00:50:08] And they are historical, but also you can, you can maybe see yourself in one of them over the other. Another one is the anxiety of death, which is, cause death is an ultimate nothingness. So we're all hurtling towards a potential nothingness. Even if there's something on the other side, we're not sure. So it's like under risk.
[00:50:24] So we're kind of like, there's a type of anxiety over death then he says, but that was a big anxiety, especially if you live in a society where people are dying young, where maybe you have a family where you expect three of your kids to die, where death is all around you, that anxiety is going to be pretty strong.
[00:50:44] Then he says that there's the anxiety of guilt on the anxiety of guilt is also a type of nothingness because to be guilty is to say, I am not who I should be. I am somehow lacking in. I imagined this is who I should be and I'm not it. And so there's guilt and guilt has a historical moment and you think of the birth of Lutheranism and that kind of thing.
[00:51:06] And then he says, there's the anxiety of meaninglessness. We're you kind of feel that your life lacks, meaning or purpose, which he thinks is connected to the modern world, right. Which I've experienced.
[00:51:17] Laura McKowen: That feels like the modern affliction and almost like a, uh, uh, absurd, like effect of modernity of things going so well.
[00:51:30] Yes, yes. That we have this new anxiety that's arisen. Because we're not just trying to survive. You know, I was listening to this talk the other day, with Sam Harris, how the long course of history up, and it was only up until the last a hundred years or so where the norm was war the norm was that's what people expected.
[00:51:57] And there were brief periods of peace, but you always kind of knew that they were brief periods at that, that the norm, the default was, was to be in war to be in battle. And so this kind of absurd, I guess it's a product of modernity is that we, you know, we have so much freedom. We have so much.
[00:52:22] There is space to argue about, to feel the meaninglessness, because there are so many choices, there's so many options to pursue. There's so many ways to go wrong. And like you said, that our culture is structured around the ability like we, we can very easily check out of our experience at any time we can, we can create liturgical structures where we don't have to, we can avoid forever until it becomes so painful to avoid.
[00:52:52] Peter Rollins: We have to do something different. Yeah. Yeah. And another element of maternity that I think is really, really important. And, uh, philosopher, Heidegger brings a site to a certain extent is that there's, there's kind of worldviews that can exist at times. One of the worldviews that we live in on a worldview is like, it's like the water you swim in, you kind of don't see it.
[00:53:10] It's, it's like an ideology as ideology exhaust what you see through. And one of the, one of the predominant notions is you'll notice this when people talk about, say optimizing their life or life hacks or whatever, is that, that there's a certain sense in which we have turned ourselves. We start to think of ourselves in mechanistic ways.
[00:53:31] There's a, yeah. So we start to treat ourselves on each other in a very crudely materialistic way. And there's a, so some of the existentialists bring the site powerfully, from Sar to Gabriel Marcel, to Comey all of these, they, they basically say that we're living in a strange age where we got, like I say, treat ourselves it whenever I, when people talk about optimizing and making yourself optimize your productivity and stuff, like there's something that ultimately meaningless in this is like, it's you think you're doing something meaningful.
[00:54:07] I'm trying to optimize my life. I'm trying to, lifehack, I'm trying to be productive. I'm trying to do this or do that. There's something about where we're missing. Just the mystery of being to sit in silence and be unproductive and to experience what we've been talking about, which is this learned on knowing this, this experience of something that cannot be grasped.
[00:54:28] That's not the realm of theism or atheism, but as the realm of human subjectivity and so on the beautiful thing about Tillich, as he says, in all of these, the point is not to get rid of them. But to find a way to tare with them. It is, by the way, it's all, it's possible that science may, may effectively abolish physical death, but it still won't abolish lack or dusting or object. So it was like, you know, There's a famous parable of this king Midas, I think who captures a demon and forces the demon to tell him what the secret of a happy life is. And the demon laughs and says, oh, it's already beyond you. You, why, why do you ask?
[00:55:14] I mean, it's to never have been born, but he says but, you know, if you're lucky you can die soon. Right? So that's what I love about this parable is if you could extend your life indefinitely, but you cannot enjoy your life. That would not be heaven then would be hell, right. There's something that about eternal life is not about mere longevity.
[00:55:34] It's about a type of infinite depth in the moment at one point in temporality. And, and, and for me to experience, not that depth is not an avoidance of our anxiety, but in some way, making peace with our anxiety.
[00:55:53] Laura McKowen: Yeah. I want to go down so many rabbit holes, but we'll try, I'll try to land this plane somewhere.
[00:55:59] What I was just thinking, as you were saying that is we, I, we, we need a voice in the middle because I don't think productivity, you know, productivity as a means to just getting more things done, let's say is, but we also, if the answer is also not to not do anything. We like doing things. We like having goals.
[00:56:23] We like working towards things like, and, and so there's, this, there's been a lot of books that have come out as a, sort of a reaction to this hyper productive, way the modern, you know, ethos on productivity, which is like how to do nothing. And I'm, you know, you can't just show up at work and say, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go I don't feel like participating in the capitalist superstructure today. Sorry, boss. You know, like, that's just my philosophy now and I'm gonna, you know, I'm, I'm practicing doing nothing. Like that's not actually what we want either. So I’m hopeful that there'll be voices, you know, you're, you're probably one of them that can speak to both things that the answer is including, you know, that productivity for productivity sake.
[00:57:11] Isn't great. And there's definitely hustle culture and burnout culture, and we're experiencing that. And also. We can't unring the bell of modernity we're here. It's, it's unrealistic to think that that we're going to go back too far into history. And so how, you know, I believe productivity can be a spiritual practice too if you're, if you think of it through the right lens. So.
[00:57:41] Peter Rollins: You know, for me, uh, one of the interesting, they say safe, someone wants to be a writer. I knew this, uh, uh, this friend of mine, she wanted to be, she wanted to write this children's book, and she had it in her mind. But she never wrote up and she knew there was always an excuse, like a, you know, the kid's family, debted all of this, but actually it was a very short [00:58:00] book.
[00:58:00] That was a big cause it was for really young children. It was going to be like probably 500, a thousand words, but it would be with illustrations. But what I realized through talking to her is that she had this kind of fantasy that writing the book would somehow fix everything that was in and her family life and relationship.
[00:58:18] And so what she didn't do this consciously, but unconsciously having that fiction, that dream was, was giving her a certain pleasure. If only I did this, everything would be great, but there was a knowledge that if she did do it, of course it wouldn't fix everything. Right. So her, her very fantasy, her fantasy was what she wanted, not the productivity now over time.
[00:58:40] I was trying to help her see that, that the book won't fix everything. And, but in that knowledge, that makes it more likely for her to write the book. So for, because if you think that the, the, like, even my PhD supervisor once said to me, he said, my, your PhD is going to be the worst thing you write.
[00:58:58] And I, that freed me up so much because if I have this fantasy of like writing the perfect PhD is actually what prevents you. So for me, a productivity weirdly as connected to giving up the kind of the fantasy that we can be whole and complete, it's almost like no, where the, the books that you write, the music and whatever you pursue, being a good chef, a good father, a good mother, the value is in it, but it, doesn't not as an escape from the difficulties of life, but rather what kind of enhances those dimensions of life.
[00:59:32] Laura McKowen: Very well said. Yeah, that's a topic I would love to dig into maybe next time. Well, this is a great place to end because don't you think for me, the creativity is the closest we get to living on the edge between certainty and uncertainty or approaching the land of uncertainty. It's where it's sort of the ultimate vulnerability, but also the ultimate flow place.
[00:59:59] Peter Rollins: Yes. And a lie for novelty and impossibility. That's the something that we're sometimes frightened of is like, we want lost by people. Sometimes we go to, you know, we do lots of things. Tarot cards to reading the back of the Gideon's Bible. It gives you an answer to every question or we get advice off somebody because sometimes we want someone else to tell us what we should do.
[01:00:22] We want to kind of close down that we want to kind of have the answer, but there's something wonderful and scary about surprise about novelty, a bite, unfortunately not knowing exactly what you should do in the present moment and on ticking and ticking out into your body and kind of like, uh, kind of being able to have the courage of that unknowing, but yes, exactly.
[01:00:46] When you're able to do that, that's, that's the creative, that's where the creative stuff happens. Whenever you don't know what the future holds, whenever even as you say, even the past is changeable, like we think, oh, the future might not be sad, but the past the set, but no, if you, if you've been single for 10 years and really depressed and really lonely and thought that life is meaningless, and then you meet somebody that lasts 10 years becomes this incredible period of we had a longing of, of developing to that moment that, so all of the person you meet does not just change your present. They also transfigure your past on your future.
[01:01:22] Laura McKowen: Yes. That's such a, yeah, that's such a good way of putting it.
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