Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. It's been a little while since we've done our last episode but

allison and i are back for another um conversation now we were going to do the 18th brumere

by by marks and we're still going to do that for sure um but today we're going to have a sort of side

convoy we have some things going on in our lives making it difficult to get that text fully done and to put the time and energy we need into that text in particular. So while we're still working on that behind the scenes, we decided to come on and have an interesting conversation about mysticism. This is even the word might confuse some people.

It's not something that we talk about very often.

Although on Rev. Left, I've certainly mentioned it quite a bit.

And Allison and I have certainly touched on it in the past, but I don't think Allison and I have

actually done an entire episode on it.

So we're going to definitely try to try to touch on politics and how this comes in to the

political arena and how Marxists should think about this stuff. But also just on its own, it's just a part of life that we're very interested in exploring. And so we hope people will stick around and just hear us out and see where the conversation goes. Even if you know absolutely nothing about mysticism, the traditions of mysticism, spirituality, etc.

It's something that plays an important role in Allison and mine lives. And we wanted to share it

with people and have an interesting conversation about something that you don't very often hear

people talk about. So first of all, how are you doing, Allison? I am doing good. Everything in my

life is kind of in a state of chaos at the moment due to some housing stuff around mold and a shitty landlord. But making it through, excited to have this conversation. And yeah, just like honestly, you know, you mentioned it. I think on like some of our Patreon episodes, we've discussed this with each other briefly.

This is a thing that both you and I, I know, have an interest in, but I don't think we've ever really on Red Minis had a real conversation about other than, again, we kind of referenced it on the Bulba episode some.

But I think it'll be good to kind of dive into it.

Definitely. Now, before we get into like the topic at hand, I'm just kind of interested

in how you personally got interested in this sort of realm of thought, maybe how you got

interested in mysticism in particular, but also how you got interested in religion more broadly.

Yeah. So I have had a weird relationship to religion and mysticism in my life.

I was raised an evangelical Christian, which I would actually say is a like shockingly non-mystical

religion in many ways. So I was raised within that world. I went to Bible College originally.

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