Hi, I'm Scyons Mike and I'm Michael Gunger. Welcome to season five of the liturgers podcast everybody.

So Mike you weren't able to be on this episode with Bouchy. I don't you were off like

signing autographs or what I do usually.

Drinking champagne on your yacht or what? Yeah I have sign autographs and have mental health grises.

The one two bunch of Scyons Mike. It's an amazing

interview. It picks up steam as it goes. It's full of fire. But you're a you're a guy that's

practiced Buddhist practices to a degree. Yeah that's fair. My first exposure to Buddhist

practice was in the westernized sterilized variant known as mindfulness which was like my

method home. When I was getting off the god addiction. And it was really helpful.

But obviously mindfulness is completely practiced based. Was that pre- like pre-atheism or in

the middle of all the atheism or bad? Middle of atheism like God's gone. Okay. I need something.

Got you. Mindfulness. And it was a it was post mystical experience that I really started

to examine Buddhism. I had examined it kind of on the way out of faith briefly and was like well

that's as ridiculous as anything else because I took a real superficial view.

What was that? Like can you remember how you saw it at the time? A neutered Hinduism.

The very notion of enlightenment seemed woo to me. But it wasn't it wasn't a deep it was a

slightly deeper than Wikipedia examination. Yeah yeah yeah. You know what I mean? I was on a mission

to disregard all faith in an open-minded way. Gotcha. Like it wasn't really open-minded.

I was I was on the the the rails to atheism at that one. So after I was a mystical experience

and I started trying to re-encounter Christian theology like my bullshit reflex was so strong

from my skepticism that I couldn't engage even really open Eastern traditions or modern

traditions Christianity without just this reflexive rejection. So it was reading

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