Gordon White | Ani.Mystic, The Living Cosmos, & Universal Agency

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01:38 In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times. You're from 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire! For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a fresh conversation. I'm Greg Carlwood These are The Hireside Chats Once again, it's the end of the world as we know it but I feel fine. From sunny San Diego, I'm Greg Carlwood and with many mysteries still plaguing the minds of curious after many moons maybe its our minds that need to be reexamined further for answers rather than the phenomena themselves

02:21 Because, after decades of inquiry it doesn't seem that the West has gotten much closer to understanding abductions, UFOs, precognitive dreams, spirit conjuring, near-death experiences, psychedelics, synchronicity, telepathy, remote viewing, astral travel or anything outside of the preapproved box. But the persistent attitude that if we just apply our superior Western logic harder these mysteries will eventually submit still remains a mainstay of even much of the alternative world Well, as the great Gordon White says in his new book Animistic Encounters with the Living Cosmos...

03:13 Perhaps the thought processes that ooze out of Western life have us thinking that we're looking at some complex paranormal equation that just needs to be solved, when really we're looking at something more like dark spots on a map that we just need to let fill themselves back in. The case is certainly well made in Animistic, a written word whirlwind of Gordon's wizarding adventures in the old world prior to Viruspunk. And each story and experience works to build the animistic worldview and constantly catch the reader from falling back into the ol' empirical patterns We all know Gordon well as the reigning champion of THC appearances with this being lucky number 15 if my count is correct

03:51 From Gnosticism and alien ghosts to permaculture and pig-chimp hybrids, we have talked about it all. And it is a real pleasure to have him back to get into this latest book the animistic idea seeder certified shamanic healer and Vesuki sky dragon summoner The Tasmanian Devil himself my friend in yours Gordon good to have you back It's good to be back Greg do you spend more time on my intros than others? I have too because it's just hard to be creative at this point Running out of shit But, you know that's just another day at the office for me. I keep expecting them to be a three out of five and going like what was left? No well done indeed good to be back! I appreciate that yes and as expected i really liked animistic which has such a great title too by the way

04:37 But as the intro goes, it seems fair to say that this is a book that is something like a book about how to think and how insidious Western modes of thought have been. And then if we look inward for answers to some of these mysteries and just shed our mental baggage will get a lot further but it's your book How would you frame it up? Yeah, that when I sat down to write it sort of faced with the let's call it like the iconic carnival mirror maze, right? Where it's like okay so how do you and we were talking about this before you hit record. How do you write a definitive book about how the production of books is not in fact a divinitive way of conveying information in a more kind of inclusive or dare I say multi-polar world right like the book and the creation of a book comes down to us through this very specific line

05:35 of a culture that literally built itself around the idea that one book is true and the rest of them aren't. And then it had an enlightenment, and devolution into scientific materialism. So all the places in the world to try to convey something like truth we ended up with this my way or the highway absolute truth model and to critique it The only thing...the only way we know how to critique it is to do like the things that you're trying to critique, to say like I must write a definitive book about how we cannot say definitive things because that's sort of part of the problem. So you get caught in these loops and that's why the book is so which was sort of mentioned it's a bit of an Indiana Jones Lara Croft if you prefer adventure And that's because it needs to be In relation to place and in relation to individual experiences Because you have to relativize rather than

06:30 make world-spanning statements to get the book to kind of be an exploration of the shortcomings of world spanning statements in books. So there's this kinda like infinite loop in it, which I think we've mostly accomplished? So that was kinda what I sat down to do and with the most fascinating experience because you had The way the book is put together is itself part of the experience of the book, which I know sounds like crazy. And maybe it is crazy! It is you can just read it like a normal book for people listening. You can get from the beginning to the end but it is a follow on without being a sequel to Starships.

07:13 I'm developing a dot trilogy. So the first book is called Star Dot Ships because it's portmanteau and play on stars and star ships, and human navigation. And the same thing is in play. The ani is a bit of a wink back to star ships because that's papyrus of ani. And so ani dot mystic, it's also any mystic or all mystics if you stick it together and you get animist, animistic right? So even at the level title reading the book hopefully takes you on that sort of relational journey. That's the story of the book or the beginning of the book. Nice, nice! Yes deep and layered branding is something I definitely appreciate and there are just so many interesting little threads about the ways we think and one of them that stuck out to me is the idea of wiping the slate clean and getting a fresh start and this is something that if I have conversations with anarchists

08:11 They tend to kind of want to have this kind of reset and that's just never really been the case everything is a continuum. And even if something collapses the people who build the new will have experienced the collapse and so they're colored by it it's just a weird western way of thinking that, if we can just get a blank canvas then I can paint my masterpiece of utopia and then everything would be fine but that never really comes No, and this is so many books in the kind of like magic world. And mine is no different have to do a sort of critique of the Enlightenment and that's that sort of moment in European history where we sort of invent the past because what we do in The Enlightenment is declare that everything that came before The Enlightenment

08:57 is superstition. And so the story of history has been this story of kind of getting cleverer and cleverer from a state of being stupid to the Enlightenment, which is where we discover that science is correct and from that moment on the rest of the future is this ever improving and ever ensmartening march into a better and better and more scientifically understood world now that is, and there have been plenty of famous 20th and 21st century thinkers like Bruno Latour who said this is a dumb idea. Right? Like we actually it's branding speaking off. It's an ad campaign for scientific thought to say everyone who isn't me that came before isn't as good. And the only thing that gets better is via this scientific understanding

09:47 And what Bruno Latour famously said is, we've never been modern. Like this is the idea that in the Enlightenment we stepped from superstition into modernity and from that point on we just like science our way into this ever-glorious future and this isn't the erasure of everything that came before and it's just branding because as you say it is impossible but what it allows you to do is gives you a moral justification for moving out into a world that you think of as lesser and have no value. So literally expanding from Europe around the world to cultures that are by definition behind you and declined, and in superstition because you have literally the enlightenment, you have the light

10:30 And so no one listening to this show would think that now. They're like, well no we all know this is a dumb and kind of racist idea and it turned into empires in the global slave trade and all the rest of it. We know that very good except what the book seeks to bring to the reader's awareness which I don't want to explain or change people's minds but its just that is, that's all good. You are still operating because of how we've been trained and taught and so on. You're actually still operating in that modality, that framework of understanding things like the past and meaning until you decide not to go in that journey. And the trick with that bit – hence why the book has a bit of an infinite loop there – The trick with that is that the framework of understanding that we inherited in this kind of imperial enlightenment sense

11:19 isn't good at all in learning from other cultures and learning from other life ways. So you have to do this, like double jump which is to recognize that how we see the past and the future and meaning making as something that came down to us with very specific political goals. You have to recognize that most people will get there but then it's the steps of like okay cool but these are the only things I have that will allow me to attempt to transform that thinking. So the quest for what other techniques that are available to us, kind of like downstream from the enlightenment so that we can learn better from other life ways because again this process over the last couple of centuries with disciplines in the 19th century like anthropology and then eventually archaeology showed up to non-European worlds with this

12:16 idea that the only things that are true with this kind of like 19th century scientific idea, and that comes with this notion of the past and so on. So when we even try to learn from other people, we learn in a way that just reinforces the framework we're trying to get out of. And so animistic is the quest and exploration for ways that are available to anyone who want to kind of like attempt that journey. And it's why the word animism is kind of implied in there, because I think that's probably the most dangerous word in academia for a lot of right reasons. I like it! Well said. Yeah thanks for saying that before you get to the next question because as we mentioned before hitting record... Of course Greg you are the first interviewer I'd ever do for this book but because of that

13:03 I mean, I handed this book in the manuscript in like 11 months ago at this point. So let's see how specific the questions are but the point is I'm describing the book fresh and I'm hoping it's landing Yes, I think it is and I'm going to do my best with dad brain but it happens to the best of us And when we have talked about animism before you gave an example in a previous interview of ours that if a banana wants to go to space it would need to make itself appeal to humans and i just really like these twists of logic and its big part of thinking, all aspects of the ecosystem as alive and spirited this is a few different quotes strung together to further make the point but you write

13:47 Within indigenous knowledge systems, so-called invasive plants and animals are viewed as nations in their own right. Materialist naturalism prefers to explain why a certain species has arrived but traditional custodians seek to build relationships with them And why do you belong in the U.S., but the kudzu vine doesn't? Here we come to a crucial difference between materialist naturalism and animism. For animists, non-human persons have retained their agency. It is becoming clearer and clearer even to mainstream biology that the location of a plant when it was first described by a European has little scientific value or meaning. While there have certainly been some losses the simple arithmetic demonstrates

14:31 that the country is significantly more biodiverse as a result of the presence of humans, yet the majority of scientists still treat human impacts as external drivers of change and almost always negative change rather than integral parts of a system. And that is just an amalgam of things that I thought were great points to give agency back to the non-human world and drive home that humans are part of this system, not separate overseen managers of it. Good stuff man! Yeah so if you think about conservation as an idea which again began in the 19th century it requires

15:14 a European mode of thought that separates humans and the human world as something apart from nature and the natural world. And this is that imperial notion I was talking about before, where it was politically necessary to think of The Americas and Aboriginal Australia as pristine because If you had to kind of legally or morally entangle with the idea that in fact there are humans who have been there for millennia and you are taking their homes, The Imperial Project would hit some bumps that it otherwise didn't. And so we have this idea of human culture as something separate from nature but crucially

15:54 Out of that developed the idea of nature as some sort of delicate, fainting white woman that needed our protection. Our conservation and so we still use those terms today. We refer to things like a delicate balance but that's actually not a good description of how the more than human world interacts with us. The more-than-human world can weeds growing over, slag heaps and giant humbled squid invading up the coast of California. I'm using invading deliberately here because out of this world of maps and what is clean and what is human or is not we have this discipline of invasion biology which is plainly racist if you applied it to humans you get the idea that people should go back where they came from

16:43 And not just that, but there's this line where it's like, OK. Anything... Where everything was in the year 1880 let's just pick or 1888 for back to the future reasons, but it literally mid-to-the late 19th century. Everything that Europeans wherever they encountered for the first time around then is where stuff belongs And anything that moves at that point is wrong. Humans, plants the rest of it and indeed many people know this already but the world's wildlife foundation all these kind of early 20th century conservation movements were eugenic The WWF wanted... The guy who founded it was a eugenicist and depopulationist in the rest of them so all the kinds

17:22 The people we're dealing with today, and it's no surprise that they're using the kind of Greta version of climate change as their cloak. It's the same ideology And it comes out of this idea that humans are not just separate from nature, but nature is this 19th century zoo where everything is in its exact little right place. And if anything moves, that's wrong now, if we look at the most studied example of how this isn't the case is the United States because probably China has more now, but like up until then, it had the most biologists And so there have certainly been species loss in the continental United States since European contact. But on balance and in places like Florida that are most studied, there's been sort of two dozen guaranteed extinctions and sort of like one-and-a-half thousand introductions. So the total biodiversity has increased now does that mean this is not the same as to say humans? It's no drill baby drill. This isn't to say that humans are living right

18:22 But what it is saying is this kind of weird 19th century invasion idea that this little plant belongs over there and that one goes over there, and they are such a thing as weeds comes out of this idea of the world as separate from us and fixed. This is the difference, the key difference between animism and say what I'm calling materialist naturalism for reasons that we can maybe get to but let's just say the imperial worldview When did nature stop, is a question you ask. When did nature finish? Because according to the cosmology we were born into that point was sometime around 1885 right that was basically when nature finished and then after that anything that changed is not good and we should bring it back to whatever that is And you can tell an invasion biologist this and they'll say no that's not what it is

19:12 Where is the model for understanding, especially as we move in like we're not living right on the planet? Whatever people think of climate change and blah blah blah. And it's used for an agenda and so on. We're not living right on the planet. And yet this framework of a fixed nature that we are separate from is being used to kind of further the agenda that got us here in the first place. Right. So we're pivoting from our virus narrative to in between this war one to the climate change one And the same kind of technocratic techniques of control and separation and a hatred of life, which we apparently use to defeat a virus will be used to battle climate change unless you are flying on private jets inside Europe because they will not be taxed with the same carbon tax as others. And same thing for Wagyu. So this idea of a fixed nature as something separate to humanity

20:10 is empire, and we're sort of still in the effects of it. And even the people who... I mean presumably those listening to a show like this are far more interested in ecological diversity than the rest of it. Even how we think with these ideas needs to be played with because we can kind of help in the wrong direction, I guess. Well said! Yes And for all that is good and holy don't tax my way goop please Klaus yeah exactly well let's talk about Marcus met a pharaoh and the story of the pa because this seems to be a great example of how to work with a living cosmos. And it was pretty good match for feel the dreams in the logic in that movie

20:51 Yeah, I can see that. Once you allow spirits to be real then a lot more stuff becomes communal as in a communal act as in thinking building and so on and that's kind of key difference with how we create things comes out of this European theory of mind right which is that your mind is trapped inside your head and the thoughts just appear there unattached to anything else And if you are say an architect or an author or what have you You have a thought And then you impose that thought, you have that thought unattached to any kind of other meaning or idea. Then you impose that though on the world in a form of painting or book or building and this is weird because even if you think which is dumb but even if you think that's how thoughts happen

21:38 A thought isn't something you have, thinking is something you do. And you do it in the context of like you may be in a cafe, you may have had a fight with your lover the night before, you maybe on site wherever you're doing it's already a communal act and once you allow or understand that spirits are some kind of real and so are thoughts then this process opens up and becomes the communal activity that it is everywhere else and I would argue is in fact the case Marcus Matafaro Lloyd is a friend of mine who is in New Zealand and I think it's chapter two from memory, I want to say. Yes! But he's an Ngā Ariki Kaiputahi member so it's in the southeast of the North Island where his ancestral lands are. And ancestral is one of those funny words because they do still live there and they lived here in relation to the dead. Before all the restrictions started literally couple months beforehand, I took some rooms with premium members

22:36 to spend a few days at the Pa site and kind of the meeting land with Matawhero. And the story of what he did, so a pa is like a Maori fort that's the closest it's going to be. It's like a hillfort that you live in right? And so where they lived at the time, Matawhero and his family was sort of next to on this hill beside the sort of sacred Mangatu River. They lived in normal modern kind of well normal Maori accommodation, which is to say there's like a meeting house and all this kind of thing. But anyway, halfway up the hill is the past site for his family and his tribe from the 19th century, which was obviously no longer occupied by living humans. And he worked in Auckland we actually encountered each other in Auckland media many years ago, which has been one of those funny loops

23:30 And he came back to the ancestral lands and for six months, he spent sitting out there looking down. It's this beautiful spot actually in the bend of the river up on the hill looking down at the old past site which just looked like mounds in the grass because that's all it was after 100 years of being abandoned and he sat there With his thoughts and with ancestors, deciding whether or how one could bring this site long abandoned by living humans kind of... This is the trouble. We say like restore it but it didn't go anywhere when we say we restore something It means it's fallen away but in a living universe it's become a place of the dead so it was never not his family's land it was never not his family's par it's just that humans didn't live in

24:14 And so how do you, even understanding something like history? How do you bring back... and this is so crucial because we do things like just cut the grass around a ruined church in England or something. But it's a ruin at that point but these things aren't ruined in a living universe. So he spent six months grappling with these ideas and kind of got to go ahead from his ancestors to what I describe as bringing back into a living context rather than restoring And so you start cutting the grass, you start excavating things all of his own bat with his own money. But more importantly in the process of doing this ideas would come to him about oh this should go here or he'd have spirits or thoughts or whatever you want to call them in his head say in this fareh like this house build a pit of these dimensions and put hot rocks in it and then use a certain kind of local plant

25:08 So they basically told him, in this whare build a sacred steam system. Right? Like you put the plants in and the hot rocks and you get in there and you sort of smoke it out. And he's like that's a bit weird because he was unaware if there was any kind of like sacred steam shall we say technology in Māoridom. Then one of his cousins who is a Māori historian was visiting And he was showing him that and he's like, oh we actually used to do that. That's a thing it's called blah I forget what the word is so Marcus was finding stuff over the course of the doing of the restoring He was getting information that we as humans didn't know at the time but subsequently turned out to be correct So what happens there is this is the difference between restoration and kind of like bringing back into context There's a way of being in a way of thinking

26:01 which we have corollaries for in kind of like Western thought, hence the book. That allows for the dead to be back with us and what happens when you operate from the perspective of a living universe gives you very different outcomes than if you operate from the perspective of a not living universe, where instead of bringing back into context like if this was a government heritage project it wouldn't have been rebuilt in a living sense. It would have been cordoned off and little signs saying this is how they used to live would have been put next to things and it would have fixed it in the past but it's not in the past. It's a place of the dead and the dead are with us and this is such a fundamental difference that

26:43 In the book, you can kind of track there are measurable outcomes from what we would call archaeology and restoration if they come from a place of living universe rather than not. Yes and great points I like the stuff you say about ruins in the book which is you know kinda what you're talking about now is the west sees something that was destroyed or abandoned and we say that's a ruin and we put the police tape around it can't just say don't touch it, add doesn't really even make much sense you know whatever than being in a continuum and alive yeah.

27:21 But obviously, Westerners don't do a lot of deep listening the way Marcus did. How would we better know if we were offending the local dead or some guardian spirits on some land we purchased without knowing much about it? Or its history? It's easy to see why that's an important story and how this process works in his situation but it's harder to apply these things to our individual situations especially in such a crowded industrial society Yeah, it is. That's correct. It is more challenging and differently challenging the difference being that we typically people will know I mean obviously RuneSoup has a premium membership where people can learn magic and we do Q&A's in the rest of it People send in questions if they're new to magic that something like I think my house is haunted

28:11 And unless that person, and this is an even more fraught area of discussion. But unless that person is like mentally ill then if you're kind of feeling something... This comes back to what was happening with Marcus as he was excavating Disfare and being told by his own thoughts whatever that means to put in the stone steam system If these thoughts arise in the doing of something, this comes back to the thinking as a communal process. You probably do have a haunted house is where I'm going with that. The challenge isn't like Do I know how to do this? I would argue that all humans do we have to unlearn the idea that it's not true or that thoughts are like ephemeral and sort of like outgassings of a physical brain. Once you get properly past that, you're situated in... And a lot of people resist it for this reason and for good reason when you step into a living universe particularly in a Western context — there is a big part of my book about how I live in Tasmania — You suddenly realize, whoa! There's like a haunted way of talking about things

29:16 are maybe understandably ripe for critique, like when you talk about privilege and identitarianism and so on. These are artificial machine way of attempting to describe something that is in fact true which is that we have this uneven inertia of crimes and positive developments that by nature of just being human, kind of flow into us and into our descendants. It's one of the reasons Cloud Atlas is one of my favorite movies because it's by each crime in every kindness do we birth our future which is a better way than just like pointing at people and saying privilege is like well hang on

29:54 We're in the flow of a living universe and some real bad shit happened. And how am I in relation to that? Yeah, you know, I think reading this book has helped me with the whole idea of not hearing the spirits because I think I've just been expecting it to be bolder and louder based on some other stories I hear like Dr. Stephen Skinner's story and that kind of thing but maybe I'm not listening to the subtle signs well enough or expecting something distinct from my thoughts, quote unquote. Like these thoughts are mine. These are consistent with my kind of logic and my personality and I'm looking for something that comes in that is so clearly not. And maybe the flaw is while those other thoughts aren't really yours, quote unquote either."

30:42 Correct. And this is that sort of fundamental hard problem of consciousness where we don't have a good materialist, even a valid materialist definition or framework for understanding thoughts in general, not even like predictive thoughts about the future or anything kind of cool like that. But literally thoughts and that's kinda like 20th century stuff where there is no interiority of the molecules of the brain and so the idea saying that like thoughts are electrochemical processes in the brain I'm like that's a just-so story which by the way is an imperial invention

31:20 There's no way inside that at all. So, and it doesn't mean that every thought is a spirit of course and Aboriginal Australia has really good particularly when it comes to dreams frameworks of understanding basically everyone but us does because they didn't decide thoughts were fake right? Where you can kind of have big dreams or little dreams and a human being as a spirit is a being that is capable of generating dreams hence little dreams But you can also have big dreams, which is to say dream encounters with thought beings or spirits. And our easiest and most available invitational way into this idea because the whole kind of point of the book is

32:03 In the 20th century, when we realized that there were shortcomings in like the European theory of mind and framework of nature and all the rest of it. We did things that were with the best will in the world not great in retrospect as we got a lot of cultural appropriation and like oh the Western world shit I'm going to be a Cherokee medicine woman and it's well you probably aren't it's probably not it's probably a bit gross And that's part of that same sort of extractive imperial process. You understand the impulse, you understand the impulse of the drive to recognize that the universe is alive again and the point of the book is that we actually have available to us in a dare I say non-problematic way thinkers and modes being and modes of thought they can get us into that quote unquote something like

32:52 approach of like non-Western life ways. And the main one would, of course be Jung right in the 20th century, The 20th century's best wizard and in particular what he admittedly did call his descent into madness but the creation of his Red Book. And so he would kind of drop into his own thoughts and have this process called active imagination when he'd do it. And the thoughts that he would encounter in there were like Old Testament prophets and these beings like Enoch told him you think where in your head we predate you. Basically, this is an interface and they sort of use the metaphor of the forest for it so we have something like which is this term we might touch on in a minute stuff that is something like what happened to Marcus? What happens in the Amazon? What happens with an Aboriginal Australian understanding of how dream works? So we're in this situation where

33:47 there is an understandable dissatisfaction with, even like it's just untenable to live with this theory of mind we've inherited and the way of being that is deeply destructive to human happiness and the so-called environment. And the rest of it. It's a question of what are the things? How does one get out of that or where does one go instead? The jumping out of it into... You can't declare yourself unless you literally marry into the tribe and so on. declare yourself a Shuar medicine man or something, right? Because you find in the Shuar cosmovision something that's a better match for your own lived experience and what have you. And so the book is this exploration of the idea that animism doesn't exist outside Western thought like it's literally a category we invented in the 19th century to describe

34:37 And this always reminds me, and I couldn't put it in the book this way. But it always reminds me of the Skinner meme like no, it is the children who are wrong. There's just something super hilarious that we invented this term to describe brown people who we decided couldn't tell the difference between thoughts and reality or dreams and reality when in fact with the benefit of 150 years later, it turns out that their theory mind was a better match for parapsychology, psi results remote viewing after death contact, all the rest of this stuff that we've had to kind of build out and like agglomerate onto this faulty theory of mind. Because we decided all that stuff was not true and then it starts to happen. And the book is a journey back to well why did we start using this terrible A word? In fact

35:25 One of the stories that's not in the book, when I was up in Sydney at the State Library working on it and I was talking to one of the Indigenous curators out there. He said what is your book about? And I'm like, I am writing a book about animism and he sort of why! It was really good discussion because you know we don't use that word. Yes I do but thank you for reminding me that actually need to make that explicit at the beginning, that the term is pejorative. The term is something we use to describe what we consider to be kind of like superstitious relic cultures that are before that enlightenment moment and that whole thinking itself as part of the know it's the children who are wrong and so the word is dangerous in electrifying because it's almost like

36:13 You have to come to terms with it, to stop using it. But like the only way out is through and that's why I sort of sat with what the future... What the book after Starships was going to be because Starships is like a story about how we've got the past wrong and then this one's a story about how we got the present wrong so no spoilers on what the third books gonna be about you can probably work that out And thats kind of where the thinking is Yeah man It is worth noting that that is considered a condescending term outside of the West, but conspiracy theorist is also a demeaning term. Totally! We can reclaim terms if we want to adopt them and transmutate them to use provocative- Well so we have to stay with terms that still have energy

37:02 And I mean that in a psychological sense, why does this term still have energy? Why does it make change because it's not done with its process yet. And conspiracy theorist is one of those terms like, why is that electrifying? Not just for us. Although maybe not for us but staying with the trouble like this term still has more work to do and this is a real big difference between stepping into dare I say an animus world out of a machine world is you and humans aren't the only things that have agency. So it's sort of like, why is this term so powerful now? And the same thing with atomism, even in Western esotericism over the last 40 or 50 years, it's really only been in the last, and I'm partially to blame for it...

37:49 six or seven years that it started to have currency and cachet again. People would use terms like pagan or, I don't know, idealist or whatever before but the term has come back and it's a dangerous term and it's a term from like...I mean depending on how you feel about the world and so on but we were never more racist as a society than we were let's say in the mid 1800s America is still having literal slavery, but how we knew things about the world was never in human history more racist. And that's where this term comes from and for it to come back and still be invitational and hypnotic in a way that I think the people who identify with it can't fully articulate means this term has work to do. And I think it's to do with that. How did we come to this term in the first place? That's kind of part of the story of the book, I think

38:42 Yes so true and on the subject of thoughts i like this quote that you include from david lynch for you say in catching the big fish david lynch writes about the process of asking your ideas what to do next if you stay true to the idea it tells you everything you need to know really just keep working to make it look like that idea looked, feel like it felt sound like it sounded and be the way it was. And it's weird because when you veer off you sort of know it. You know when you're doing something that is not correct because it feels incorrect and that resonated with me a lot because it does feel like the story of how The Hireside Chat found its footing I wouldn't bring this up if it was anyone else cuz it's just such a personal thing here but

39:28 But I have that well-worn story of doing mushrooms with comedians at the comedy store condo and having a quote unquote bad trip which caused me to pivot towards what THC is today, and leave the comedians alone to do their own thing. And i have said that the mushroom told me that but when i reflect on it now It really did feel like the spirit of the higher side chats itself saying, you're not doing me right. And the mushrooms are kind of what allowed me to hear that rather than the thing that told me it I don't know maybe that's a more accurate description or such a subtle thing that it doesn't matter much but to me it was profound. No, it's excellent and it's a really good and essential distinction because it was in conversation with the mushroom that you encountered

40:15 And so it's funny, you're talking about Mataferro's PA project going back to New Zealand as being Field of Dreams. What isn't Field of Dreams? Right? That's sort of the point not everything is but all these projects are and I'm sure it can be frustrating for people who attempt to assist you in the high side chats journey whether its long suffering better halves or whoever like web developers and so on that it's very difficult give something like a five-year plan, because it's like this isn't how this works. Like we don't have language for how this works because we don't think how this works is real but it is! It's the only thing that's real and so thinking is being with thoughts. It is an active process right? And so what we call animism is an academic attempt to encounter other ways of thinking

41:12 And there's a really cool, Graham Townsley. And this is about shamanism like Yaminahua Shamanism specifically let's just not split those hairs and say it's about animism in the book he says shamanism is an ensemble or an assembly of techniques for knowing so shamanism isn't a collection of ideas that are known that are understood So Catholicism has catechisms Catholicism is God as Trinity and the church and all that kind of stuff. Like it literally has its Nicene Creed, it's like this do be Catholic so it's a collection of ideas. Shamanism Yamanaho shamanism was an assembly of techniques or an ensemble of techniques for knowing So that is dadari or deep listening. So another way of saying that is

41:57 Shamanism is paying attention to your thoughts when you are encountering certain plants and what comes up, because what comes up has some kind of relevance. And it is also a capacity to taste which plants would be poisonous and which ones aren't. So we think like so what is animism then? What is shamanism? It's an assemblage of techniques for knowing rather than a collection of ideas. We want it to be Catholicist. Oh, there's like an upper world and a middle world in the lower world. And we have sky spirits and we have this." That's what's found at the end of some animisms right? And that's the kind of pivot in the book because when you realize that it's a assembly of techniques for knowing then your process of how you co-create and are custodian to higher side chats

42:49 It's clearer now. It's not even like, sorry it's kind of my weird process I'm a bit of a stoner and don't really think about a three year plan any of that stuff is not right because actually you do know but you don't know it with thinking the direction this stuff has to go. Yeah, that's true! And so after reading your book i actually tried to apply deep listening and listening to ideas to our interview itself knowing it was coming up and I treated the book in the cosmos like living beings and before falling asleep asked what ideas in it are the best focus on when we talk

43:30 And with a baby of course I'm waking up five times tonight so i'm getting a lot of time in that half awake half asleep state which is where these things are loudest they say and the loudest phrase in my head was technology is habitat. It was screaming at me basically but elaborate on that phrase and how it could apply to some other things we like to talk about like even ufo's Well, yeah. Cause I could hear some of that thinking in your questions to the good Richard Dolan in a recent episode when this one was coming out. So technology is habitat is an event that myself and Diana Walsh-Basilko who wrote American Cosmic had at the Guggenheim in whatever that was 2019? Yeah end of 2019. And it emerged from some discussions in The Jungle during my first dieta

44:24 on Ayahuasca and there were people there who kind of like could arrange funding and work with the Guggenheim and all the rest of it. And we were trying to look for where we can situate a discussion in between, this sort of animism now that we can kinda use that term, that you will encounter in the Amazon and contemporary ufology. And we sorta landed on, cause Diana's book is great, Diana's great This idea that technology is habitat, and this is how Starship sort of flows into animistic. Is that if thoughts are beings then the sort of uneven distribution of novelty and inspiration and new thoughts across a kind of like human timeline takes on a different meaning? And I was always...I mean the TimeWave Zero stuff that Terrence McKenna came up with isn't right at all except for the fact that he looked and could see that the uneven distribution of novelty

45:19 when it comes to technological complexity on planet Earth is weird. And in particular, from sort of like the 1820s to this dramatic increase to the late 20th century when he was still alive you look at and go that is unprecedented! So what's going on there? The story of starships is that there are thought beings that for whatever reason and we don't know are trying to get us into space as fast as possible And we get closer and closer to that, the more we entangle our consciousness with stars and sky countries. Everyone who listens to High Side Chats would be aware of the sort of Crowleyan influence on the 20th century American space program. I know you were talking to Richard about similar esoteric ideas being involved in the development of the Soviet space program and so on. You find for whatever reason, and literally we don't know this idea that

46:12 these thoughts or these beings of inspiration have agendas that are their own. And we're kind of, I don't necessarily think it's a trap. I think it's more nuanced than that. And so with Technologies Habitat, we kinda looked at the idea that the more the technological complexity develops along certain directions, the more kind of beings we become aware of or come into relation with right? And this we've kind of had an uneasy understanding of technology and its risk from the very beginning of time. So even the story of the apple in The Garden Of Eden is a technological one in it's own way, right? Because you make a fundamental change that alters your perception but I think the best one for the West is that the Greeks did have

47:01 a mode of thinking called technet, which was like an entirely separate mode of thinking. And I have in pieces debate with one of my other books if you do kind of like a survey of creation myths around the world of how humans came to be and it came to have their status It's technologically based. We're given things by the spirits at the end of, like, The Campfire's Edge another presentation I did that alters our relationality to the rest of the cosmos so we might be given hunting technology or something falls from heaven that changes how we can do things and all of a sudden we have metallurgy in what is now the Christian tradition but was obviously Jewish to start with and we have the earlier versions of where

47:44 Technology and evil and misfortune came into the world in the same series of contact events, which is of course the story in Enoch famously. But like the story of The Watchers and their sort of entangling with The Daughters Of Man but basically sky beings teaching us stuff sometimes in exchange for sex? When you hear a story like that what is actually happening is a way of saying that this process of delivering technology and ideas and all the rest of it is relational, and it changes us. And we get further and further into relation with these kinds of beings right? So consider that The Watch has taught the Daughters of Man the skills witchcraft so like let's say herb lore which means The Watch has taught the daughters how to

48:30 procure and use entheogens, which are used to communicate with beings like this. And so technology as habitat is kind of widening that out to this idea that once you allow for some thoughts to be some kind of being then the development isn't even the right word. The ongoing relationship of humans and technology becomes certainly more interesting and certainly more fraught I know you're talking to Richard about this, that is there some sense? Maybe I agree with you. I don't think greys are future humans but is there something and it's not just Terence who thought this idea that the UFO was a transcendental object at the end of time. You have Uri Geller thinking believing that he was in contact with a human-made supercomputer in the future who's kind of like guiding development all of these

49:21 Attempts to understand are a way of saying like, there is something about our thoughts when it comes to technology that is pulling us into a specific kind of future. And at this point in the timeline and I don't think it reduces to good or bad but at this point in the timeline we don't actually you just have to sit with that. You just have to sit with once you realize that some thoughts are beings more stuff is going on Yeah, I find this stuff super interesting. Just kind of like the example of the Watchers and Herbology There's another little anecdote, like we've talked about John Dee and the Angels a thousand times but what gets missed that you point out in the book is that apparently Uriel gave John Dee a crystal. And that is what set all those things in motion is that it was given to him like this technology was given them and just makes me think about even Tesla apparently has this story of hearing something that seemed to be calling them

50:22 Maybe it is just as simple as you say, something is trying to get us into space and our hierarchical thinking says well we do the summoning. And in reality, we can also be summoned- is actually true too so we should probably reorient ourselves and wonder what's calling us! And particularly if we're going to talk magic like in the West because of our... and you know Grimoire Magic is very powerful and if you do it right it works really well but It is that unidirectional summoning and it relies on the status of a male, but like a human man as the sort of favored creation of God so that even angels will respond when you call them up. Right? So it's built into this idea that will work

51:09 But it's a subset of, shall we say spirit interaction as a field of global study around the planet. And I would say healthier and more robust ones you find this in say the Afro-Caribbean traditions where so very good friend of mine here in Tasmania is Brazilian and part of Candomblé as a result. The spirits will choose who they want to be in kind of like initiated into their governance. And we don't have that, we sort of do, we kind of used to pick patron saints when we would get baptized and so on but if you move from a relational model and all this stuff opens up and gets more interesting but these are really good examples

51:58 prior to the famous metamaterial of the last few years, and that is in there because like Diana and I spoke about it at the Guggenheim. we have a very long history of being given things. And that's literally what, this is kind of like hyper-dimensionally true rather than historically true but the apple is a very good example of that. The proverbial apple is an example of like, we get given things that kind of unspool throughout history and D got given the crystal you will find similar ideas when we think about UFOs and implants So Paul La Folle, I don't think you ever had him on your show. I met him just before he died in London and he had multiple implants that were in his teeth and he had like professional dentists look at it was kind of like that meta material stuff this incredible American artists like one of my favorite ever And he was an experiencer back when it was kinda hokey back when it was kinda like butt stuff and abductions right but he was adamant and he had stuff removed from him But if you think so

52:55 The Aboriginal English term for shaman, this is a simplification but go with me is clever man. So that kind of medicine man medicine woman idea is called the clever men and you find in say some Western Australian I guess, like initiatory or in descriptions of initiatory processes for clever men that they would have crystals installed in them during initiation but also by the spirits themselves. So you actually get implants that are also stones that allow for this kind of communication and Dee was given the same thing so because the book is about comparison and how to do comparison in a way that is non-extractive

53:34 When you drop down, so rather than looking around the world for a collection of shared ideas or claims about reality. You actually look for a collection of doings and so I use this aboriginal academic Tyson Yonker Porter who talks about it and I think I mentioned on this show the difference between products of thought and ways of thinking. And so a product of thought isn't usually universally found around the world and that would be the catechism. So, the products of thought that get you to I believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Church, Trinity blah blah blah

54:11 Those are all products of thought. They come out of a way of thinking, which is a sort of four century encounter with an attempt to build the Bible out of various texts and patristics and so on but there's a way of thinking which is some of these words are true and some of them aren't and I'm going to put the true ones together and that's going to generate thoughts but you drop down to the way of thinking and it looks different Globally, if you do a survey of ways of thinking rather than products of thought. You find the delivery of technology and the use of stones and technology for spirits that's global what we encounter when that happens is a product of thought and that's culturally bound so that's kind of crucial difference I think

54:54 I know, we'll see how the book goes. But it took a magician to attempt comparison on that level because half the time i'm looking for tech and half the time i'm like crystals you say? And where I can kind of approach that with my own sort of experiential understanding of how stone beings might be used in ceremony and it allows a survey on the level of doing that I think reveals something, hopefully. That maybe hasn't been revealed before? Yeah, man. Lots to chew on there but I'm sorry this is kind of you're the first as I said this is the first interview so sorry everyone like if you need to take a breath There's a pause button exactly play it at point eight rather than one point two for once I must try that some yes man but this has been a lot of fun and a couple of points in the whole wrap-up portion of what we do

55:53 You know, I hope to join you both at the farm and in the jungle one day if I ever feel better about international travel restrictions. But on that subject, you are breaking out of the prison colony and your joining Chris Knowles at Miguel Connors Astro Gnosis event in Cancun. You mentioned it but it was in The Plus Show so for everybody's benefit let them know what's happening sounds like a good time. I wish I could swing it but tell people about this and what you call the moth shot actually? Oh yeah! Right. So let's start with the moth shot, because this is funny and people who aren't premium members have been chasing around different shows going like tell me about your experience with Novavax but um Novavax is a non mRNA platform injection I got to be careful with the words in case you want this on your in case we want this on YouTube right? And this is how health works in 2022

56:44 CRISPR is used to modify a moth virus so that it can have the spike protein balls attached to it. If you know, and I'm not this is kind of like the veganism thing please do not come for Greg about where the viruses exist but So that's how its built and then it makes the adjuvant or the thing that agitates you when it gets injected is saponin made from a Chilean tree barks. So I've been joking that it's practically organic It's like moth and tree, right? But it isn't the mRNA platform. So I view it as two doses of poison which the first one has been through and still here and that's to...I can get out a Fortress Australia

57:21 without the shots, but I can't get into Fortress America. Which is basically the only way I can get to Mexico. So it's this sort of funny world for people who are asking apparently its had provisional approval in the US as well and its available in countries like Iran and Indonesia And it has been approved in EU and I think it's available there But I've been calling at the moth shot and we're trying to get moth shot started. I think it's funny. It is. There's clot shot, there's moths shot The product came out so late, and I think this is deliberately. Like Australia actually bought 51 million doses before we had any Pfizer in the country at all. And because as most Western governments appear to work for Pfizer they just held off on approving it until we got to like whatever ludicrous injection level right now like 95%. And the 5% that's left which are a big bunch of my friends down here are like, I'm not getting anything! I'm never getting any of these things. So this shot has showed up where I'm like well what about the moth shot? They're like no you didn't

58:16 What are you not understanding? I'm not getting any. And, actually really respect that. I'm certainly not doing it." I think as with the majority of people who've been injected, I didn't do it because I wanted to. I did it so that I could get to Mexico and like my spirit said this wouldn't kill me. So, I'll stick with that but that's the moth shot story for people who are looking for it and yeah, as from Miguel's event Utterly unrelated. There's a two, three day conference over the Equinox in Playa del Carmen March 20 to 22 if I get the dates right and showing up a couple of days earlier if Joseph and Vladimir don't get in the way of international travel in the next couple weeks

58:59 And should be really fun. Chris Knowles is there, I'll be there. Miguel's always a good time and it's...I forget who the other guests are but i'll be talking on indigenous experiences of time and obviously how that relates to The Stars very looking forward to being out of the country for the first time in two years. There may be other events on that trip that we can kind of wink at there Greg? Yes yes okay! I don't know if we wanted to say it explicitly but it seems like we might I do love the moth shot thing. It's a compromise that is fair and logical in your situation, but your experience has been a little harsher than mine to say the least so we do what we have to do. And it seems like you've done a lot of preparation

59:50 for dealing with a bit of incoming toxification. And one of those things is turpentine, and I actually just recorded an interview with Dr Jennifer Daniels about this very subject so we don't need the full story of it but it would be nice to hear what she had to say reinforced with a positive review if you can give one Sure. I didn't use it in the context of The Moth Shot, but like the other health journey I'm on in the beginning... So I did a month of amongst other things daily turpentine and I've got an infrared sauna now and there's a couple weeks of coffee enemas in there and like beginning of the year full detox stuff. And I will tell you particularly on an empty stomach, I didn't do the sugar thing like she did because I kind of deep dove into Soviet research actually that for the better part of the 20th century

1:00:37 There are different turpentine treatments for like heart complaints, like angina and so on. And the Soviets used it as a cleaner for blood poisoning if you take it on an empty stomach. So build up to the five milliliters she says. And I did that. I did like the first day of one milliliters in the next day five and stayed on five from there. It was fine. And it definitely was that kind of detox experience. I think she's correct don't do it And this is one of the things that coffee enema process help with. Don't do it unless you have three, you can be sure you'll have like three bowel movements a day because it is taking stuff out of your system and moving it through right? So it's a proper detox but yeah I know it sounds crazy

1:01:20 And bear in mind, there are some petroleum based products that are sold as serpentine that aren't deadly and don't drink them. But it's a natural medicine. It's literally basically essential oil of pine and people maybe don't realize that but it's literally a natural medicine. Yes you know, as with anything else, norephrine whatever... In a high enough dose will kill you but she seems to be right about it being a medicine that was available to the slaves, which is a thing that's kind of like evidence free. But she got from her grandparents who knew slaves as in because the family et cetera, et cetera right? And also I've looked at the Merck manual, which you've had Dr Kaufman on before it's in there and it's got dozens of things listed for but it's a potent detox option and yeah, I did it because It was too intriguing not to write them like all right

1:02:08 Let's take this seriously. And yeah, I did a turpentine detox for all of January and I would actually think about it...I used a different process around the moth shot and i'll do the same again right? So I took the horse pills and my daily supplementation looks a lot like with quercetin or whatever looks a lot like remediation suggestions that are over the counter anyway, like I actually have a pretty good supplement regime. So I added some moth shot to it like the day of and a couple of days after and i'm going to do the same thing for the second shot and I also have vasodilators so I took that kind of stuff

1:02:49 that is like an anticoagulant, so it literally prevents the blood from clotting. Because I'm like you know what? The majority of clots deaths are within the first three days after either shot, 70 or so percent of them. So i took anti-clotting medication for those three days even though the moth shots because they don't have mRNA platform haven't caused any clotting in trials but if people are looking at making the decision I made That's some recommendation for you. And I based it on the idea that the horse pills, as far as any of this works they appear to literally neutralize the spike protein which is the pathogenic part of it right? So if I'm putting spike protein in me at the same time as horse pills maybe they'll balance out and

1:03:34 I'm here to tell the tale, so who knows? Yeah. I really think the key if there is some kind of shady agenda in there is probably avoiding the mRNA stuff and have other options it seems like you are just dealing with a little bit toxicity and you can prepare for that. And the body can deal with that. Yeah, like cause everyone has to do that I'm not anti-vax blah blah blah but i tell you what? I almost am after these last two years but speaking of The Jungle like I took... You have to it took the yellow fever shot to get into Peru more specifically you're not allowed back into Australia of course if you've been to the Amazon and you haven't taken your yellow fever shot right so in a similar vein I'm like listen if I was prepared

1:04:14 To do that, I view the must shot to get to Mexico in a similar way. It's certainly everyone and we've been up front about this from the very beginning. Everyone, I believe should be health sovereign and make the decisions you want to make And that was the one I made. Crazy though it may seem. Yes, and uh i'm just glad we could talk about the turpentine thing a little bit because it does have all these crazy warnings on it and not to rehash the entire Dr Jennifer Daniels interview but I heard about that from you Heard her talk about it and then sought out an interview with her. So comes full circle that these two interviews will be back to back nice, and another quick little anecdote with our pediatrician we talked about the vaccine issue. We picked her because of her allowing us to do what we want with the vaccine issue which is ignore it

1:05:04 She said that a lot of parents, they are wishy-washy on it. But then they decide all they want their kids to go to school and here in California obviously there's a whole Rolodex of shots you must get so they get them all together and she has to tell the parents whoa hold on And she has a detox protocol that she tries to get the parents to give to the kids before they do all these shots. And to me I just thought how stupid So you think these shots can be harmful? So you don't give them dear kid But then when your kid is going to kindergarten age, you want to do it all at once. I mean, I guess they're a little bit more built up so they could maybe resist any potential damages but it seems like backwards logic to jam them all together but at least I'm saying that you're not the only one who has a detoxification protocol when administering or taking vaccines

1:05:56 So one of the things that I think Del Bigtree got right, because he's a very optimistic man. But one of the things I think he got right was this process... Because remember, I think it was on your show? No somewhere else there is this thing to him maybe his own when Warp Speed was announced is like this process isn't going to work and it's going to end the vaccine industry which is obviously something he would want or at least make it very optional is probably a fairer thing to say and it didn't in the short term, right? Because we actually watched as Pfizer always does fraudulent safety data and all the rest of it. A complete scam to roll it out and make billions of dollars as it kind of always is but over the longer term I think untold millions of parents around the West are looking at this whole industry differently

1:06:46 And, you know we have to because it's been such especially for people like in Australia or Austria or Canada or wherever. It's been such a god awful couple of years We have to look for like what goods are coming out of this? and one of them is no one I hope is going to look at No one's gonna be terrified into big pharma compliance and quite the same way ever again I think Yes cheers to that! I'm right there with you and hoping that that is the case And so in terms of what you got going on lately it is all about the book animistic but.

1:07:21 But you do also have a new course on protection and malefica, which also flips a lot of perceptions and words regarding what is protection. And what is malefica from different perspectives? Just before we go how would you plug that course because it is all about that recurring revenue in the subscription world. Yeah why thank you yeah One of the kind of funny things that's emerged over the last couple of years is that the premium members vote on a course. And it always ends up being like oddly, the first course of the year we do in every quarter, oddly and creepily predictive. And whilst you can listen to my forecast show with Austin where I say explicitly Ukraine war in Q1 which is happening

1:08:06 It's kind of interesting that we're talking about protection and almost like magical attack at a time when protection is both personally and globally front of mind. And it's one of those weird kind of unconscious things, part of it is my fault because I put those two courses together as a part of there's two words together so as a part of the voting thing I kind of have a short list based on what everyone's kind of voted on in the previous thing and protection magic kept coming up and malefica and curse work kept coming up and I'm like they're sort of in my head The One Course So we stuck them together then we stuck them together to allow... It has been fun to go on this journey with people

1:08:44 Those who are in the magical world who will say, I will literally never do malefica. So I'm just going to do the protection part and not the other is to get people to understand or sit with the idea that maybe counter magic is its own kind of like, Is there a way you can avoid it? This kind of comes back to this spinach trying to kill you. Is there a way you can avoid like his protection magical reversal magic right? Like sending bad magic back away from you? Are you cursing someone when you do that?" And it's, if you actually again if you look around the world outside of the West. The answer is often a yes and that doesn't mean do it but there does mean there's a really interesting philosophical and metaphysical journey for people to go on whether they do magic or not about what you think the difference between protection and malefica is because it's all about like being in the world It's all about taking up space and it's been really really fun and so far so good people have been really enjoying

1:09:36 Yeah, it seems really synergistic with the new book for sure. And just a wild thought but I wonder if I could ask the egregore of the higher side chats that I seem to have helped nourish to court guests that I can't seem to court on my own from the other side? Yeah, that's a good idea. Yeah, I'm gonna think on that for sure. But yes man well always a pleasure you really did kill it with the book cheers to the road ahead i wish i could join you in Cancun but maybe i'll see you in Austin Texas Maybe Alright man take care Thanks very much And boom goes the dynamite! You know I love having Gordon here and today was no exception

1:10:28 I learned a lot from his latest book. It got me thinking about so many things differently, but we recorded this last week and just the other day he dropped a presentation slash podcast episode called Advice for Professional Astrologers During an Apocalypse it's about two hours and anyone who wants more Gordon should check that out right away You can even think of it as an extension to this by pretending it starts with me asking, so how would you frame up the context around this Ukraine situation? Because we know that when we see this sort of coordination and full court press from every cultural figure of the West. And this weird corporate virtue pile on of canceling Russia something is up

1:11:18 Because that is largely what his presentation is about. And I think a THC audience is smart enough to know that the media, politicians and cultural mouthpieces who all synced up their lies about COVID over the last two years are not now giving us the truth about the Russia and Ukraine thing at a base level we should be able to say that right? Well, there's an interview with Russian expert Gilbert Doctorow on the Tom Woods show. And I asked Mr. Doctorow to do THC and he wrote back saying that he wasn't interested based on the other topics we've covered...and that's a real shame! But you can seek out that interview yourself or it is in the top pinned post before this drops on the THC Telegram channel

1:12:07 And this is not about pro-Ukraine versus pro-Russia. Don't get sucked into such simplistic thinking I'm on the side of the elite and the bankers and military profiteers NOT sending tens of thousands young people to die over their dick swinging That's the side i'm on But basically, in a nutshell it seems like all the information I'm seeing this interview included says that the globalist establishment has been using Ukraine to needle at Putin for a long time. So this isn't some sudden invasion by big scary Russia and bad man Putin there's a ton more nuance than that And if you've been paying attention we have seen a lot of Wag The Dog style emotional footage that turned out to be completely fabricated in the last couple of weeks

1:12:55 And couple that with Putin being removed from the WEF's partner website, which is clearly damage control. There is a lot going on but this crisis could actually become the path to a world war and that's very serious And when you get swept up in supporting Ukraine, well there's a lot of material out there that looks like the Ukraine is a government captured by the globalists and actual Nazis. I know that sounds bold but check out Gordon's video and this Gilbert Doctorow interview and it becomes pretty clear so be careful what your rallying behind because what we really need

1:13:39 as unlikely as it is, is for the people who are hell-bent on starting a world war to actually negotiate away from one. But what really stuck with me from the Doctorow interview was that he said that Russia recently presented its new cutting edge nuclear sub technology and the US completely ignored it and this Russian historian was very clear that he would not be surprised if in the next few weeks we saw these subs pop up along the east coast of the US aimed at our cities trying to sober up the American people as to how bad this can get. I'm not trying to fear monger, i'm passing along some information and yeah it's a bold prediction but it comes from a Russian historian that won't come on this show because we're too out there so consider The Source

1:14:34 And prepare yourself. Make sure you have extra cash on hand and extra groceries You should already be getting your high quality meat from a producer locally outside of the industrial system Probably your water too Again, not trying to overhype Not trying to engage in fear porn But I can't hear something like that and not tell you guys Even if I have to shoehorn it in at the end of a two-hour interview about something else. It's relatable because of Gordon's latest presentation, but still things can turn on a dime and we want to use our counterculture knowledge To be better positioned than the masses who always mock us right? So I went and got cash out of the bank this morning before recording this and let me tell you

1:15:25 It was pretty clear that the teller was instructed to persuade people away from taking out cash. I mean, this is pretty much word for word how it went but she asks well why are you taking out this sum of cash? And i say um paying a contractor and trying to get some money for a big trip Well won't the contractor take a cashier's check? I'm not really sure...I just told him I'd get cash Well the cashier's check is insured Cash isn't always the safest Well, that's all good because I'm just going to pay him cash because I said I would. Well do you want to call him and see if he'd prefer a cashiers check? No, I don't want to call him while in line at the bank. I really am in a bit of a hurry and I just wanna grab what I came here to get and get moving if thats alright." That is real dialogue that I had trying even getting a modest amount out of the bank. And it was a bit concerning. Definitely a new experience!

1:16:28 But I'm going to try and get a good guest to come here and talk about these things. But i really have nothing on the books right now, but that is some preliminary info and some personal security advice that I just don't think should wait You know how things can get creepy around the Ides of March? That's coming up It could be pretty intense We know they like their numbers in there dates And I was thinking about this too, but you know when Ross Ben did his astrology forecast he called this year a glimpse of grace. And in terms of COVID restrictions they do seem to be all but gone at this point. I would say the personal prison aspect has certainly let up. But a glimpse of grace suggests an easing-up in the middle of a tough time sandwich because the grace is temporary

1:17:25 So I'd imagine the next two years could be as oppressive as the last two, but probably in different ways with different justifications. Just something to think about and i'm sure my tone at this point does not really match the interview you just listened to but...I can't keep that stuff to myself! And I also wanted to throw out Yes, Gordon and I are thinking about doing a joint event on June 25th in Austin Texas. But we are struggling to find a venue We've seen many great venues and we can't really get responses from the ones that we've inquired with. We really just want somewhere that's on brand and a bit counterculture-esque where we can have drinks And maybe get a food truck to show up? And i didn't think this would be so hard in Austin but

1:18:22 It's not going smoothly so if you are in Austin and can help us out with this particular problem, please email me the higher side chats at gmail.com and we can get this event and the venue locked in because I don't really want to miss out on that I think it'd be a lot of fun but in terms of this episode a critique of solution ism is a good thing to focus on and it's pretty resonant right now. Solutionism is colonial thinking, what can we do to fix this? Well maybe this actually doesn't require your meddling actually you should just stop meddling and quote-unquote solving for a bit and just breathe along with the rest of the cosmos." And I hemmed and hawed about even saying anything to this effect but

1:19:12 The things we talked about today can be a tough conversation when we have all this woke liberal Antifa craziness going on because some of the terms and foundational ideas are adjacent to that stuff, and it can be triggering. And it can be hard to separate out And it seems like Gordon really is trying to walk a tightrope between people who have knee-jerk reactions to anything that sounds like liberal progressivism, as expressed lately and the actual liberal progressives who have already decided that they're right and they're not really open to any critique. But I would say there are a lot of core problems that need to be addressed where the people who realize that are spun off

1:19:59 in an unproductive direction and that is what I think we are seeing in a big way. And I would say that just because there's a highly manipulated group of people doing it wrong doesn't mean there isn't a nuanced point in there worth unpacking so please, I hope we all have the sense to navigate that somewhat thorny territory but materialism, the thinking of everything as dead This is like a key philosophy to seed before you're going to exploit the earth and the people who live on it so we're trying to unravel the damage done by the mindset of living under the influence of psychopathic empire in the thoughts around thoughts and ideas were great. It's not that some of these perspectives were completely new to me gordon i have talked about some of them before previous episodes to an extent,

1:21:00 But maybe it was just the revisiting of the perspective through his book or that the phrasing was just right. But yeah, ideas are alive and in The Astral and we are actually hearing them constantly! And I think that example of executing something some work of art or even a news shed or song... ...and having the execution be grossly inferior to how it seemed in your head will go back to that mental picture really dig into it Why is the physical execution so bad? And how can you work it and get it closer to that perfect mental picture. That's a skill set, that's a muscle we need to work out. It was simple but for me it was just a really useful template. Even Joseph Farrell has been here talking about old art and statues and that art wasn't thought of as subjective. It wasn't open to interpretation. It was about drawing things down from the astral

1:22:00 from the imaginal and made the best representation of such perfection when the talent was. The execution between idea and physical representation and it being a bit self evident which artists were getting closer to the divine I mean, with THC when people have interviewed me and commended me for sticking with it. I've always said hey we should all be looking for progress on our thing and not get hung up on it not being perfect from the beginning but what's progress? That would be constantly moving towards the idea that came to you and moving towards depicting it better than you are currently. I hope that makes sense but hey! That's why Elon Musk builds rockets kids

1:22:49 There is some pesky, nagging idea calling them to the stars. And I wonder how it got there! But really good stuff as it always is with Gordon this book took my understanding a level deeper on things like how our ideas are alive and how one can talk to plants and how spirits interact with the landscape It's actually simpler than I thought and maybe I was getting in my own way of understanding So I'm hoping that I can keep these things in mind going forward, no pun intended. But you know it also makes it a bit more obvious why everyone stresses meditation as the first step in this direction right? And why every guided meditation says to observe your thoughts like clouds floating by and your minds eye You can see how the things we talked about today build off of that kind of foundation

1:23:43 I certainly like the idea of consulting with the THC egregore to go put a bug in the year those guests who won't take me seriously but anyway. In the plus show as always we go harder and deeper and we talked about, nuances of the elite's use of esoteric symbols, sky people and star maps, shamanism and UFOs, fallen angels and favoring humanity, AI and habitat, spirits landscape and war manifestation and time. And of course the most animist diet and how your spinach is trying to kill you

1:24:22 Sign up for PLUS because the PLUS shows are always better, and you deserve it. And if you're already a PLUS member I sincerely thank you! It's getting harder to just exist as a vessel for counter-opinions to official reality and your support is extremely important...as important as i think our guests are and knowledge is so thanks as always! As for the events on the calendar at highersidemeetups.com You guys are finding the others! On March 11th, at The New York City United Truth-er Meetup It's happening at Cafe 28 On March 12th we got The Jefferson City Meetup in Jefferson City Missouri At The Last Flight Brewery Also on March 12th There is a Scottsdale Arizona 2 year lockdown anniversary meet up at the Tally Ho Cocktail Lounge

1:25:18 And then an event that was proposed by someone who is calling the event, The County Durham Shroom Alchemy and Permaculture Summit at the UK Gretna Green Hotel in County Durham United Kingdom. If you're in that area you can read the description on the website about the event but it does look to be just an invitation for interesting conversation But those are all very cool. I am so happy that Hireside listeners are uniting and finding each other, the screws are getting quite tight and i don't think we should consider this over... And we should build better networks while we can! I want to try to help you and that's the only way i can think of to do it

1:26:05 Find people around you that you can talk to and agree with. These are heavy times, even just in the week since me and Gordon recorded this I feel quite concerned for the immediate future And the next five years or so let's not put all the weight on just The next 30 days there is a long arc here as we did with COVID we're going to oscillate between following the threads, deconstructing them and also going completely off the radar to unrelated things that are also interesting. But if you become Plus Members or stay Plus Members I will keep fighting the good fight and deal with any ramifications that come from doing that And we will reach the promised land together right? Let Gordon know if you liked hearing from him today

1:27:01 I appreciate him letting us have the first crack at an interview about the new book. And get the new book, Animistic if it calls to you and take care of you in yours! Much love out there keep your head on straight Your move agents of empire mental construct controllers elite level parasitic exploiters of the earth your fucking move Long thought they were rooting for the home team As they're sent to the game and torn apart We twist this tourniquet upon the pipeline That it carries all of our pain and looms As we blindly clap in cheer from the sidelines It's clear, no losing streak from the restart And that's where they found their last cemetery

1:28:14 A smoking gun in my downfall THC I can't scream They took that faded ribbon off the oak tree Worn out open their arms Long thought i was doing Now im lying in a pool of my blood And thats where they found me In the cemetery A smoking gun in my

1:29:08 From the land of the free, sing with me And that's where they found my cemetery A smoking gun in my hand Now I'm down from the land of THC And I can't scream, I can't scream! And that's where they found my cemetery A smoking gun down from the land of me The aim

1:30:23 And that is another show complete! Remember, as much as you enjoyed this which is just the free first hour I hope you'll become a Plus Member to hear the full two-hour interviews. You also can engage with other Plus Members in the comments and the forums and you'll find your answer to one of the most common questions I get which is where can I find those cover songs that you use at the end of the show? Well they are free downloads for Plus Members too And without Plus Members, I can't hire the occasional musician to bring these odd cover song ideas to fruition. Plus members are how I'm able to do what I do without ads and without the big machine being on my back! We can fit so much more into a two-hour interview and I'd do my best to make it worth your time and money." The conversation only gets deeper, weirder, and more controversial in that private hour. How could it not be the way things are going?

1:31:15 But the best way to sign up is at TheHigherSideChats.com, where new first-time subscribers always get a free 7 day trial because I'm just that confident! There's no PayPal on the website but if you need to use PayPal then sign up through Patreon and you get all of the same episodes Our website is a credit or debit system, but you can also scope out the other options like a few various cryptos. Cash or check mailed to the P.O box and I'll even barter with most people if you have your own business and produce something nice that my wife or kid or taste buds might like But the architects of consensus reality have made it clear that these themes and topics aren't really welcome on the main stage. And so this is how we secure a little counterculture corner for ourselves, and I hope you'll join PLUS because that's the only way it works!

1:32:04 Besides, you can cancel any time right on your profile page. The most common concern I hear is people just being unsure if THC Plus will work with their podcast app and the answer is probably yes! But if not we have several high-level app recommendations for whatever phone you use and the website is made for mobile too We're trained to tip a waitress for bringing us a sandwich, but that tip doesn't give you access to a second sandwich. Really I'm not asking for any more than that and think I offer better service. Come get your second serving of tasty conspiracy goodness in exchange for that small token of your appreciation. Beyond that let it also be known we have grown and survived as long as we have by word-of-mouth

1:32:46 I don't care so much about social media likes or follows, but tell the right people about THC. And not just listeners but the high level figures who are better suited to sit down with me than most other hosts. And if you can help me with any of these things, I can work to bring you better shows which is just a win-win for both us! Informative, entertaining and action packed It also never hurts to thank a guest you liked if you have the time either. We want them to know people are listening so they're willing to come back down the road too! Thank YOU for spending some time with me and cheers to a better tomorrow!