Crazy Wisdom
Episode #511: From New Age Psychedelic Spirituality to Ancient Orthodoxy: Finding a Reliable Path
- Consciousness & Philosophy
- Christianity
- Protestantism
- Catholicism
- Orthodoxy
- mediation
- information
- printing press
- Martin Luther
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Timestamps
00:00 Christianity’s tangled history surfaces as Stewart Alsop and Ken Lowry unpack Luther, indulgences, mediation, and the printing-press information shift.
05:00 Luther’s encounters with the devil lead into talk of perception, hallucination, and spiritual influence on “main-character” lives.
10:00 Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox worship styles highlight telos, Eucharist, liturgy, embodiment, and teaching as information.
15:00 The Church as a living spirit emerges, tied to hierarchy, purpose, and Michael Levin’s bioelectric patterns shaping form.
20:00 Spirits, goals, Dodgers-as-spirit, and Christ as the highest ordering spirit frame meaning and participation.
25:00 Identity, self, soul, privacy, intimacy, and the internet’s collapse of boundaries reshape inner life.
30:00 New Age, Rainbow Bridge, Hawkins’ calibration, truth-testing, and spiritual discernment enter the story.
35:00 Stewart’s path back to Christianity opens discussion of enlightenment, Protestant legalism, Orthodox theosis, and healing.
40:00 Emptiness, relationality, Trinity, and personhood bridge Buddhism and mystical Christianity.
45:00 Suffering, desire, higher spirits, and orientation toward the real sharpen the contrast between simulation and reality.
50:00 Technology, bodies, AI, and simulated worlds raise questions of telos, meaning, and modern escape.
55:00 Neo-paganism, Hindu hierarchy of gods, Vedanta, and the need for a personal God lead toward Jesus as historical revelation.
01:00:00 Buddha, enlightenment, theosis, the post-1945 world, Hitler as negative pole, and goodness as purpose close the inquiry.
Key Insights
- Mediation and information shape the Church. Ken Lowry highlights how the printing press didn’t just spread ideas—it restructured Christian life by shifting mediation. Once information became accessible, individuals became the “interface” with Christ, fundamentally changing Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox trajectories and the modern crisis of religious choice.
- The Protestant–Catholic–Orthodox split hinges on telos. Protestantism orients the service around teaching and information, while Catholic and Orthodox traditions culminate in the Eucharist, embodiment, and liturgy. This difference expresses two visions of what humans are doing in church: receiving ideas or participating in a transformative ritual that shapes the whole person.
- Spirits, telos, and hierarchy offer a map of reality. Ken frames spirits as real intelligible goals that pull people into coordinated action—seen as clearly in a baseball team as in a nation. Christ is the highest spirit because aiming toward Him properly orders all lower goals, giving a coherent vertical structure to meaning.
- Identity, privacy, and intimacy have transformed under the internet. The shift from soul → self → identity tracks changes in information technology. The internet collapses boundaries, creating unprecedented exposure while weakening the inherent privacy of intimate realities such as genuine lovemaking, which Ken argues can’t be made public without destroying its nature.
- New Age influences and Hawkins’ calibration reflect a search for truth. Stewart’s encounters with the Rainbow Bridge world, David Hawkins’ muscle-testing epistemology, and the escape from scientistic secularism reveal a cultural hunger for spiritual discernment in the absence of shared metaphysical grounding.
- Enlightenment and theosis may be the same mountain. Ken suggests that Buddhist enlightenment and Orthodox theosis aim at the same transformative reality: full communion with what is most real. The difference lies in Jesus as the concrete, personal revelation of God, offering a relational path rather than pure negation or emptiness.
- Secularism is shaped by powerfully negative telos. Ken argues that the modern world orients itself not toward the Good revealed in Christ but away from the Evil revealed in Hitler. Moving away from evil as a primary aim produces confusion, because only a positive vision of the Good can order desires, technology, suffering, and the overwhelming power of modern simulations.
Episode transcript
Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcasts. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Ken Lowry here and he is a philosopher who is engaged with living out of the journey towards wisdom works in medicine. He has two young children and a wonderful wife and is wrestling a lot with Christianity, which also I am doing at the moment as well. Welcome to the show.
Yeah, so, man, Christianity is such a big topic and I've been doing a lot of research into the Protestant revolution. I just read a great book by the world lit by Fire. Highly recommend it. I think he was a humanist, so like one of the secular humanists. I didn't actually research him that much, but I think he was a secular humanist because he was very much like, sort of aggressive towards both what was going on with the Catholics. And then he was like, okay, the Protestants are going to come and save us. And then he goes like, oh, wait, no, the Protestants were also kind of nuts. And because like during that time Borgia was having orgies and the Pope was having orgies and everything like that. And then he's like the craziest thing he's said about Martin Luther, it's getting a little graphic. But he. So Martin Luther was a monk and he was. Didn't try to set off a revolution. He was a devout monk who. Who just had happened to post some skepticism around the. What do they call them? The indulgences. And then it just. He was the first viral content creator and so went viral. But apparently he was. Had not just sort of auditory hallucinations about the devil and all the things he had full on like the devil was in the room with him and he would like. His main battles with the devil would involve a lot of fecal matter and like farting and other things and like. And it was so just totally crazy stuff. Hopefully we didn't start that off on the wrong football. Like what? And so Christianity is this giant topic with so many things. And recently I've been feeling that the Protestant revolution is it They've protested now. Right? There, there has been a protest. And, and, and those things have been like, the Catholic Church isn't the same church. Right? What, what. And what's going on in your world regarding all these topics?
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