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The Search for Meaning with Gary Lachman · This Jungian Life Podcast

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  Speaker 1: Again, it sounds simple self-help, but if you started with
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  Speaker 1: an attitude like, I might not really want to do it,
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  Speaker 1: but it could be an enjoyable experience in some way. Again,
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  Speaker 1: I'm not suggesting be masochistic and go out and do
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  Speaker 1: something that you absolutely hate and say, oh, I have
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  Speaker 1: to enjoy this. That's a stupid logical way to think
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  Speaker 1: about it. But any kind of thing. This is advice
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  Speaker 1: I say to anybody. All the stuff that you don't
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  Speaker 1: want to do, get that out of the way first.
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  Speaker 1: And then you have all the energy that you're locked
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  Speaker 1: away with avoiding doing it. That's energy you can't use
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  Speaker 1: for anything else.
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  Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, this is how you come to write
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  Speaker 2: 27 books, this right here. Welcome to This Jungian Life,
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  Speaker 2: conversations with Jungian analysts on the unseen forces shaping our
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  Speaker 2: lives and what it means to be truly human in
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  Speaker 2: today's complex world. I'm Lisa Marciano, and I'm a Jungian
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  Speaker 2: analyst in Philadelphia.
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  Speaker 3: I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst in Cape Cod.
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  Speaker 2: Well, today on the podcast, we're so excited to have
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  Speaker 2: Gary Lachman, who is an American writer and musician. Gary
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  Speaker 2: has written 26 books that are published and the 27th
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  Speaker 2: is due to come out next year. He has written
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  Speaker 2: on such a wide variety of topics. He's written a
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  Speaker 2: biography of Jung that is very interesting. I'm just going
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  Speaker 2: to read some of the titles to give you a sense.
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  Speaker 2: He's written a book on precognitive dreams called Dreaming Ahead
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  Speaker 2: of Time. He's written a book called Dark Star Rising,
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  Speaker 2: Magic and Power in the Age of Trump. He's written
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  Speaker 2: a book called Turn Off Your Mind, the Daedalus book
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  Speaker 2: of the 1960s. Beyond the Robot, the Life and Work
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  Speaker 2: of Colin Wilson. The Secret Teachers of the Western World,
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  Speaker 2: a book on Aleister Crowley. Revolutionaries of the Soul, Reflections
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  Speaker 2: on Magicians, Philosophers, and Occultists. The Caretakers of the Cosmos,
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  Speaker 2: a book on Madame Blavatsky, among many, many others. His
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  Speaker 2: most recent book is one that I've just really been
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  Speaker 2: enjoying reading is called Touched by the Presence. And it's basically,
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  Speaker 2: would it be right to call it a memoir, Gary?
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  Speaker 1: Yes, I would say technically it's a memoir. It's not
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  Speaker 1: an autobiography because I barely name anybody in it. That's
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  Speaker 1: not out of any kind of, you know, way to minimize...
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  Speaker 1: people's importance, but it was just kind of the story.
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  Speaker 1: And a memoir is generally about some aspect of your
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  Speaker 1: life or some time in your life rather than your
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  Speaker 1: entire life. So this is about how I went from
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  Speaker 1: playing in bands a long time ago to becoming a
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  Speaker 1: writer and leaving the United States 30 years ago and
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  Speaker 1: starting a new life here in London.
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  Speaker 2: And I definitely want to talk more about Touched by
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  Speaker 2: the Presence because, well, there were so many aspects of
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  Speaker 2: it that I really appreciated. But from our view as Jungians,
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  Speaker 2: it's a really great story of individuation. I mean, I
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  Speaker 2: think if someone put your story, fictionalized it, you know,
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  Speaker 2: that you started as this kind of scruffy kid in Bayonne,
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  Speaker 2: New Jersey, and then you wound up playing in the
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  Speaker 2: band Blondie, and then you got into the occult, and then,
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  Speaker 2: you know, and then you went and studied philosophy.
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  Speaker 4: And, you know, someone would be like, that's not believable.
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  Speaker 4: You know, that's too much. But it's, you know, it's.
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  Speaker 2: Like truth is stranger than fiction. You've had a really colorful, rich,
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  Speaker 2: you know, Jung says the right way to wholeness is
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  Speaker 2: via fateful detours and wrong turnings. And you've had your
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  Speaker 2: share of fateful detours. So it's a really great story.
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  Speaker 3: What did lead you into the occult?
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  Speaker 1: Well, I got interested in the occult roughly around the
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  Speaker 1: same time I started playing music. This would have been
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  Speaker 1: around the spring-summer of 1975, so it's a while ago.
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  Speaker 1: And I had just started playing with the then third-on-the-bill Blondie.
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  Speaker 1: And let me just say, the title of the memoir,
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  Speaker 1: Touched by the Presence, if you know your Blondie music,
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  Speaker 1: it's an allusion to a song I wrote called The
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  Speaker 1: Movies Touched by Your Presence, dear. That was a hit
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  Speaker 1: here in the UK and in Europe, not so much
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  Speaker 1: in the States.
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  Speaker 4: It was definitely on my playlist when I was.
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  Speaker 1: All right, well, there you go. So experiences I had
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  Speaker 1: with precognitive dreams, not precognitive, but shared dreaming with my
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  Speaker 1: girlfriend at the time. And so that's the allusion to...
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  Speaker 1: But all that happened, all that started when I was
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  Speaker 1: living at what was known as the Blondie Loft on
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  Speaker 1: the Bowery. Going in one direction, William Burroughs had his bunker.
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  Speaker 1: And then the other direction was where CBGB, the club
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  Speaker 1: where the Ramones and Patti Smith and television, all these
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  Speaker 1: bands came out of. And the guy who had the
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  Speaker 1: lease on this squalid place we were living in, he
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  Speaker 1: was this wild gay biker artist who was into the
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  Speaker 1: Hells Angels, but also into Alistair Crowley, whom I didn't
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  Speaker 1: know anything about.
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  Speaker 2: I had read.
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  Speaker 1: I'd read Hessa and I'd read Jung and I was
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  Speaker 1: reading The Existentialists and The Beats, but also weird fiction, H.P.
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  Speaker 1: Lovecraft and all that kind. So it was a mixed
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  Speaker 1: bag of stuff and I was a big reader. But
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  Speaker 1: I hadn't heard anything about Crowley, and I was never
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  Speaker 1: really interested in the occult side of weird fiction. I
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  Speaker 1: didn't take it seriously. But he was really into it,
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  Speaker 1: and he was like, he would do these tarot readings
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  Speaker 1: with Crowley's fantastic Thoth tarot deck, if you know that one,
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  Speaker 1: and did these paintings. And then he had a copy
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  Speaker 1: of Crowley's book, Diary of a Drug Fiend, which is,
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  Speaker 1: you know, when you're 19, it's a great read about
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  Speaker 1: some idyllic place. And in Sicily, where you can go
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  Speaker 1: and do your true will and take lots of drugs
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  Speaker 1: at the same time and have sex and all that.
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  Speaker 1: I said, yeah, that sounds good. I'm sold on that. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: so that was the time when I got disinterested at
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  Speaker 1: the same time. And gradually, this teenage, enthusiastic kind of, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: this is great, turned into, I guess, halfway serious attempt
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  Speaker 1: to understand all this stuff in the context of who
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  Speaker 1: we are, you know, who we are today. Because it's
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  Speaker 1: part of our culture. And I would even say it's
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  Speaker 1: part of our, you know, biological or whatever, you know,
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  Speaker 1: neurological kind of inheritance. Yep.
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  Speaker 2: I think we know some people that would very much
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  Speaker 2: agree with that, that we evolved with that, with the
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  Speaker 2: propensity for contact with the numinous as part of our
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  Speaker 2: essential nature.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, very much so, I would say. You know,
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  Speaker 1: it's what Abraham Maslow sort of calls, you know, the
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  Speaker 1: higher reach, or is it the further reaches of human
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  Speaker 1: nature or something like that.
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  Speaker 4: Mm-hmm.
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  Speaker 1: He was the great American humanist psychology and worked with
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  Speaker 1: self-actualization and peak experiences. I mean, I often think there's
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  Speaker 1: kind of, they're very different, Jung and Maslow, but I
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  Speaker 1: think there's similar kinds of, what do you want to
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  Speaker 1: call it, sort of process and gull teleology. I think
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  Speaker 1: there's a lot that's similar between them. Hello.
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  Speaker 2: I want to let this Jungian Life listeners know about
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: a very special opportunity. This winter solstice, the Cosmos Institute
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  Speaker 2: will convene its inaugural residential colloquium in Ascona, Switzerland, in
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  Speaker 2: the magical landscape where Monte Verita and Erinos rose to
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  Speaker 2: legendary prominence as centers of artistic, spiritual, and intellectual life.
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  Speaker 2: An intimate company of scholars and participants will gather at
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  Speaker 2: Hotel Ascona, high above Lago Maggiore, for five winter days
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  Speaker 2: of exceptional depth and beauty. Distinguished speakers, including Gary Lockman
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  Speaker 2: and Lawrence Hillman, will offer extended lectures while shared meals,
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  Speaker 2: unhurried conversation, and time for reflection sustain the life of
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: the gathering. I will also be among those presenting. A
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  Speaker 2: highlight will be a visit to Erinos, where Jung, Marie-Louise
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  Speaker 2: von Franz, Mircea Eliade, Henri Corbat, James Hillman, and others
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  Speaker 2: developed work that profoundly shaped depth psychology and archetypal thought,
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  Speaker 2: and symbolic imagination. Registration closes November 21st, and you can
• 8:13
  Speaker 2: visit cosmosinstitute.org to learn more. That's Cosmos with a K.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: We'll put that in the show notes, and you should
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: know that listeners of This Jungian Life get a 15%
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  Speaker 2: discount on registration. So I hope to see some of
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  Speaker 2: you in Switzerland this December.
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  Speaker 3: There's something about people that have had these experiences that
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  Speaker 3: is inherently tantalizing in a very deep kind of way
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  Speaker 3: that we read about and yearn for.
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  Speaker 4: Is there more?
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  Speaker 3: Can I reach for more? Can we experience that kind
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  Speaker 3: of thing? I remember reading about William Blake's fantasies when
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  Speaker 3: I was much younger. and wondering, you know, I wonder
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  Speaker 3: where could I access something like that in myself?
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  Speaker 1: Oh, well, I mean, actually, I was very motivated to
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  Speaker 1: do that. It was kind of the, oh, wow, kind
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  Speaker 1: of reaction, like, well, kind of similar to where, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: I didn't start as a musician. I was a guy
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  Speaker 1: who hung out with all the other really good musicians.
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  Speaker 1: I knew the lyrics to the songs, and I you know,
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  Speaker 1: wrote poetry and I read. So I was kind of
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  Speaker 1: the nerdy guy who was allowed to hang out with
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  Speaker 1: all the really cool people. But I think, and these
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  Speaker 1: are fantastic, really good, you know, really great musicians. I mean,
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  Speaker 1: one of them later went on to be the drummer
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  Speaker 1: for Blondie, Clem Burke, who passed away last year. And
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  Speaker 1: he's just one of the great drummers, you know. So,
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  Speaker 1: and I knew him when I was a teenager, you know,
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  Speaker 1: in Bayonne, New Jersey and going to, you know, high
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  Speaker 1: school dances that he played at and stuff like that.
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  Speaker 1: But I also know all these other people. Wow. But,
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  Speaker 1: It was kind of after seeing, and there was a
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  Speaker 1: whole by the time, you know, the mid, early 70s,
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  Speaker 1: there was all this kind of, you know, what do
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  Speaker 1: you want to call it? Grandiose kind of prog rock. Emerson,
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  Speaker 1: Lake and Palmer, or, I mean, we're talking rock and roll.
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  Speaker 2: Yes.
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  Speaker 1: All these bands that were very, very Wagnerian almost. You
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  Speaker 1: had to go to the Juilliard School of Music in
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  Speaker 1: order to play this stuff. And I never could play that.
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  Speaker 1: But then there was a band in New York called
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  Speaker 1: the New York Dolls who just played three chords. And
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  Speaker 1: it was like, when I saw them, I thought, I
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  Speaker 1: could do that. Again, not to diminish, it was sort
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  Speaker 1: of like it was a revelation. Like, wow, yeah, they're
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  Speaker 1: just playing old rock. So that was the kind of
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  Speaker 1: change that happened in the early to the mid-70s that
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  Speaker 1: I found myself in. And likewise with the magic, it
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  Speaker 1: was kind of like, you know, once I started reading
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  Speaker 1: about this stuff, it's like, well, I want to do that.
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  Speaker 1: And so... Maybe I can. Why can't I? So you
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  Speaker 1: start doing the things they say. At one point later,
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  Speaker 1: I was practicing some of the rituals in the Crowley book.
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  Speaker 1: It basically says, does it do what it says on
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: the tin, as they say here? Does it do what
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  Speaker 1: it says on the product you bought? Follow these instructions
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  Speaker 1: and you'll have a wonderful whatever it is, curry at
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  Speaker 1: home or something. So I'm okay. Applied the same kind of,
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  Speaker 1: you know, practical sense of, which is Crowley's. It was
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  Speaker 1: very much like that. He's very practical. He is in
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  Speaker 1: his own element. He is kind of scientific in the sense,
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  Speaker 1: like it's right. If you do this, do this, these
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  Speaker 1: things follow and stuff like that. So I, you know,
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  Speaker 1: I did all that kind of stuff. So it was, yes,
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  Speaker 1: it was like kind of do it yourself, you know, in,
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  Speaker 1: in both, both kinds of contexts.
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  Speaker 2: So, and that strikes me, I mean, having just, you know,
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  Speaker 2: spent time with you via your memoir, this strikes me
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  Speaker 2: as like maybe an essential characteristic that you look at something,
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  Speaker 2: you're like, why can't I do that?
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  Speaker 4: I think I can do that.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, why not? You know, basically, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: I guess I'm still sort of like that, you know,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, I gave a talk last night about a
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: fellow named Owen Barfield. I don't know if you know
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  Speaker 1: who he was. He was a great friend of C.S. Lewis,
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  Speaker 1: and he was one of the Inklings. But he referenced
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: the Isaiah Berlin references this ancient kind of distinction between
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  Speaker 1: the hedgehog and the fox. And the hedgehog knows one thing,
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  Speaker 1: the fox knows many things. And I don't know which
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  Speaker 1: one I am, but I've certainly had a varied career.
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  Speaker 1: I've done lots of different sorts of things and I'm
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  Speaker 1: still kind of, you know, dipping into that now. So
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  Speaker 1: I'm always like, yeah, why can't I do that? You know,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, even DIY at home, I'm horrible at it.
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  Speaker 1: But I'd rather say, well, I'll try at least, you know,
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  Speaker 1: so at least you can try to do something like that,
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  Speaker 1: which I think, In a way, that's, I don't want
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  Speaker 1: to say it's an esoteric, but it's a psychologically beneficial thing,
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  Speaker 1: I think, rather than think that, oh, God, I can't
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  Speaker 1: do that, you know. You know, it's a more active,
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  Speaker 1: you know, response. Oh, it's a response. It's response rather
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  Speaker 1: than reaction to your environment.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, and it's actually very Jungian, I think, because Jung,
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  Speaker 2: you know, Jung at one point says, you know, he
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  Speaker 2: talks about life as an experiment, you know, and he's like,
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  Speaker 2: go have your experiment.
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  Speaker 4: Go try something. So it seems to me that's in
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  Speaker 4: that spirit.
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  Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, I always say, you know, if I
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  Speaker 1: ever listened to the people when I was still living
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  Speaker 1: in New Jersey as a teenager, you said, yeah, you can't,
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  Speaker 1: you know, you, you're going to go do that. You know,
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  Speaker 1: I would have, you know, never left and probably would have,
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  Speaker 1: you know, shot a lot of people I didn't like
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  Speaker 1: before blowing my brains out. Luckily, I escaped. I escaped.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: That's a joke, folks. That's an exaggeration. I really don't
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  Speaker 1: have any interests like that in mind, but it just
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  Speaker 1: gives you a nice... It's a literary poetic license there.
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  Speaker 2: Yes.
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  Speaker 3: A loyal son of Bayonne, you are. But also, it
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  Speaker 3: seems like no one told you you couldn't do that.
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  Speaker 1: No, actually, there were. I mean, everyone around me basically
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  Speaker 1: said you couldn't. I mean, there was one person... No, literally,
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  Speaker 1: I had one high school teacher, my last year in
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  Speaker 1: high school. It's fantastic in division. Mr. Daylor, I don't
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  Speaker 1: know who knows where he is now. He was in
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: his early 20s, and I think it was one of
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: his first jobs, you know, teaching. But he quickly twigged,
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  Speaker 1: as they say here, that I was reading, and he
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  Speaker 1: started giving me books to read and teaching the rest
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: of the class whatever the regular curriculum was. So he
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: handed me Sartre's Existentialism as a Humanism first, which is like, Okay,
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  Speaker 1: I had mentioned existentialism in some essay, you know, from
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: like reading Hesse or reading Jung or something like that
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  Speaker 1: that came up. And then, so now I had to
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: figure out not only what existentialism was, but humanism too.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: So it was a two for one. And then he
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: kept giving me more Nietzsche and things like that. And
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: so that was the first, I would say that was
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: the first time an older male, you know, I got
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: approval for me, or at least one aspect of me
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: from an older male. no one in my family was,
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  Speaker 1: you know, into this. And, you know, I mean, you know,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you remember, if you, I don't know
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: if you know the old TV show All in the
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: Family that was on in the 70s or something like that,
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  Speaker 1: that was not quite that, but not too far away,
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: not too far away from that was my upbringing. So,
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: you know, so, I mean, it's easy to joke about it, but.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking about, you know, some of, one of the
• 15:19
  Speaker 2: things that Hellman talks about in The Soul's Code, he
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: kind of talks about the, the sort of essential genius
• 15:25
  Speaker 2: that each person is born with, personal destiny that is
• 15:30
  Speaker 2: known and protected by our daimon. And it seems that
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: you could really write your life from that standpoint, because
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: as you're saying, you grew up in this family where
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: it seems like you had nothing in common with your parents.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: You almost came out with a completely different worldview from
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: your parents, from your immediate family, from the wider culture.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: And it started very, very early. One of the things
• 15:51
  Speaker 2: I loved about the book was it's really sort of
• 15:55
  Speaker 2: a kind of an autobiography through bibliography. And you start
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  Speaker 2: very early just talking about the comics that you liked
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: and then the books that you liked and all through.
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  Speaker 2: And there's so much about what you were reading. It's
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: just almost like you could just give us a reading
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  Speaker 2: list and there's your whole life story. But it was
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  Speaker 2: like something in you knew, and this is, you know,
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: sort of Hillman, you know, there was some innate blueprint
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  Speaker 2: that was pressing to unfold that must describe, in some sense,
• 16:31
  Speaker 2: the nature of that experience for you.
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  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, it's, you know, Become Who You Are,
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  Speaker 1: I guess, which I had first come across in Nietzsche,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: I guess, and Jung, I forget where, no, probably, I
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: don't know, but I know when I first read Nietzsche,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, Become Who You Are struck me as, you know,
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  Speaker 1: I mean, the first book I've serious literature, let's say,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: or books about the way and the path, this hippie
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  Speaker 1: girl gave me a copy of Hesse's Siddhartha. And I
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: promptly fell in love with her, but we just became friends.
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  Speaker 1: But then the book that really did it for me
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  Speaker 1: at that time was Damien, which was Hesse's novel after
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: he had undergone some sessions with Jung himself, but mostly
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: with Jung's follower, Joseph Lang. And it's all about, you know,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: it's basically the art it's, it's, it's the archetypes, you know,
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: projected out into this fiction, you know, and Damien, Emil Sinclair.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: And it was so different. It was so different from
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Hess's other books that he initially published it with the,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: under the pseudonym of the main character, Emil Sinclair. And
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: it even won like best first novel of the year.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: And he later had to give the money back and
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: he had to, well, you know, Hesse was an established,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: you know, bestseller writer by then. And everyone was surprised
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: that he had produced this very kind of stark and unsettling,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: you know, book about the, I guess, the Gnostic antinomian
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: world bringing the opposites together and all that. I mean,
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: I was a real victim of a casualty of the
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: Hesse phenomena in the late 60s and early 70s when
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: he achieved this He's one of the, I think he's
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: the only writer who had three times in his career
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: he achieved a kind of bestseller-dom in a wide popularity,
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: and the third time is when he was dead, when
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: he was posthumous, in the country where he said he
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: would never be understood. Hesse said that only 10 people
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: would understand him in America. So either millions of people,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: hippies and adolescents like me, were reading him with complete incomprehension,
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: which is not, you know, out of the realm of possibility.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: the counterculture caught hold of him at the right time.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, by the way, I'm actually, I'm such a
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: Hesse reader, I'm going to be talking about Hesse later
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: this year. In a place, Ascona, in Switzerland, which is
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: this fantastic Italian-speaking region of Italy, Ticino, which I've actually
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: visited quite a few times. And this is part of
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: Cosmos Institute Colloquium that I've done some things with them.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: I've taught a course, actually, on the work of Colin
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: Wilson early this summer with them. So I've been invited
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: to speak there. And I'll be talking about Hesse, the
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: notion of the journey to the East, not just the novel,
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: but this whole idea.
• 19:36
  Speaker 2: I'll just jump in here, Gary, and say that I
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: will also be speaking at that same colloquium.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Well, there you go.
• 19:42
  Speaker 4: And I believe that there are still spots available.
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: So... If any listeners would like to join me and
• 19:48
  Speaker 2: Gary in beautiful Switzerland. to have this very kind of
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: like intimate conversations, I'm going to be talking about the
• 19:56
  Speaker 2: ego-self axis.
• 19:57
  Speaker 4: So come along.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, my impression is it's kind of trying
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: to be, not exactly, but sort of echoing or alluding
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: to the erinos. conferences that were held at this Casa Gabriela,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: which is along Lago Maggiore, which is the big lake.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: But it's a wonderful house, fantastic estate, just on the
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: lakeside that where Jung held. And he, well, he, they
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: were held there, but Jung was sort of the head
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: speaker and then Gershom Scholem and Henri Corbin and Joseph Campbell,
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: the Hillman, and you know, so many others were there.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: And I think there's a visit, part of it's a
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: visit there one morning and some other things as well.
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: And one of the reasons I'm talking about Hesse there
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: is because Hesse lived not right there, but not far.
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: There is the city Locarno is the sort of the
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: transport hub to get to Oscona, but there's another city Lugano,
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: which is around there, which is slightly bigger than Locarno
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: and it's more kind of casino kind of place. But
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: in the hills above Lugano's, village called Montagnola. And Hesse
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: lived up there from 1919 until he died in the
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: early 60s. And there's a Hesse Museum there that's absolutely fantastic.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: I visited in 2000, I forget exactly when I was there.
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: The same time I visited Casa Gabriela and I went
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: up to this museum in Ascona, the Museum of Monteverita,
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: which was like where the counterculture started in the late
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: 19th early 20th century was like the first place where
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: there was like back, back to nature and the health cure.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: And everybody, any, anybody who is anybody in the alternative
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: scene back then, you know, turned up at Monteverita. Rudolf
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Steiner turned up there. Hesse was there. Isidore Duncan, lots
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: and lots and lots of different people were there. And
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: it was a whole, it was a whole kind of scene.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: So that's, that's part of, that's why it's being held there.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: So it's a part of it there. So any case,
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: there you go.
• 22:04
  Speaker 2: So, Yeah.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: I have gotten to know you in a manner of
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: speaking through other books on other topics. I came across
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: at some point the Secret Teachers of the World, sort
• 22:22
  Speaker 3: of turn of the last century, Ouspensky and Blavatsky and,
• 22:28
  Speaker 3: you know, Gurdjieff. I've always been intrigued by Gurdjieff. and
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: who he was, it's remained somewhat a mystery, I think.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: And then because we knew you were going to be
• 22:40
  Speaker 3: coming on, I dived into the secret consciousness, secret history
• 22:47
  Speaker 3: of consciousness. I'm misquoting the title and I'm still reading it,
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: but wildly curious about you talking about where consciousness is
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: going and, having read, as many of our listeners no
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: doubt have, and you certainly have, of how there was
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: a sort of revolution in consciousness 50,000 to 70,000 years ago,
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: and that something clicked on worldwide in our human capacity
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: that enabled us to become more self-reflective and burst us
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: forth into all kinds of new developments. cities and farming,
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: all kinds of things. And so I find the prospect
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: of an evolution in consciousness or cosmic consciousness absolutely intriguing.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: And I can't help hoping that it'll, you know, start
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: next week, given the state of the world. And Jung
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: talks about, you know, and Lisa's touched on it, of individuation,
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: of that we really need to become whole. And it
• 23:59
  Speaker 3: seems to me that unless we can transform into something
• 24:04
  Speaker 3: that is more conscious, we may be on a very awful,
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: slippery slope.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, Jung also says that we won't do
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: anything until we absolutely have to. You know, we can
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: make lots of good intentions and all that, but it
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: comes down to some absolute, absolute dire necessity. And I'm
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: actually giving a course at the moment, I've just been
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: through the first two this month for the Philosophical Research
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Society in Los Angeles, taken from an earlier book called
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: A Secret History of Consciousness. There's a lot of secrets.
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: My sons aren't interested in any of this stuff. They
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: always say, Dad, you're always writing about something that's secret
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: or lost or forgotten or, you know, where the heck
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: is all this stuff?
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: That's great.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: So in any case, but I'm giving you a course
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: on that book, and one of the people I'm talking
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: about at the very end, the last class, is a
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: fellow named Jean Gebser, who's not as well-known in the
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Anglophone world, but he died in 1973. He knew Jung.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: He was involved with the Jung Institute in Zurich for
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: a while. He attended some of the Erinos conferences, but
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: he wrote this remarkable book called The Ever-Present Origin that
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: was only translated into English in the 80s. And I mean,
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: to try in a nutshell, as it were, he talks
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: about different structures of consciousness and how human consciousness and
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: the world itself, because the two were sort of two
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: ends of the polarity, you sort of can't have one
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: without the other in a certain sense. And how that
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: has changed over time. And I can't go into all
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: the different structures, but there's the archaic and there's the magical,
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: the mythical. and then what he calls the mental rational.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: And what happens is the structures start, and then they
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: kind of reach a maturity point, and then they start
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: to atrophy. They become deficient, but he said they're deficient mode.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: And the deficient mode is the preparation for the next
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: coming on. And he believed that the end, or what
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: the teleology is, what he called the integral, which is
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: a kind of structure of consciousness that can encompass recapitulate
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: and encompass the other four and sort of bring them,
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: reintegrate all of them in this sort of thing. But
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: before that happens, there's what he's calling the breakdown of
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: the mental rational structure of consciousness, which he said, the
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: mental rational conscious sort of reached its peaks, say, with
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: the Renaissance. And then it atrophied in the sense of
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: losing all contact with origin. which is ever-present, it's a
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: spiritual non-manifest. I mean, he's not an easy read. He's readable,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: but he has to coin, he's trying to use language
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: to do what our everyday language can't do. So kind
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: of like Heidegger, but he's much more readable than Heidegger.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: And he's also a cultural philosopher, so he brings in
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: sources from lots of different, so you learn a lot
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: if you read this book. He brings in lots of
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: different material from science, biology, and whatever. Yeah. So in
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: preparation for the integral structure, the mental rational is kind
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: of oramborically kind of eating itself and breaking down and fragmenting.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: And I think what we see more than anything else
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: these days is this kind of fragmentation. You can say
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: it goes back to the change from classical physics to
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: quantum and suddenly things are going backwards or the strange
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: behavior of elementary particles and all that kind of thing.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: But also I think, you know, up close in our
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: own life, you know, you know, say when I was
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: in university, deconstructionism, postmodernism were the hottest things in town.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: And that's all about breaking everything down. There are no holes.
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: There are no overarching narratives. It's all smaller and smaller
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: and smaller groups, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And,
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: you know, eventually you just have an atomized, you know, world,
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: which is more or less, you know, and I think
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: there are forces actively actually in the world now wanting that.
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: Because once you break everything up, you can put it
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: together how you like. And chaos is a good medium
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: out of which some strong figure who can help us
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: through this difficult time can emerge, the archetype of the
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: leader or whatever it is and all that. So I
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: don't know. Where is it going? Well, I'm hopeful. I'm
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: hopeful that it looks to me like, okay, the skeptics
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: are right. Well, do I think there's something to get
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: out of how he's seeing things? Yes. And he's not
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: the only one to have said sort of stuff like that.
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you want to read a disturbing book,
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: I just read it recently. It's called Against the Machine.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you've heard about it.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:57
  Speaker 4: That's on my reading list.
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: This guy, Paul Kingsnorth, he was an eco-activist, and he's
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: recently converted to Orthodox Christianity. But it's basically the idea
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: that all of the AI, social media, telephones, oligarchy, it's
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: It's all about creating this kind of, he even thinks
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: it may even be bringing in some kind of non-human
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: intelligence into things. Steiner talked about Ahriman. There were two,
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you know Rudolf Steiner, there were
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: two kind of spiritual forces, Lucifer, which is all kind
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: of pride and arrogance, and and let's just go do
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: it who cares you know this eruptive and anarchy and
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: ariman is very dense and dead and deadening and machine-like
• 29:47
  Speaker 1: and steiner in his the visionary states he he saw
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: the the advent of ariman but you know a thousand
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: years ahead, but I think his ETA has changed. I
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: think it might be the case that it's arrived now,
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: but the whole kind of technological world is exactly the
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: kind of thing Steiner was warning people about a hundred
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: years ago. So I'm not saying he's right, but you
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: can find echoes. You can find how there's connections. Facebook
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: is a little bit of social media I engage in,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: but I posted something about if you want to get
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: an idea how the 70s saw what was coming in
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: a certain way, at least in science fiction films or
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: three science. I'm not to say these are the only ones,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: but these are the ones I watched again recently and
• 30:34
  Speaker 1: they struck me. Oh, it's quite prescient. And there's one
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: called Colossus the Forbin Project. That's 1970. And it's about
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: two supercomputers, one US and Russian who take over.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: And then there's another one called Rollerball. That's 1975 with
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: James Caan. And it's about a A world in the
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: future where corporations run everything. And it's this kind of
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: high sport, but it's violent. But it could be, I mean,
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: in one way it's a standard dystopian film. But one
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: of the things that stood out about it for me
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: is the James Caan figure. He's a hero figure. He
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: wants to figure out what's really going on. And he
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: wants to get access to the libraries. And he goes
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: to the libraries and he discovers there's no books. There's
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: only summaries. Oh, shit. There's only summaries available for him.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: And where's the book? He says, oh, no, there's no
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: books anymore. And the last one is called Demon Seed.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: And that's with Julie Christie. And she basically gets impregnated
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: by the smart house she lives in. Because it wants
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: to have a child. It wants to somehow manifest itself
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: outside of the virtual world. And no, it's a very...
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: And the... director donald camel the filmmaker he he was
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: he was into crowley his father his father knew alistair
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: crowley and he did the dark anti-hippie film performance in
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: 1969 at mick jagger when he's a kind of on
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: his way out fading rock star who gets involved with
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: a criminal and there's all this strange guy i can't
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: go into it but that has a dark side to
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: it but When I saw those films, I thought, God,
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: didn't anybody see these films? They probably did now, and
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: they're saying, yeah, that's what we want to do, rather
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: than like, oh, this is what we shouldn't do. So
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: I think it's probably, you know, what do you want
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: to say? You never say it can't get any worse.
• 32:32
  Speaker 4: But it's so great to hear you say you're an optimist.
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, again, optimist, pessimist, you have to be
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: optimistic or pessimistic about something. You can't just be. one
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: way or the other, but it's kind of like, is
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: it worth it? Yes, I would say it's worth it.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: Is it worth the effort? There's no way we can know.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: There's no guarantees. So it's up to you whether you
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: think it's worth it or not. And that's the gamble.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: You know, do you know Pascal's wager? That's the old
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: one where the safe bet is believing God exists. Because
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: if you're wrong, so what?
• 33:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Right?
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: But if you're right, then you're lucky, you know? So,
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: you know, so.
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: But they also really hold out for the value of
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: the individual. Rollerball of, you know, James Caan fights against
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: these forces, and the whole setting is about people skating
• 33:27
  Speaker 3: in a big, giant roller rink.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, pointlessly going around. Yes. Right.
• 33:33
  Speaker 3: You know, and I'm jumping ahead to something like The Matrix. And,
• 33:39
  Speaker 3: you know, the quest for humans or some humans to
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: become themselves and to insist on knowing, which echoes your
• 33:51
  Speaker 3: story of that you wanted to know these things, you
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: wanted to know them, and you pursued it. And it
• 34:00
  Speaker 3: seems to me where, you know, the sub-theme here is
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: the importance, the crucial importance of individuating. Of reading stuff,
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: going places, having experiences that are beyond screens and convention
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: and what Gebser calls just the ordinary, practical, daily, day-to-day awareness,
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: which we all need to have. But stretch into more,
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: stretch into more, stretch into symbolic thinking, stretch into the
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: mystical or participatory kind of states of being.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: No, without doubt. I mean, I think that's what, in
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: a simpler sense, I would think that's what all this
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: stuff is about. You have to find some time where
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: you're not plugged into everything and you can, you know,
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: hear your own thoughts or actually feel. I mean, the
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: book that's coming out, the title is We Forget That
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: We Exist. It's sort of inspired or based on experience
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: I had here during the first lockdown, during the COVID-19 lockdown, 2020.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: And It was more of an inconvenience for me than
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: anything else. It wasn't really a hardship that much, but
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: I still had to, you know, take precautions and the
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: hoarders had emptied out all the local markets. So I
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: had to get on my bike to cycle out to,
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: you know, other places to find anything. And, you know,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: I was wiping everything down and wearing the gloves and doing,
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: you know, doing all the kinds of stuff like that.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: And I remember one morning. where I live, it's lovely
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: green and leafy North London and West Hampstead. And I
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: have a private garden that opens up to a larger
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: communal garden. And so one morning, this would have been
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: April or something, I think it was March 2020 was
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: when the lockdown started here. I went out, cup of
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: coffee in hand to my garden. And I looked up
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: and I said, what is that? And it was the sun.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: And then I caught myself You just asked what that was.
• 36:05
  Speaker 1: So there was like a few nanoseconds. I literally, I
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: was surprised by the sun. This is the theme. I
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: didn't know what it was. It wasn't doing anything strange.
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: It didn't just come behind a cloud or anything. It
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: just was up there and just big yellow and too
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: bright to look at and the usual sort of thing.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: And then I started laughing. I started laughing. My neighbors
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: would have wondered, what is he on again or something?
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: I just was laughing or something like that. And then
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: I realized that I felt like, a strange sort of thing,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: I felt like I was on a holiday. What I
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: call the holiday feeling. The holiday feeling to me always makes,
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: it has a kind of feeling of kind of freedom
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: in some way. It's in some, the essence of a
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: holiday feeling is kind of freedom. And so I'm doing
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: phenomenology saying, okay, laughing, I'm giggling. I just was surprised
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: by the sun. And I'm feeling like I'm on a holiday.
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: Holiday feeling is freedom. How could I feel more free
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: now when I'm restricted? I have to stay home. If
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: you go out for a walk, you can't sit down
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: anywhere and blah, blah, blah, tons of things. My freedom,
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: my actual physical freedom is more limited now than it
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: was before lockdown. But why do I feel this excess
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: of freedom? And strangely, you know, and I came to
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: the conclusion is because of all the precautions I was taking,
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: I was in a kind of alert emergency sort of mode.
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: And I was putting more of myself into what I
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: was doing. More of my everyday kind of self. This
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: is a long story. Colin Wilson, who I've written a
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: biography of and recently brought back into print. Sorry, here's
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: a plug. It's online, but in a Kindle edition. I
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: spent last summer learning how to format. You want to
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: do something, learn how to format. Okay, so I brought
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: it back into print. But he has this idea of
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: what he calls the robot, which basically is a kind
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: of labor-saving, evolutionarily adaptive device we've developed in order to
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: take care of all the grunt work. You know, when
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: you first learn how to type, you have to look
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: at every key and at one point you can do
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: it and you can think about a higher level, like
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: what do I want to say? And likewise, riding a
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: bike or anything like that. And somehow we all allow
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: the robot to start doing things we'd rather do ourselves.
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: The sunset no longer elicits, you know, a sense of awe.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: It's because you're not seeing the robot seeing it. Robot's
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: not a villain. We just, we unconsciously allow it to,
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: it's like a valet who does his job too well.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: We allow the valet to do too many things for ourselves.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: And at the end, we're just sitting around feeling bored.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: But because I, because the crisis, you know, the lockdown
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: made me be more like, okay, got to go out
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: and find food today and make sure we wipe everything
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: down and all that. I felt more alive. And because
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: I felt more alive, everything out there suddenly was more.
• 38:55
  Speaker 1: And that morning, somehow it just, I, whatever it is,
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: I just walked out class and looked up and.
• 39:01
  Speaker 4: Well, it's like you see things with fresh eyes, yeah.
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so this is this,
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: what we were just talking about before, how we kind
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: of shrink, you know, our lives become, and we don't
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: want them to. We seek out means to get out
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: of that, you know, glass of wine, suddenly everything's much
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: more interesting than it was before you had the glass
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: of wine. That's why I call wine poetry in a bottle.
• 39:26
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I liked that. It's portable poetry.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: Poetry because, I mean, I think how alcohol works and
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: all these kind of drugs work is it kind of
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: quiets the utilitarian practical mode, you know, the dealing with mode.
• 39:41
  Speaker 4: And the automaticity of it.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: Exactly, yeah, exactly. And which edits out all this other
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: stuff that's not relevant to dealing with things, but it's
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: still part of the reality of something, right? It's still
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: part of its reality. And then when that's quieted, that
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: other level or dimension, whatever you want to call it,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: of the thing, is suddenly you're aware of it. You
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: can see, ah, you don't know quite why it's more
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: interesting than it was, but suddenly it is.
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: It's a lot about the compensatory function of the psyche,
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: that if you quiet down the so-called robot, all the automaticity,
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: you get poetry in a bottle and you're in a
• 40:22
  Speaker 3: different self state and feeling state. If you're in lockdown
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: and you have to do all of these mundane wiping
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: everything down and so on and so forth, you experience
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: a sense of huge freedom of what is that thing
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: in the sky? Wow, it's the sun. So, you know,
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: how do we navigate that and be aware of it
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: so that with all of our robotic assistance and helps
• 40:49
  Speaker 3: and screens and Siri and all the rest of it,
• 40:53
  Speaker 3: bring forth a sense of more individuality, more freedom, more intention,
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: more sense of awe, even the numinous. Maybe it will
• 41:06
  Speaker 3: spur our ability to find a sense of the numinous
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: in a sunset instead of just, oh, the sun's going
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: down again.
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: No, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I.
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Again, just to mention this talk on Hesse, it's going
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: to deal with this notion of the journey to the East.
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: But one of the things he actually says, it's this
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: little novella that he wrote that came out in the
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: early 30s. And it's kind of a symbolic, you know,
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: sort of novel. But in it, there's a character, H.H.,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: and he was in charge of the music for the
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: league that's on this journey to the East. And he says,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: he discovered that a long time devoted to small things
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: exalts us and increases our strength. And that was something
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: that was happening when I was doing all the precaution.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: But I also discovered that when I painted my flat
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: a few years ago, I said, I try things. I'm
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: not very good at it, but I'll do it. And besides,
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: it was horrible. It's really horrible to find painters in London.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, we can get to it next year
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: or something like that. So I said, okay. And they
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: forget about it. So I said, I'll just do it.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: And But I said, you've got to do it right.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: So there's all this preparation before you paint. It's all
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. And that's the key. I'm not
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: doing any tutorials about painting your flat, but that is
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: the key, all the prep work beforehand.
• 42:31
  Speaker 4: That won't be part of the Escona presentation.
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: Well, it might be. It might be. But I told
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: this story the last time. Not there. I'm getting a mix-up.
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: I'm going to be at the Paris Center in Tuscany
• 42:44
  Speaker 1: this weekend. But I was there a couple years ago.
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: I'm getting a mix-up. But in any case... What happened
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: was that I did all the prep and then started
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: doing all that. And I put on some shakuhachi, you know,
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: the Japanese flute music in the background. If you know,
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: it's very breathy. It gives you a sense of space.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: It's a big sense of space. And so I was
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: doing this, and I just got into it. I got
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: so into it that over the next, you know, four
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: or five days or whatever, when I was finished, I
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: wanted to knock on my neighbor's door and ask them
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: if they needed a touch-up. or anything because I was
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: so enjoying doing it.
• 43:21
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: That's so great. And it's what it is if you,
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: in the Tom Sawyer story or the Huck Finn story where,
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: I forget whether it's Huck or Tom, where he has
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: to paint the fence and he doesn't want to do it,
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: but he thinks if he pretends it's fun, his friends
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: will want to do it. And so he does this
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: whole thing pretending it's kind of fun to do. And so,
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: oh no, this is only something special. Oh, come on, Hucker.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: Come on, Tom, let us do it. And they wind
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: up giving them, you know, here, I got a frog
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: in my pocket, whatever it is, I'll give you that. So,
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: you know, he gets all this stuff and then he
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: lets them paint the thing. But they do enjoy it.
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: That's the trick. The trick is on him because they
• 44:02
  Speaker 1: actually enjoy it because he's convinced them that it's something
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: that's enjoyable to do. And so they start out with
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: that attitude. So in a way, again, it sounds simple self-help,
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: but if you start out with an attitude like, I
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: might not really want to do it, but it could
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: be an enjoyable experience in some way. Again, I'm not
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: suggesting be masochistic and go out and do something that
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: you absolutely hate and say, oh, I have to enjoy this.
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: That's a stupid logical way to think about it. But
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: any kind of thing. This is advice I say to anybody.
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: All the stuff that you don't want to do, get
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: that out of the way first. And then you have
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: all the energy that you're locked away with avoiding doing it.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: That's energy you can't use for anything else.
• 44:40
  Speaker 2: Ladies and gentlemen, this is how you come to write
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: 27 books. This right here.
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: All the stuff you don't want to do, get that
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: out of the way first. Because if you don't do that,
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: you lock that energy away and you can't use it
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: for anything else. So this is my experience. So I
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: just clear the decks and then bang, you've got your time.
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: And if you're writing, I usually time this. I have
• 45:02
  Speaker 1: to write in the afternoon. I'm not a most... Generally
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: writers or morning writers are... night or evening writers, but
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: I have to write in the afternoon because all the
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: time I wanted to be a writer, in the decade
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: when I say I'm out in the wilderness trying to
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: find a place for myself in the real world, which
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: meant academia mostly, while I was working at a bookshop
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: in Los Angeles. The Bodhi Tree was just the, at
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: the time, was the most well-known metaphysical bookshop west of
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: the Rockies. But when I had afternoons to myself and
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: I could write, I sat in front of the, well,
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: it was WordPress back then, nothing would come out. So
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: I would, I would go have this horrible, horrible, you know,
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: what do you call it? Depression, frustration in the afternoons.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: And that was like my demon. So I have to
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: have my afternoons occupied now. So that's why I usually
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: write between about 12 to five or something like that.
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: But I get, I get my, you know, my quota
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: in and leave enough to start with the next day
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: and take one, one day a week off. You have
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: to take at least one day a week off. There
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: are writers who do it every day. You have to take,
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: at least I do, I have to take a Sunday
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: off and go do something right around London on my
• 46:10
  Speaker 1: bike or something like that. So that's the work. That's
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: the work. And you'll see, you know, if you keep
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: doing that, you keep doing that, you keep doing that,
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: and after a while, it's like three months, four months later, oh,
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: you got a book.
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: That's really great, though.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 46:22
  Speaker 2: It is. I want to pick up on a theme,
• 46:27
  Speaker 2: I want to say, that's in your memoir, which is
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: the rejection of, of nihilism. And so you spoke about
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: that in terms of your involvement with the, with, you know,
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: the rock scene and how there was a lot of
• 46:42
  Speaker 2: very kind of nihilistic music. And that wasn't your, that's
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: not how, like, that wasn't the way you, you know,
• 46:49
  Speaker 2: like the Sex Pistols, for example. And that just wasn't,
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: that wasn't the world that you related to. And then
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: it comes up again when you're talking about your stint
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: in graduate school, in academia. Yeah. And I don't know
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: that you actually use the word nihilism talking about, you know,
• 47:09
  Speaker 2: the kind of postmodern deconstructionist, but essentially it is a
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: pretty nihilistic view. And I said, you know, there's one
• 47:21
  Speaker 2: part you're talking about, you know, that we're trapped in
• 47:26
  Speaker 2: the economic system of late capitalism or we're totally under
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: the spell of consumerism. You're talking about people like Adorno
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: and Horkheimer. And, you know, it's like their answer is
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: if you, you know, turn toward this brand of Marxism,
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: you might just find a way through. But, and you
• 47:45
  Speaker 2: didn't exactly say this, but I was thinking, but you
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: already had an alternative answer because you'd spent all this
• 47:51
  Speaker 2: time studying the occult, which presents another answer to that
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: sense of being trapped.
• 47:59
  Speaker 4: In our current environment.
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: And I think that's very much in line with Jung.
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: And then, you know, I have this, you know, I
• 48:07
  Speaker 2: have these quotes that get surfaced for me every day
• 48:11
  Speaker 2: through this app, Readwise, that I love. And here's a
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: quote from The Collected Works that came up this morning.
• 48:17
  Speaker 2: I thought, yeah, that's exactly it. So Jung says, here
• 48:21
  Speaker 2: each of us must ask, have I any religious experience,
• 48:24
  Speaker 2: an immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which
• 48:28
  Speaker 2: will keep me as an individual from dissolving into the crowd.
• 48:34
  Speaker 4: So I just, you know.
• 48:35
  Speaker 2: It's sort of like Jung says, yeah, there's this real
• 48:39
  Speaker 2: possibility out there that we could just be dissolved into
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: the crowd, that we could be trapped, you know, as
• 48:45
  Speaker 2: Adorno was talking about. And there's a solution, which is
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: contact with the numinous, which I imagine you had already
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: found and been steeped in for years in your study
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: of the occult. So I just wondered what your thoughts
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: are about that.
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: No, I was doing my bachelor's in philosophy. I went
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: out of my way to learn about all this stuff
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: that I normally wouldn't have been interested in. But everybody
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: else was reading Derrida and Foucault and Walter Benjamin and Adorno.
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: So I said, what is this all about? I kind
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: of put Rudolf Steiner on hold. and I was reading
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: a lot of George Steiner. I don't know if you
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: know who George Steiner is. He was a Cambridge Don,
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: but he wrote a lot about the links between philosophy
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: and literature and language. And it's through reading him that
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: I was introduced to people like Adorno and the Frankfurt
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: School and all that kind of stuff, which was real.
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: They were really hot in the mid-80s when I was
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: in university. I guess I just have an inherent kind of,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: I guess that's the optimistic side of me. I can't
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: accept some vision of the world where my actions are
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: useless or futile. I just can't. I mean, in this
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: book I'm writing, I talk about some poets that have
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: that vision, and I call them the futilitarians.
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: That's great.
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: You know, and if Batman was a nihilist, he would
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: wear a futility belt, you know. So, you know, so
• 50:10
  Speaker 1: this is kind of philosophical jokes there. But but I mean,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: I just felt like, no, I'm here. I mean, I
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: it's like I have energy. I was a rock star.
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: I don't want to. Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Oh, I can't.
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: I'm trapped in the episteme. I'm trapped in Foucault's episteme. Well,
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: I don't want to be trapped in your episteme. I
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: believe we can transcend. And how far do you go
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: with that? If you could keep doing that. And funnily,
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: two people can't talk to each other.
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: Totally. No, I actually loved your discussion of Foucault. I
• 50:38
  Speaker 4: was really, I was really grooving on that. It was great. Yeah.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, well, there's the salty bit I won't get into.
• 50:45
  Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. You're a little salty. It's terrific.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Here, but I mean, but fundamentally you get to a
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: point where if we're all, you can't talk to each
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: other because, you know, we're all trapped. There's no transcendence
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: of your own, you know, historicity and whoever you are.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: And I just can't buy that. I mean, I think,
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: it's like solipsism. If it's true, who do you prove
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: it to? You know, so it just seems futile to me.
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: And so I just can't accept it. But that vision
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: is considered more serious than any kind of, not any
• 51:22
  Speaker 1: way less real vision, but a more optimistic is the
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: right word, constructive, I don't know what to say. So
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: writers or philosophers who believe it's worth making the efforts
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: to try to transcend the limitations. I mean, that's what
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: thought is supposed to be about, transcending your subjectivity. We
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: can't do, obviously, we can't do it completely. And it's
• 51:42
  Speaker 1: good to know how much our subjectivity informs what we're
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: thinking is an objective assessment and all that. We all
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: need to do that. But at the same time, you
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: have to accept some kind of objectivity in order to
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: do that, right? Because the Either the person telling you
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: you're doing that, they must have some objective view, or
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: you're just saying that because you don't like me, which is,
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: you know, there's subjectivity. So you have to assume there's
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: some level where we can transcend the island universes we
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: are in. Otherwise, there's no point in having any kind
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: of conversation. So, I mean, if that's the case, just
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: like I, again, I may not get this at all.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: I only have a BA in philosophy, but the whole
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: kind of epistemological problem how do we know what we know?
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: I said, well, do we know there's an epistemological problem? Yes, okay, well,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: there's no problem knowing anything because we know there's an
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: epistemological problem. So we must be able to know something
• 52:37
  Speaker 1: in the first place in order to deal with what
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: we're talking about. So it's just, there seems to be
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: all these kind of philosophical questions that they kind of
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: undermine themselves. I mean, it's, you know, that's what I
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: thought about, you know, the whole everything's a social construct.
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: Is that a social construct as well? If that's a
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: social construct, then it doesn't have any more weight, doesn't
• 52:58
  Speaker 1: carry any more weight of truth than the other social constructs. But,
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: you know, it just seems like, you know, that kind
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: of logic doesn't get grabbed because it goes against the grain.
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: So I would say this, if you want to lose
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: your imagination, there's two surefire ways. Go to graduate school
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: or be on your phone all the time. And being
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: on your phone all the time is cheaper than going
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: to graduate school. Yeah. You know, you can do that
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: at home.
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: I just want to put a cap on that because
• 53:27
  Speaker 2: I'm thinking of this quote from Jung from MDR where
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: he says, you know, we don't know if life has
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: meaning or not, right? And he says, probably as in
• 53:35
  Speaker 2: all metaphysical questions, both are true. Life is or has
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: will preponderate and win the battle. So I think count
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: me in that camp.
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: Andy also talks about the necessity of having a relationship
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: to the infinite. And I'm curious about your relationship to
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: transcendent experience.
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. I mean, I think that's absolutely the thing. And
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: if you have that experience, you know all this other
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: stuff can't be true. It's difficult to hold that.
• 54:09
  Speaker 4: Wait, say more about that.
• 54:10
  Speaker 2: If you have that experience, you know what other stuff
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: can't be true.
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: I had this experience of being surprised by the sun.
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: It was probably the most remarkable experience I've ever had
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: when I think about it. Right. I mean, I've taken
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: psychedelics and all that kind of stuff and blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: But just that brief moment when I was there and
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: it's like, it's suddenly, it was there. It was there.
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: Everything was there. And there was, you know, it's those, again,
• 54:36
  Speaker 1: as I was saying, it's like, it's, We don't say
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: it's a watershed now. We say it's a watershed moment.
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: So I was about to say it's the I'm seeing
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: a leaf for the first time moment. All of us
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: have had that kind of experience. It's like when we
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: were a kid and when you're older. When you see
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: a leaf, it's typical. All leaves are just leaves. But
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: we know everything in nature, there's no exact copy. There's
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: no such thing. I mean, everything is separate and unique
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: and all that. But in order for us to navigate
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: through the world, we typify things. So that's a tree.
• 55:10
  Speaker 1: So you put a whole category of things into something
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: called tree and you don't need to pay attention to
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: whatever particular kind of tree it is. So I had typified, oh,
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: that's the sun. Somehow, at that moment, that filter of
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: making things typical was gone. It wasn't there. And I'm surmising,
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: I'm thinking, well, perhaps it was the fact that I
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: was putting more of myself. I was intending more. You know,
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: I was putting more it's like every day because you
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: know when you're on holiday you usually put more energy
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: oh let's go walk let's go walk down the beach
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: or whatever it is because it's interesting it's new it's
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: different so i was kind of in that mode but
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: not because i was on a holiday because it was
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: the crisis or the the covid kind of thing so
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: i was kind of okay where are we going to
• 55:54
  Speaker 1: go today you know in order to find you know
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: food or something so it was that's why i said
• 55:59
  Speaker 1: god why do i feel like i'm on holiday i
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: equate it with that so there we we to get
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: through things. This is McGilchrist, you know, E. McGilchrist's work.
• 56:07
  Speaker 4: Yes, I was just thinking that.
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: Master and Emissary.
• 56:10
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: This is what the left brain does. I mean, and
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: we needed to do that. Otherwise, we'd be like, you know,
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: looking at a puddle all day, you know, because it's
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: absolutely too beautiful or something. We need to be able
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: to look at the puddle when we want to look
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: at the puddle and recognize that it is beautiful and
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: it's not an illusion because in that mode, we are
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: actually whatever we want to call it, meaning, I don't know,
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it. It's something that we
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: perceive without the senses, and that's contradictory because perception is sensory.
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: This is why Rudolf Steiner talks about super-sensible perception. Whatever
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: we want to call the stuff that comes out of
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: the sunset and you're looking at it and it's beautiful,
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: the senses show you the sunset, but the senses don't
• 56:53
  Speaker 1: give you what it is that's making you that feeling
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: of awe. Because there's times when you see the sunset
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: and you don't feel that. So your senses are still working.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: So there's something else. There's something else that's not sensory.
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: But it's real. It's part of our experience out there.
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: I call it meaning. So it's a kind of aura
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: of the meaning of what? But it's not a meaning
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: you can put your finger on. It's not a meaning
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: for or it's not significant for some reason. It has
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: it in itself. And these are the sorts of implicit
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: meanings that McGilchrist says the right brain is more attuned to.
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: The left brain is explicit. And, again, I'm talking about
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: this fellow Owen Barfield yesterday. I mean, this is why
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: the right brain can understand metaphors and the left brain can't.
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: Because metaphors are like poetry. Poetry is language that means
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: more than it says. And prose is language that says
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: exactly what it means. All right? So... Poetry, there's language
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: and there's a literal meaning of whatever the words might be.
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: Her face bloomed, right? Where are the petals? A very
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: literal person would be saying, oh, he exploded with anger. Oh,
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: where are the bits and pieces? He's not accepting it
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: as a metaphor. We don't do that now. But, you know,
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: if you're very literal and you want explicit, it's like
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: you don't understand that you're using language as imagery. It's
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: suggestive of something else, which is the right brain is
• 58:26
  Speaker 1: perfectly happy. with that kind of thing. So there's a
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: certain kind of ambiguity. It's, oh, how is it the
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: case that something in one sense, literal sense, can be
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: transformed to a non-literal, inner, imaginary kind of sense and
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing. And so this, again, this is,
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: I think we are increasingly more and more literal. The binary, again,
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: that's either or. Literal is either or. Metaphor is both and.
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: So that's what McGilchrist would say. And I, you know,
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: I would say, you know, When you're in the ego,
• 58:59
  Speaker 1: it's either or. When you're in the self, it's both and.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, to put it in that kind of larger
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: kind of general kind of context. Because the ego is
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: the one that has to deal with the world. And
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: how do I do this? How do I get? you know,
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: this problem? I've got to figure this thing out. And
• 59:12
  Speaker 1: the other one is just like, there, it's given. It accepts,
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: you know, the world that's given to it. And a whole,
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: you know, kind of holistic, global kind of perception of it.
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah. No, there's lots of threads there to follow up on.
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: There seem to be a lot of sort of themes
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: and pointers to, you know, we do have all these
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: other kinds of experiences. It would be a shame if
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: anyone went through an entire life without having a moment
• 59:46
  Speaker 3: like you had when all of a sudden you see
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: the sun. And then we have all of these frameworks, philosophers,
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: people like McGilchrist, Is it right brain versus left brain?
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: Is it both and versus polarities? Is it, you know,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 3: lots of ways to express it. And we can cultivate it.
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: We can actually intend to cultivate explicit experiences, not just
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 3: leaves or trees, through probably our own You know, ego
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: can go toward all these things. You can sort of
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: intend to sit and just look at a tree or
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: the sunset or, in my case, the beach. You can
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: get on a bike and have sensory experiences. We can
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: choose these things.
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: No, I think you're absolutely right. I think one of
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: the important things is to really recognize that they're real.
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: It's a real part of the world, just like if
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: whatever found a street you didn't know before, and you
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: can go back to it. There's a really cool secondhand
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: shop that you liked on that street. Oh, you can
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: find it again. That's there. You didn't know it. It's
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: real in that kind of sense. Not physically real, but
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: it's a real thing. And I think that's, I was
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: saying this in the course last night, is all of us,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 1: even the best of us, you know, trying to not
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: be stuck into this kind of, you know, reductive materialist view,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: we were brought up in it. So it's difficult. It's difficult.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: And I have to tell myself, look, you've had precognitive dreams.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: You know, they are real. You've had very powerful synchronicities,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: meaningful experiences. You've had telepathic experiences. These things are real.
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: You might not feel them right now. You might think
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 1: right now, oh my God, no, whatever, you know, life's horrible,
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: but you have to remember that these things are real.
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: And it's, this is what we, this is what this book,
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: we forget that we exist. It's, it's, We have a
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: very weak grasp on reality. Who's the, was it Piaget? Yeah.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: Jung studied with as well, right? In France. And he
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: had the, he talks about the reality faculty or something
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: like that. Something that he called kind of like psychological
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: tension or some way. And, you know, when the tension
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: is very loose, we have a weak grasp on reality.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: Just in a sense, we don't get it. We can
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: see everything, but I mean, this is one of the
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: things I say, you know, Imagination is not about make-believe,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: it's about making things real. And if you think about
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: what happens when we say we realize something, you realize something.
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: You realize something means it's something you knew already. You
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: factually knew this, whatever it is. And then suddenly you realize, oh,
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: I made it real in the sense that I understand
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: now it had wider connotations, it was more depth to whatever.
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: I didn't know that would happen, blah, blah, blah. So
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: you went from something just being factual 2D to being
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: 3D kind of thing. And we have that same, you know,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: we go through most of life like that where we don't.
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: In that moment, I realized the sun was something that's
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: really there. It's really this huge thing that's 93 million
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: miles away. Who the heck are we on this planet here? Like,
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: what's going on? I had a what's going on moment
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: to speak in the vernacular. And that strikes you and suddenly,
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: you know, you have to get back to work.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: It's this moment of like immediacy and where nothing is
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: taken for granted. And you talk about a couple other,
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: you talk about seeing the smoke rising. I think when
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: you were at one time when you were visiting Colin Wilson,
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: that maybe it was a little bit like this, almost
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: like a hyper reality where, where like you said, you're not,
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 2: you're not looking at, you're seeing everything as if for
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: the first time.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: Well, it has this crisp, crisp. That was a very
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: strong moment for me. We had visited Colin Wilson with my,
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: my wife at the time, and we were driving back
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: to London from Cornwall and we stopped at some gas
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: station to use the loo, you know, the toilet, whatever.
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: And that must have had a fireplace. There's a chimney
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: and smoke coming up. And I felt I could hold
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: it like a Hakusai, you know, those Japanese paintings where
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: it seems like it's all very crisp and clear and,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 1: you know, very, very well-defined. And that, I mean, those
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: are the kind of, I don't know, I tend to
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: think I get more Satori than Samadhi. moments if I
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: have to talk like that. So it's more about the
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: sudden isness of something rather than the full-on mystical. And
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: I'm not saying one's better than the other, just from
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: my own kind of experience. It's been more kind of
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: the sudden snapshot isness of something. And we have no
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: idea why we're here. We have no idea what's going on.
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 1: The scientists don't know any more than we do. The
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: most mysterious things in the universe are us. Forget the
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: black holes. We have no idea what's going on here.
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: And I know in one way that sounds like, yeah,
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: but that's the absolute truth. And when you have those
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: kind of moments, they're scary, but they can be very liberating.
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: And then you kind of, has anyone ever had any good,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: clear idea what's going on here? Is there a better,
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: who else has been obsessed with these questions? At least
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: when I was young, that's how it started. I suddenly
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: started like, what? What's going on? And so, oh, maybe
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: this guy, Hesse, maybe he knows, or maybe Jung, maybe
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: Nietzsche knows, maybe Sartre, maybe this guy knows, that guy knows,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: you know, and I can find out from them. You
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: don't necessarily in the end necessarily have to adopt any
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: of these individuals' conclusions they've come to, but you can
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: follow them on the way they've arrived at those conclusions,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: and they help, over time, they help you arrive at
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: your own conclusions about something. I haven't concluded about anything yet. Yeah.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: But you did for a while, you, you, you sort
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 2: of did the work, the, the Gurdjieff, you know, and,
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 2: and so, so there were, you, you kind of got on,
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 2: got with the program a few different times and then it,
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 2: you know, and then you, you know, whether it was,
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 2: you know, being, being part of Blondie or, you know,
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 2: being interested in Crowley or, or, or following Gurdjieff, but,
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: but then it was like, but somehow the, the energy
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: leaked out of the container and, you know, it was
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: time to move on.
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you just, well, that's what growing is, right?
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: I mean, I, I, I think, One of the things
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: I do is I get into something and I outgrow it.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: These days, one of the things about being a writer
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: is that you do one thing. That's what you do.
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: You write about that. So if I write 20 books
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: about Crowley, I'm a writer about Crowley and people can
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: find you. I mean, this is one of the problems
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: with Colin Wilson. He wrote many more books than I have,
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: but he wrote about them. All of his books were
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: informed with the same sorts of ideas, but he wrote
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: about lots of different things. He wrote about philosophy. He
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: wrote about literature. He wrote about psychology. He wrote about criminology.
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: He wrote about the occult. And so there was always
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: his take on a variety of things. And he was
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: always accused of like jumping around to different stuff. And
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: there is no, you know, no continuity. And that's why
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: I wrote this book about him called Beyond the Robot,
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: the life and work of Colin Wilson to show, actually,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: it's a one-stop shop. If you're interested in Colin Wilson, there's,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: theme that runs through and he calls it it's the
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: paradoxical nature of freedom and it's much like what we're
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: talking about where when our freedom is threatened or anything
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: that's very very important to us is threatened its value
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: becomes absolutely solid and indubitable and unavoidable and we'll fight
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: tooth and nail whatever it is and but what happens
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: is once we secure that thing again against our best
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: efforts we invariably start to take it for granted i
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: mean joni mitchell You don't know what you got till
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: it's gone, right? I mean, that's sort of the thing.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: I mean, in a way, in a nutshell, it's that,
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: you know, when we have something, we invariably take it
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: for granted. And this has got to do with this
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: notion of the robot and other things and stuff like that.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: So I can't go into detail on that. But that's
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: sort of the thing. Why does that happen? And all
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: you have to do is have the same thing be
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 1: taken away from you. And suddenly, you want it again,
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: even though when you have it, you It's fun for
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: a while and then you forget it. And freedom becomes
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: a burden. You know, Eric Fromm wrote that famous book
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: in the last century, Escape from Freedom. You know, we
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: want to give it away to people because it's a burden. So,
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 1: I mean, why does that happen? You know, why does
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: something that we know is very important and it's the
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: most important thing to us when it's threatened becomes something
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: that in some ways we find, you know, we want
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 1: to kill time. You know, what am I going to
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: do now? So.
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: It's an age-old question, but I think we tend to say, oh,
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: that's human nature, but that doesn't answer anything. Why is
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: it human nature?
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 3: We're a very peculiar species. I reflect on that again
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 3: and again and again.
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: We are a.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 3: Very peculiar species. And your question stands of why is
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: that and what kind of consciousness can we bring to
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 3: it so that we can hold it in consciousness of
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: maybe I should stop and look at the sunset. or
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: a leaf instead of being propelled by my inner robot. Yeah.
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: Well, I think it has to bother you. Maybe you
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: have to realize, gee, I'm not getting, you know, life
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: has become, you know, what is it, flat, stale, and
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: I forget, unprofitable. You know, you have to get into
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: that mode. But one of the things that Wilson found
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: was that, again, like my own experience, but more intense,
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: were how, like someone like Sartre, Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre, when
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: he never felt as free, he said, was when he
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: was working with the resistance against the Gestapo, and he
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: could have been arrested in Paris and possibly shot. There's
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: a wonderful quote from the English man of letters, Dr. Johnson,
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: from the 18th century, when he says, if a man
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: knows he's about to be hanged, it concentrates the mind incredibly.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: So if you suddenly know, and this is both Gurdjieff
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: and Heidegger, hit upon this, but they said this, the
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: one surefire full proof method of awakening being, so in Heidegger, Seinvergessenheit,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: being forgetfulness, and in Gersheth, it's like we're mechanical or
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: we don't remember ourselves, is to have a vivid grasp
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: of your own death. The reality, you know, the reality that, yes,
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: we know everyone else is going to die, but you
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: are going to die. We, you know, we, me? I'll
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: get around to it sometime, but you know, but it's like,
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: you know, and, but you have to, and that's why
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: this is what gives existentialism this grim and the work
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: in some ways, a grim kind of thing. It's we're,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: we're so sunk in forgetfulness that we need such a,
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: you know, austere threatening kind of thing to wake, to
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: wake us, to wake us up. But this, this is
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: the same kind of thing, but it's that that's the
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: reality function. The same thing that would allow me to
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: grasp the reality of my death vividly enough for me
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: to feel like, Oh man, I got, I got to
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: get to work here, is what maybe see the sun
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: in that way. It's the same, I saw the reality
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: of the sun. So you don't necessarily have to, I mean,
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: that's the grim wake-up call, the surefire method, but it
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: has had a negative side to it. You don't necessarily
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 1: have to do that. If we can grasp that reality,
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: you can grasp the reality of positive things. Think of
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: all the things, why is dying bad? Because all the
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: stuff you'll miss. We'll think of all those things. Oh, gee,
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 1: I still have those things. Shouldn't I feel better? good
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 1: that I have them, you know, not necessarily going around
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: with some phony, you know, attitude of gratitude and everything's
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: wonderful sort of thing, but just actually realizing, you know,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: that actually, you know, if crisis hits, what you want
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: is things to get back to normal, right? Well, they
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: are normal now. So why don't you imagine that you
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: just got over a crisis and isn't it wonderful now
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 1: that I'm back home and everything's okay in some way,
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: you know, again, you don't have to do that. Maybe
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: take time out. every day to do something like that,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: you know, to work against our tendency to take everything
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: for granted. Because it's there in us. And this is,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: Wilson said, this is our original sin. It's the, you know,
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: we just, you know, vanitas vanitatum, all this vanity after
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: a certain time, you know. But does it have to
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: be that? Aren't there moments where Maslow's peak experiences? And
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: I get this, you talk about Hillman. I think Hillman
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: always is critical of Maslow, but I don't think he
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: understands Maslow. Because Hillman is obsessed with melancholy and depression
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. And he thinks Maslow's
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: peaks are about climbing Everest or surfing. And it's not.
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 1: It's everyday things that you suddenly see. So he tells
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: the story of a Marine who was at a station
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: someplace and he hadn't seen a woman in two years.
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: And then he was sent back to a base and
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: he saw a nurse and suddenly he was like, women
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: are really different than men. So it was like, struck
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: him with the revelation. It was the divine, you know,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: the feminine. His animal was suddenly, whoa, full blown in
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: the first whack that, you know, walked by or whatever
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: like that. Or there's a mother who was getting her, again,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: it's of the time. So she was getting, you know,
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: he was writing the 60s. So she was getting her
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: children ready for school and her husband and all that
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 1: and all the flurry and dizziness of that. And after
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: they left, the kitchen's a mess, but the sunlight came
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 1: through the window and she suddenly felt, aren't I lucky?
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 1: And she didn't climb Everest. It's the same thing. Some
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: ordinary thing, suddenly you see it as it is, really,
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: without the filter of preoccupations and indifference to them.
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: It's finding ways to be alive while we're alive in
• 1:13:34
  Speaker 3: the ordinary. Sunlight coming through the window, seeing the sun,
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 3: There are millions of opportunities, or we can be at
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: war and not see a woman for however many years,
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 3: and then the contrast will appear. But why depend on
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: that when we could depend on growing our own awareness?
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: Well, it's not depending. I'm just saying it just was
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: an experience that he noticed, he saw. No, I agree.
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 4: No, right.
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 3: If it happens to you, great. You know, Paul falls
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 3: off his horse on the road to Damascus. OK, that's
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 3: one way. But we can intend it.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 4: Partly, I think what you're talking about, Gary, is like
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 4: an attitude.
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: No, I agree. No, I'll put it this way. The
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: Marine didn't go to where he was for two years
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 1: in order to induce the peak experience when it just happened.
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: But no, you're absolutely right. I mean, again, this is
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: one of the things I said. I had something like
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: that and I was painting my flat. Fundamental technique is
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 1: slowing down because we usually got to do, I mean,
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 1: I know I'm like that. I mean, I, you know,
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: you think you're self-employed. You think you've got a lot
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: of time to yourself. No, you're wrong. You're constantly working
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: everything you have to take care of.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: Nope.
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: There's nobody there that you, you know, you can't give
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: the work to anybody else. So I'm constantly like that.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: And when I have these kinds of moments, I remember
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: that actually I can relax.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 4: So how do you, how do you slow down?
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, these days I usually, you know, if
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 1: weather permitting, I'll take my bike out, cycle around, and
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: I'm near Regent's Park, which is a lovely park in
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: the north of London. And that's what I've been doing,
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: did over the summer. It's the weather's changing now, so
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to be able to do it as much.
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: And basically cycle around, walk for a bit, find a bench.
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: They have wonderful fountains, you know, and sunlight coming through
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: the leaves and just sit there as old people do.
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: And you're just sitting there and you're just kind of,
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: maybe I'll read, maybe I won't, but I just take
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: a breath. And I try not to do anything. I
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: know it's Wu Wei in some way. Just don't do anything.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: And just watch the people walk by. I mean, for me,
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 1: sunlight coming through leaves, I mean, when I was a kid,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: I used to be absolutely hypnotized by that. So when
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: I see something like that, it's a slowing down kind
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: of thing.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 4: It induces a kind of slower, yeah.
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: Again, you have to be, retired and old and have
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: the time to do this but if you can sit
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 1: and if you watch cloud pick a cloud it doesn't
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: seem to be moving and look at it and it's
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: it is moving it's moving very slowly and if you
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: can follow the cloud moving you're slowing down at the
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: same the same way you can slow i mean that
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: that's there are practices like that i mean uh Itzhak
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: Bentov had one, I think it was this book about
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: the pendulum where he said, well, it wouldn't work with
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: a digital, but you need an old-fashioned sort of watch
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 1: or a pocket watch. You need something with a second
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: and a minute hand and an hour hand. You need
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: something with moving parts. And, okay, you look at it,
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: we always see the second hand moving, right? We generally
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: don't see the minute hand. We certainly don't see the
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: hour hand moving, but we know they are moving. There's
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: gears inside there. It's moving parts. So he would say, okay,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: close your eyes. Imagine some place that you very much
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: like going to. So the beach for Deb or whatever.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: It's Regent Park for me or something. Some place you
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 1: really like. And you imagine that place and you try
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: to imagine it as vividly as you can. And once
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: you've done that for a bit, you just glance at
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: the watch. Don't look at it intently, but just kind
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: of Look over it slowly and you'll see the minute
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: hand moving. For a brief kind of second, you'll see
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: the minute hand move. If you did it enough, you'd
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: probably see the hour hand kind of move as well.
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: So you've slowed down enough so that actually your perception
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 1: of things has slowed down enough so that you can
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: see things that you usually just see as a blur.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: Now you can see them. It just shows that, you know,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: what we consider our perception of time has a lot
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: to do with our state of consciousness, you know. I
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: think time is a product of consciousness in a certain sense,
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: you know. So, but, I mean, slowing down is the
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: most important thing, I would say.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: You know, you were talking about scrolling on your phone.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 2: I think that scrolling on the phone really interrupts that
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 2: slowing down, you know. I think because your brain can
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 2: just keep speeded up even when you're sitting there doing nothing,
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 2: you know.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. No, no, no. It's the opposite of it
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: because you're constantly looking. looking for the next thing, and
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: it's all outward. I mean, to me, I mean, this
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: is a wonderful thing to use, but like all the
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: internet and all that, I think of it as exteriorized imagination.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: It's become an exteriorized, external kind of imagination kind of thing,
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: or occultists, you talk about the astral light or something,
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: it's kind of an exteriorized version of that. You can
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: get caught up in it. I mean, one of the
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: things about, again, in the magical tradition, the astral light
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: is like you have to watch out for the phantasmagoria
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: or the show, what they call glamour, that you can
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: get caught up in. And you lose yourself in that.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: And you lose your place. And that's the same thing with,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: you know, having people that are addicted to like looking
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: at Like, you know, all the time. And again, it's
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: easy to say this, but when I'm on the tube here,
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: you know, the underground here, and I look and I
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: see everybody. And it looks like someone arranged for them
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: to do that for a photograph session, but it's not.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: Everyone is like that. And I don't know. I hope
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: it doesn't get to the point where if you're not
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: doing that, someone doesn't come around and say, what's wrong?
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: Why aren't you looking at your phone?
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 4: What do you like to do when you're on the tube? I.
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: to sit basically i just basically sit and try to
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: be quiet i take it i try to take advantage
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 1: of being there because there's not much i can do
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: i i used to be able to read on the
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: tube i can't anymore so and i certainly can't look
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 1: at the phone so i just kind of sit you
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 1: know and try not to get impatient.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 2: Which is a which is a thing right you know
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: because there's always like oh yeah yeah like i can
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 2: always go like to all the things i have to
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: do you know when i'm yeah.
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: Oh, no, I agree. Yes, you know you have to
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: do them. The one way I know to deal with
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: that is the old make a list. Exteriorize it, and
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: then it's there. You did that, you did that, you
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: did that, you did that. And again, of those things,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: the thing that you most don't want to do, do
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: that one first.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 3: I used to sit on the subway in New York
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 3: and look at the people. make up stories about them,
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 3: of what they're like and their interactions with a friend
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 3: or a child, and just sort of have a reverie about,
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 3: isn't that nice? Or isn't that looks really too bad
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: and hard?
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: No, certainly. I mean, if people are reading, I tend
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: to try to see what they're reading. I don't want
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: to do it too explicitly because these days it's a bit,
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: you know. No, I'm interested in somebody's reading. Actually, well, yeah. Well,
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: I had one, it's a couple of months ago, but
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: somebody was reading a book and the title had neutrinos
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 1: in it. And I was looking at it and he said,
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: just kind of said, that's an interesting book. And he said,
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: are you a physicist? I said, no, but I know
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: what a neutrino is. And it was just like, it
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: was like, wow, this guy's reading something about all that.
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: So no, there were all those human, those wonderful story.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, everybody has a story. I mean, that's the thing.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you're, you know, that's what Colin Wilson said.
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: He wrote a lot of nonfiction, but he also wrote
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: quite a few novels. And he said when he was
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: a young man, he used to, when he lived in Leicester,
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: which is up in the north in the Midlands here,
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 1: that he would walk around and he'd be like, you know,
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: walk past people's homes and the lights on in the window,
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: what's going on there? Who's that kind of thing? And
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: it's like, it's all stimulus in a way for your
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 1: own imagination to work out these questions. And he said,
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: you know, fiction should be able to work out these
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 1: kinds of Okay, what would it be? This is one
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: of the classic things. It's always easier to write about
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 1: something negative in fiction, to show someone who's struggling, you know, that.
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: And the good Bildungsromans, at the end, the character has
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: come into themselves, but you never find out what happens
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: after that. So the challenge is like, okay, how do
• 1:22:26
  Speaker 1: you present the good life after it? Because usually it's
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 1: not very dramatic because, you know, they lived happily after
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: and the kind of fiction needs that drama of tension
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: and struggle and achieving something. But once you're there, this
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: is kind of difficult to, I mean, Aldous Huxley, one
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: of his last novels, Island, was his attempt to show
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: this kind of, rather than Brave New World, which is
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: this kind of dystopian future society, a more utopian, I
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: forget the, I think it's a Maslowian terms, a sort of,
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: society that nurtures self-actualization and it's a good blueprint but
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: it's a bad novel it's it's just it's it's all
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: a little too goody-goody and isn't everything spiritual so there's
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: a kind of you you lose a certain tension once
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 1: you get to the the the plateau of where you've
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: achieved yeah so i mean that's yeah so it's a
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: kind of i said just in terms of you can
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: write philosophy about i'm just saying just in terms of
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 1: sort of portraying portraying the life like that what what
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: would it be like i mean i guess Like Hesse,
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: Hesse at the end of Siddhartha, I guess that's the
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: probably most famous book of his. You know, the character
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: achieves this unity, achieves this integration, achieves oneness, but that's
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: at the very end of the novel. And for what
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: we know, he's sitting in front of the river now, still.
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: He's still sitting in front of the river, the timeless river,
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: you know.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: Well, maybe at the end of The Building's Roman, the
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 2: main character moves to London and And spends the rest
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: of his life living happily ever after, writing wonderful books.
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, writing wonderful books. I don't know about happily ever
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: after so far. Writing wonderful books, I'll go with that.
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: I'll keep doing that as long as I can.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 4: Fully alive.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: Well, I try to be. Well, I feel like I've
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 1: got more vitality than I have opportunities to do something
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: with it.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 3: And one of our teachers, that was her watchword, is
• 1:24:31
  Speaker 3: for people to be enlivened. Are you enlivened? Sure, there
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 3: are going to be problems and tensions and all the
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 3: rest of it. Oh, yeah. Are we really there? Are
• 1:24:43
  Speaker 3: we present? Are we into it?
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 1: There's the wonderful quote from Wilhelm Reich. He once said
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: to one of his students, I sparkle, do I not?
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: So he was full of the Orgone energy. You know,
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: he was full of... So he was very alive. Jung
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: was one of these people who everyone said he was like,
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: you know, he was like, there. You know, I've always
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: wondered what an encounter between Jung and Gurdjieff would have
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: been like. Because they were both sort of larger-than-life kind
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: of characters.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 4: And they never met, as far as you know?
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: No, they never met... The book I did before, Touched
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 1: by the Presence, is a biography of Morris Nicol, who
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: started out as a Jungian. About 100 years ago, he
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: was Jung's, well, a little bit earlier, he was Jung's
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: British lieutenant. And then he attended a lecture by P.D. Uspensky,
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: who was the Russian writer and philosopher, who at that
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: time had become an expositor of Gurdjieff's system. And he
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: basically wrote Jung a Dear Carl letter and said that,
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: He was changing his allegiances and becoming a student of Gurdjieff.
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: And Jung broke off communications with him. There was a
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: few others who went there, a few others. There was
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: James Jung. There was something called the Psychosynthesis Group in
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: the early 1920s in London. Nichol was part of. And
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: Jung talked about, he used that. that term, but Roberto
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: Asagioli kind of started the whole system with that, but
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: Jung used that term as well. So it was in
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: that kind of context that when Uspensky turned up in London,
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: that's how the ideas got funneled into people like Niccol
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: and others. But no, Niccol went and he spent about
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: a year at Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: Man in Fontainebleau outside of Paris. Then he became a
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: teacher of the work himself in London. But yeah, they
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: never met. I don't know, it's probably apocryphal, but there's
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: a story that when Freud found out that Nicol had
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 1: left Jung and had joined Gurdjieff, he said, ah, see
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 1: what happens to Jung's followers. You know, they join the gurus.
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 4: That's great. That's great. I can see that.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's the Freud house here. It's just up
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: the road from where I live. And I've given two talks.
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: I had to go to Freud's house twice to talk
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 1: about Jung. I gave two talks about Jung at Freud's place.
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 1: But they recreate his rooms from, what was it, 19...
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: I forget, Gasse, whatever it is in Vienna. And you
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: must know the story of the poltergeist in the bookcase,
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: you know, when Jung visited Freud and they were talking about,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: you know, this stuff and Freud kept saying, oh, it's bosh, it's,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: you know, rubbish, quatch, you know. And, no, it isn't.
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: And he felt his diaphragm getting hot and suddenly there
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: was a, sorry. And then, Troy went like that and
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: he said, and Jung said, that was a catalytic exteriorization phenomena,
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: his long-winded term for a poltergeist. And Freud said, No,
• 1:28:08
  Speaker 1: it wasn't. That was just coincidence. It was not hair doctor.
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: And here's another one. And he made it happen. Jung
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: tells the story, but he says Freud was aghast. And
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: I always think of his mouth opening and the cigar
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 1: falling out or something like that. But at the Freud house,
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: I asked the curator, I said, so the bookcases here,
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: are these the original bookcases from Freud? Freud's place in Vienna.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: He said, yes. I said, is the poltergeist still in there?
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: That's a story. That's just completely untrue or something. Jung
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: made that up.
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 4: That's so funny.
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 2: Like here we are, you know, a hundred and plus,
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: however many years later, and people are still sort of
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 2: arguing that.
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 4: That's great.
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 2: I didn't, yeah, I haven't actually been there, but it's
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 2: definitely on my list.
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 3: So.
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: It's an interesting place. I mean, he only lived there
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: for a year, so 38 to 39. But this area
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: of London, because he lived there, it attracted a lot
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: of Eastern Europeans. So in this part of Hampstead, not
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 1: as much as it was, but say in the 30s
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: and 40s, there was a large sort of Eastern European
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: community around here. I mean, there's the Tavistock Center down
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 1: this way, so it's all psychoanalytic schools and all that. Yes, yes.
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 2: Well, Gary, it's just been so much fun, and I'm
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 2: looking forward to hanging out with you in person in
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 2: December in Switzerland.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: Oh, that would be great. Yeah, that's fantastic. I look
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: forward to it as well.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: So we will link your website, which lists all of
• 1:29:47
  Speaker 2: your books. Is there anything else you want people to
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: know about anything that's upcoming or where they can find you?
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: Well, we talked about the thing in Ascona.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 4: Yeah, if you want to come hang out with us,
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 4: there's still room. So we'll put a link.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: There's a few places left. It looks to be, you know,
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 1: it's going to be a remarkable time there. I'm definitely
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: looking forward to it. And I hope it happens because Galerai,
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: she saw this film one of my sons made about
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: the book Touched by the Presence. He did a short film.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: And she really liked it. And she asked, he asked,
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: you know, because he's done other things. I mean, he's
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: a classical violinist, but he's also a budding sceniste. And
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: he does, you know, professional recording things. And he put
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: up some things online. And she asked if he'd be
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 1: interested in recording the event down in Ascona. So they're
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: talking to each other. So I hope that happens. That's
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: really cool. When he was young, we went there. So
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: when he was quite young, we took holidays there a
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: couple of times. So it would be an interesting experience.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: thing to go there when he's 20 years older and
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: in a you know in the winter not in the
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: summer so.
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 2: So thank you so much for coming on and absolutely
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 2: my pleasure we we can't wait to read the new
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 2: book that's coming out next year.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 1: Well thank you for inviting me on and i look
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: forward to doing again.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 2: Sometime yes that would be wonderful thanks for listening to
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 2: submit a dream suggest an episode topic or join our
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 2: mailing list visit our website thisunionlife.com. If you enjoyed this episode,
• 1:31:27
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