Patrick Harpur | The Secret Tradition Of The Soul & The Philosopher’s Secret Fire

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06:19 It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, Hiresight Chatters. From The Sunshine State I'm Greg Carlwood and it seems as if so many people are stuck trudging through the mundane requirements of modern society being dragged through traffic to a meaningless means to make ends meet sitting through a rotation of circle jerk zoom meetings or feeling as if they aren't much more than a replaceable part in someone else's machine The demanding requirements of income generation leave little time for anything else but scrolling through some endless digital list of whatever and munching on a drive-thru dinner while we stare ourselves numb enough to semi sleep until it's time to face another unsatisfying day. Many mistake being busy for being fulfilled, entertainment for true happiness and employment for meaningful contribution

07:09 Our highly sophisticated mouse-trap society can keep many of us so stressed, beaten down and angsty that we don't even ponder the deeper questions of life's meaning consider that we might have a cosmic role to play or even explore our own internal dreams and desires. But there is a better way and we owe it to ourselves and the greater game of life to explore what it might be, how we can better orient ourselves with its insights & meanings with a capital M. And for a cake with those ingredients there's really only one baker worthy and that's the ever insightful Patrick Harper! He's a great writer responsible for such works as Daemonic Reality A Field Guide To The Other World, The Philosopher's Secret Fire-A History Of The Imagination, and The Secret Tradition Of The Soul

07:53 As well as a partly fictional account of the great work of alchemy, The Mysterious Mercurius or The Marriage Of Heaven And Earth which might have even been co-authored by Mercurius himself in some strange esoteric way. Ann Patrick has also written some highly respected novels like The Savory Truffle, The Good People and The Stormy Petrel He has been here twice before, once in the much simpler world of 2018 talking about demonic reality and again with his sister Merrily in 2021 talking about her book Mystery Big Cats. And he is back to do the dance again! The daemonic reality restorer secret tradition of the soul explorer and maestro of the mysteries Patrick my man welcome back once again how are you?

08:37 I'm fine, thank you Greg. Glad to be back! Yes, thank you for doing this. I hadn't read Secret Tradition of the Soul until after the last time we talked and i'm a big fan of how demonic reality, The Philosopher's Secret Fire and The Secret Tradition of the Soul all overlap and really reinforce each other by pulling together the best ideas of the past and saying, hey we do get it right sometimes in the West but we often lose the thread. Is that fair to say? That's fair to say exactly what I was trying to do yes i don't really have new ideas I just look to the past and see what we've neglected or forgotten It works! A curator of good ideas that's how I think of myself sometimes Good man

09:24 Well, how would you consider the later two books related beyond this summary where you write I have documented the extraordinary and fertility-bearing floods that inaugurated those great flowerings of culture among the Renaissance magi, the romantic poets and the depth psychologists in my book The Philosopher's Secret Fire. Now I will describe the personal implications of this secret tradition for us as individuals? Well yes! It seems to say it right there, but I guess for people listening the philosopher's secret fire is more of the overview of the mysteries itself and then the secret tradition of the soul really boils it down to what it means to the average person. Yes, so I think that's exactly right you know? The secret fire was an attempt to sort of outline what I think of as the imaginative tradition but it's also a tradition of soul if you like

10:22 deriving from the Neoplatonists. And it's a tradition which has, for long stretches of our two and half thousand year history remained hidden or occluded or occult and I wanted to draw attention to that. Then I realized there were some things i'd left out which were too impersonal so I kind of reframed that tradition in a more personal way in my book about the soul where the emphasis was more on soul and less on imagination. But in some sense I use those words interchangeably, it's a vexed question. I think of imagination as being the chief faculty of the soul which is important because for the last well certainly since the enlightenment you know the chief faculty of us humans was held to be reason and that has sort of ossified into a kind

11:26 rationalism, which is inimical to soul. But the ancients always thought that imagination was the chief faculty of the soul and I'm going with that. I like that and that is something you rally against a lot, the literalization and over-rationalization of everything that comes with the materialist worldview we hyper focus on the things we can see and the physical, and we completely cut out the unseen. And that has a lot of implications for society...and an individual wouldn't you say? Yes indeed yeah I mean i think in one sense The Secret Fire is a long critique of literalism which I think it's one of our most telling modern vices but we don't think anything is real unless it is literally so

12:26 We lay enormous store by facts, but there's more to life than facts. And earlier cultures their worldview was primarily metaphorical poetic if you like or rather and even better I would say that their worldview was embedded in a vision that preceded the division of the metaphorical from the literal It's only in modern times have we distinguished between metaphorical and literal. So, for example the literal worldview thinks that myths are untrue they think they're fairy stories they're made-up stories whereas of course for traditional cultures myths are the true stories they absolutely point to the reality of a human condition but at the same time I'm not sure that any traditional culture takes them literally

13:31 in the way that we suppose that they did. Even in ancient Greeks, the gods were understood not in a literal way – they were understood as real, real as images but not necessarily literally real. It's a very hard distinction for us to make because we are so literal-minded. So it is easy for us to dismiss all of the products of imagination as if they were mere fictions But even now, even in modern times there's a sense in which we understand that fiction — drama and novels and poetry can be more real, more truth-telling than so called facts. So it's not impossible for us to understand this distinction between the literal and the metaphorical. And indeed it is not impossible for us to understand how

14:32 Those two things might be combined, as it were or understood before they were split apart at the Scientific Revolution. Do you see what I mean? One of the missions around here is to re enchant the world to improve our relationship with soul and light that fire up the imagination backup. And i'm not very good at it but i love talking to people who do think in those ways cuz it's kinda difficult we've been conditioned one way and, really hard to make a switch when there's just this constant drumbeat of materialism

15:10 Atheism i mean this is the way i grew up it was just like really hard to see anything else i always enjoyed the mysterious and ufo's not kind of thing you have those you can kinda shoehorn in because they're from some other planet that so that and then you get to a more complex. And new ones understanding of that and no then we're back to igniting imagination in the demonic reality, I guess to move along here, what would you consider the central tenets of this secret tradition of the soul or the core components of it? Even though the wrapper kind of changes when the current does come up to the surface there are some core things we could say about it for the uninitiated here so they have a better understanding of the term. Yes, I suppose that the central tenants are that first of all as I said

16:03 Soul and imagination are central, and are the core faculties by which we apprehend reality. Secondly, absolutely key to the whole business is that following the Neoplatonists for example... they weren't the only people who believed this but they were the best articulators of the view that the whole cosmos is made of soul or it's sustained or underpinned or controlled by soul as Plotinus said or rather soul stuff. Soul isn't like spirit, it's not inimical to being material – it's both material and non-material. It's a bit like water which can be both ice – solid as it were but also fluid – or even ethereal as in steam…that sort of analogy. And

17:07 This idea, which was Plato's idea originally that the whole cosmos had a soul woven through it was reinterpreted in different ways later on which might go into later. I as the romantic imagination as the collective unconscious and certainly nowadays as a revival of interest in the idea of consciousness which is now held by lots of scientists and idealist philosophers to be basic substrate and fabric of the universe. But if we stick with a Neoplatonic idea of soul, the idea is that soul is an impersonal principle which constitutes the fabric of the universe, and we are sort of individual manifestations of it. And so that leads us to one of the central doctrines which is that of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm

18:08 where the macrocosm is the cosmos at large and the microcosm is us little individual cosmoses. And so there's a kind of resonance between, an affinity between us and the cosmos that we're not separate from it. We're just differentiated portions of the whole cosmic soul And so we remain intimately connected to the outside world, to nature and indeed to the larger cosmos. I think that those are the main ideas, I think. And so the Neoplatonists would be a good place to look for an area where that current peaked

18:56 I'm curious about some others i mean especially outside of the west you write about some traditional or indigenous tribes that do live closer to nature and they have really complex models for reality way more than one might think because they don't have the scientific method and all this stuff. But a lot of it is observation, and just being embedded in the environment we've taken ourselves out of the environment We do all our experimentation in an isolated sterilized laboratory And that's not how nature works. You can't really take out parts of the whole and then get some great insight that's applicable out in the real world, out in the chaos of everything but talk to us about some of the cultures outside of the West and your favorite takeaways from studying their thoughts on the soul and the insights you get from their models? Yes I mostly draw on what the anthropologists call animist cultures

20:00 believe explicitly that everything has a soul. And so they relate to everything in a subjective manner because they recognize that they themselves are only one manifestation of soul, but all animals or trees or natural objects are themselves in souls. So you have a kind of subjective relationship with them and these relationships have to be very carefully managed For instance, if you're hunting which is absolutely a key thing in hunter-gatherer tribes it's an extremely perilous activity because you're killing something like a brother or a sister because you are both ensouled beings and you don't necessarily have priority over them. So you have to be very careful how you kill them. You have to kill very respectfully. You have not mention the name of the animal your killing

21:01 because if you kill a bear in the Arctic Circle, you have to say I have acquired a brother or something like that. They use all these careful euphemisms so as not to blaspheme against the natural order. So that's very interesting to me and it seems to me having read more anthropology recently, I was very surprised to discover...I read an interesting book called Beyond Nature & Culture by a Frenchman called Philippe de Couillat, the head of the Anthropological Institute or whatever it's called in Paris. Very hard to read because he is French and an intellectual but he surprised me by announcing that there are only four possible worldviews! I thought there were probably as many worldviews as there were people but

21:58 He thinks not, and he knows what he's talking about. And I've read critiques of him which don't really question this assertion of his. The four worldviews are animism, totemism, analogism and naturalism. Naturalism is simply our modern worldview after the scientific revolution which began well at the Renaissance but took off in 17th century and was crowned at the Enlightenment Totemism is a special case. It's mostly found in Australia, all Australian tribes are totemists but the word totem comes from the Plains Indians of America so obviously they have a totemistic element in their culture but they are all basically animists. But the fact that they have a totemic element in their culture means that there's always going to be overlap between these world views and indeed

22:58 I'm a living example of an overlapping worldview that i'm partly animist, partly naturalist modern but perhaps favorite. I'm an analogist and now analogism is the world view that the Chinese used to have, the Aztecs used to have, the Indians used to have and still do. And what Europe had before the scientific revolution...and it was based on the idea what its Animism was probably the earliest worldview. I mean it's still going in Amazonia and in certain parts of the world, the Arctic Circle particularly but I have a feeling that animism was probably the earliest worldview as well you know the hunter-gatherers of Neolithic times and before we don't really know what they believed but I suspect they were animists so analogism came a bit later on

24:00 It's very much the idea of, as expressed by the alchemists that what goes on above is reflected in the below. That everything is analogous. In Europe there was a great chain of... The European cosmos before the scientific revolution thought that creation was a great chain of being which stretched from God through the angels nine orders of angels down to man down to animals down to plants down to stones So there was a kind of vertical structure. But at each level, each level could be thought of horizontally and was analogous to the level above it. For example the idea of the top human being was the king and the analogy amongst the animal world was the lion and amongst the plant world was the rose and so on. Someone like Shakespeare uses that kind of imagery all the time

25:03 the chief metal was gold, and so on and so forth. The top planet was the Sun Planet in inverted commas because we were thought to be the center of the universe then So all these systems of analogies, all these different planes of existence were analogous to each other. The whole universe was extremely orderly and harmonious everything connected to everything else and everything in-souled in an animistic way nothing was just a thing or object or inanimate even stones were thought to have some dim kind of soul life to them I find that very attractive idea

25:49 I think it's borne out by our own experience at times. For instance, when we experience synchronicities for example that would be just a commonplace thing in the analogist view of the world because what happens within you as a soul is reflected in the larger world soul around you and vice versa so there was a lovely concordance or resonance between the human mind and the outside world. And so an image in the mind would find a resonance outside, and vice versa which made for a very meaningful universe you know everything was harmonious unified bound together yet every level was distinct and discriminated between there was no conflation of things

26:45 Yeah, I like it. I think that does make sense that although it seems like there's a thousand world views they usually can be put into one of the four buckets and in terms of the point of a human life. I liked this paragraph you say Many West African peoples believe that before you enter the world, you draw up a contract with a heavenly double who prescribes what you will do with your life. How long you'll live? Who you'll marry? How many children you have and so on... Then just before your born, you are led to the tree of forgetfulness which you embrace and from that moment you lose all conscious recollection of your contract

27:24 However, if you do not live up to your contractual obligations you will become ill and need the help of a diviner who will use all his skills to make contact with your heavenly double and discover which articles of the contract are failing. I love stuff like that! It seems well thought out and pretty accurate from what I can tell about what life seems to be. It's another one of those big buckets that many cultures have something similar to that, but it is an odd structure to make such a plan forget it and then face consequences for not remembering. I understand when you go down this rabbit hole and start doing the thought tree while you can't come into the world with the knowledge or the whole adventure doesn't work

28:15 So there's these like subtle hints at what it is, but it would be much better if we lived in a society that taught us how to recognize those subtle hands or the symbology of life. And maybe when you look at America and everybody's obese with chronic illness and there are no shamans to visit just the white lab coat pill pushers I can see why our society is so ill but talk was about those mechanisms, I mean the idea of a otherworldly double, a sole contract and that our life's purpose is to fulfill such a contract. It's not just the West African people that think that? No indeed one of the reasons for my writing the Soul Book was to expound at greater length the idea of the personal daimon. I'd referred to it in Daimonic Reality but I hadn't really explored it

29:16 And as a result of reading more anthropology, it sort of was born in upon me more and more that this was a very common belief. I was finding it in all sorts of tribes—this idea that we are shadowed by our kind of double. The West African description you've just read out is almost exactly the same as the description in Plato of the personal diamond And it occurs in his great work The Republic, in which he tells the story of a man called Ur who died but came back to life. He had what we call a near-death experience and Ur tells us the mechanics of how it works in the afterlife and that you die and return to the fullness of being that you were denied on Earth but are reincarnated. This happens

30:21 you're given the choice of a life. You can choose the life you want, there's a whole pool of lives and then you choose when you want it. Once you've chosen it, you are assigned a personal daemon whose job is to help you enact that life, unfold that life when you're born on Earth And the personal diamond became the guardian angel of Christianity later on, which is still widely and very properly believed in. Its role is to guide you, it's to help you fulfill your life plan. It's the guardian of a blueprint of your life and also to protect you so guiding and protecting you. The West African description is even more detailed and I think probably more accurate

31:20 So I began to take this idea, which hadn't really occurred to me before more seriously. And I thought yes how true it was of my own life you know one felt impelled by some daemonic force to do certain things even against my own wishes or desires or whatever... You don't necessarily do what you want or what you think is good for you. The diamond, with its divine plan for your life has its own scheme of what you should be doing and I think we've lost... With this evidence too from around the world sometimes the personal diamond is seen as an ancestor who is assigned to you at birth that's quite a common thing for instance above the arctic circle the Inuits believe in For instance a child isn't given a name

32:16 until it's divine, which ancestor is its daimon, is its personal guardian. And then it's named after that ancestor. So it's a common idea and one that I find very fruitful. It's not fatalistic. I think it's a kind of fate but fate isn't the same as fatalism things aren't predetermined there's a lot of wiggle room but nevertheless there is a kind of blueprint for our lives which we have chosen ourselves before we were born and which we then forget, and the diamond helps us unfold it. And one of the particularly attractive ideas for me is the notion that if that's the case there's a sense in which we are drawn towards our personal destiny from the future as it were from the plan that's already laid down and our job is to unfold that planning to enact it and make it concrete to actualize

33:17 In other words, we're not necessarily determined as psychoanalysis would say by our past. By whatever happened to us as children or what bad parenting we had or what traumas we had. No! We are rather drawn towards our destiny from the future from the completed self that the daimon already has in its mind And so the daimyo directs our soul in this way, that the world is as John Keats said it's the veil of soul-making. That we have souls but in some sense we also have to make them. That we are acorns that have to become oaks. We are potentials which have to be actualized and that is the key to the meaning of our lives I mean that's where the meaning of our lives comes from

34:10 And if we deny the promptings of the daimon, it's the worst for us. Indeed it should be the role of psychotherapy really to help us contact our daimons. As your West African passage said, if you lose contact with your daimon, with your double, you start to get ill and the witch doctor is called in to help you re-establish contact with it and so on. And psychotherapy is the people's chief ill, is that kind of loss of contact with the daimon which directs and guides and protects their soul. So a psychotherapist is like a witch doctor in that respect and should be concerned not so much with analyzing your past and worrying about this or that but helping you to re-establish contact with your own daimon

35:13 Of course, you know I mean being aware of your daimon or aware of your purpose doesn't mean you're going to be happy because your destiny, your fate may be to suffer all sorts of tribulations and in any case we can't avoid that. We're all subject to mythologies, were also subject to loss and bereavement and grief, fear so we are not necessarily happier but what our lives are fuller if we obey the Daimon's blueprint We know that we're on the right track. Our life has meaning and purpose." Well said! So yes, I really like that description of the personal diamond and the contract that we have. Another thing i like in your books is that you talk about the idea that on top of this contract and the personal liaison that helps us try to fulfill it

36:10 We can also be ruled by someone in the big pantheon of gods. One of them is always sort of driving our actions or our mindset, talk to us about this idea and how we can determine what God might be acting through us or what God rules us and how we could even shift to another or if that's even something that's in our hands Yes, I know that's a vexed question. But in this matter I'm following James Hillman who was perhaps the best of the post-Jungian psycho psychologists. He accepted as I do that there are archetypes at work in our unconscious and somehow or other we are ruled by sort of archetypal forces

36:57 and Jung had a whole pantheon of archetypes, the anima and the animus and the wise old man and the eternal youth and the great mother and the self. But these were really... I think Hillman thought this, and i do too that they were kind of reinventions or repackagings of traditional gods principally for example the gods of Greek mythology, because Greek mythology has been so influential in our culture. And also it's incomparably rich, the mythology of the Greeks you know?

37:34 fantastically rich, fantastically well documented. So there may well be deities other than Greek deities of course who are ruling our lives. Anglo-Saxon gods for the English for example but we have almost no information about Anglo-Saxon gods I tend to think that the Norse gods play a much larger part in northern European psychology than is generally thought that we may well be more Norse god-oriented than Greek god oriented, but nevertheless even the Norse gods and the Greek gods have a lot in common. You can see a lot of parallels between Thor and Zeus, between Odin and Hermes and so on. So this kind of point is rather moot. Granted that archetypes play a large part in influencing our lives unconsciously so that we're not aware of them I think it's

38:35 even more fruitful to think of them as gods because the gods are more fully described and elaborated in the mythologies than the Jungian archetypes are, since they were discovered by him alone. It is by definition very difficult to know which god is ruling you or influencing you or forming your worldview over and above the personal diamond simply because That is the world we are in, as it were. We can't see... It's like seeing your own eyeball if you're in the grip of... Let me give an example. Materialism as an ideology which claims that all things only matter. As the root word for materialism from Latin mater meaning mother suggests, the goddess behind materialism is The Great Mother and

39:39 someone like Azusa's wife Hera, who was very single-minded and believed that only one thing was real at a time just as materialists do. They only believe in one thing. It is the kind of ideology that believes that only matter is real and incidentally she's very jealous of other perspectives on the world for example when her husband goes off and has sex with nymphs or other goddesses she's insanely jealous. That points to the way in which materialists can't abide any other kind of perspective, any other kind of divine plan. Let me give you another example. Think of the way in which women were enjoined to be good little housewives in the 1950s? Well

40:35 You can see that they are under the influence then, or rather that way of looking at women was under the influence not of Hera but her daughter Hebe who was a classic good little servant housewife and so on. And we can see that the trouble begins when Zeus gives birth to Athena and Athena isn't born in the conventional way she springs from his head fully armed and we can see in her the feminist, you know. The shift from the view of women as housewives to the view of women as strong independent women they come from Zeus's head i.e., they're a product...they're intellectual but they're from his thought and they're fully armed which means that already up running to be combative very different from other women who are under the influence of Aphrodite for instance

41:32 you might say free love, promiscuity, sex. So all these goddesses and of course they don't just underpin women they underpin men as well but that takes a different form. There's no sexism in the world of mythology. The gods and goddesses influence all of us regardless of our gender Sure, yes. And the heavy Aphrodite examples are in the book when you talk about deities behind social movements and different eras and I'm curious... You know when you look in the past with hindsight it's a little easier to sometimes see but I'm curious what gods you see at play in today's social movements or the major arcs of our timeline

42:25 And could we nudge ourselves in a different direction that might better serve our collective society? But what forces do you see at play today?" I'm too close to it. We all are, we're too close for me to get leverage on it. I think that the major competitor with the wonderful diversity of Greek polytheism was, of course, Christianity and That is more important as a mythic background to, for example Americans than Europeans because the founding fathers were exiled Puritans. The ground plan of American society was Northern Protestant Puritanism who were all escaping persecution in Europe

43:17 And so I have a feeling that there is this strong Puritan streak in the American psyche. I'm leaving aside the diversity of your ethnic differences and so on, but the ground plan of the American psyche was Puritan. And i see that resurging very much in the single-minded ideologies which have overtaken most of the English speaking world's. The trouble with ideologies is They're like religion gone wrong. Fundamentalist Christians, for instance, are Christians who've been captured by an ideology – the ideology being the religion of one book – the Bible – which is taken completely literally so it's quite a narrow kind of view. The attraction of ideologies is exactly that, that it is one thing

44:19 It's simplistic in a way. All ideologies are simplistic, they concentrate on one thing which rules everything else. For example the idea of class in Marxism—the class war—and it is very compelling that all evils can be put down to differences in class and the exploitation of one class by another. There is obviously truth in it otherwise you would never catch on but then used to explain just about everything And that is itself a kind of puritanical idea because the Puritans excluded everything. They didn't want anything to do with soul, they didn't want anything to do with beauty, dance, theatre, drama, art, images... The Puritans cut all that out! They wanted everything bare stark image lists you know just people working hard in an ethical way

45:21 Of course, that is a very compelling idea too. I think we should work hard and be ethical but you know what i mean? When it's confined to that alone, it excludes so much. So the ruling idea is no longer classed. It's probably today race. That's probably the single most telling ideology. To attribute everything to race is obviously faulty Well not obviously but you know just obvious to me right it is hard for us to incorporate many different things and your ideologies are attractive because you kinda get the shut off your mind and say okay i found that this is the answer. And now everything gets filtered through this lens i see happen in my own audience when i interview one guest

46:15 Versus another guest people will latch on say no that resonated with me and now that's my new worldview and now i'm shut off from other interpretations of what the ufo might be in that sort of stuff. I try to keep you know let's even if we're leaning this direction lets still give some space too someone who still thinks that the alien bodies are at right patterson i don't know but, another thing you say in the book in the secret tradition of the soul is that the shaman appears whenever the tribe, people or culture is threatened with extinction. And that's a provocative idea I like the thought there are these mechanisms in place if you lose contact with your diamond and the contract well we got to go see the guy at the edge of the village and he's gonna help reconnect you or no if there's more existential threat we got that too we have a person in place

47:11 a safety mechanism, a lever to pull to try and help you from absolute annihilation and extinction. But do we have a modern Western archetypal shaman? You would think someone like this might be of a bit of fame perhaps but does the absence of such a person... I mean when i rack my brain I can't think of anybody Does the absence of such a person mean that we're maybe less close to extinction than we're led to believe? Or do you see shamans emerging as we're maybe nearing some precipice?" Well, the trouble is when you talk about the precipice I suppose for Western culture it's just too big to be a tribe anymore. The only figure that stands out as a possible shaman for the tribe of Western culture

48:09 is the second coming of Christ. I mean, because we are a Christian culture and the idea that there will be a Messiah that will come and save our whole culture is part of the Christian myth. And that may well be the case who knows? You know... I think there's so many people who don't subscribe to it was kind of just stamped on us and were told where a Christian nation we better be somewhat Christian, but I just think there's so many people especially in this audience that reject that. That don't subscribe to it obviously were colored by it a little bit its everywhere around us but I think so many people listening would be like I don't buy into that no I agree either buying to die though what I'm saying is that there is no kind of

49:05 shaman for the Western world apart from the figure of Christ. So we're in trouble! What we have instead is pockets of would-be saviors all over the place, you know? And there's got to be many shamans if you like. There are gurus and teachers and mentors and psychotherapists...and everybody forms their own little tribe within Western culture in which it seeks to find salvation. So there are absolutely masses of these people who follow some sort of artistic vocation or people who follow some sort of religious belief, or some sort of religious sect, or just new age people who believe in spirituality and so on and

49:57 It's because our culture is too big. It's very, very fragmented so there can't be any more... it's not like a hunter-gatherer tribe will only number 80 to 100 people at most! So then in that sort of cohesive society you can imagine the priest, the shaman working for all of them kind of voicing their collective fears and interests and so on It's interesting to think about these mechanisms of reality that are baked in and have been baked in from the beginning but then they just go so haywire or it's hard to find. The thread on how their applicable to such a connected global society i think about that all the time when it comes to things like ritual magic, and influence and things like agro gores like

50:56 A person like me is not meant to be speaking to a hundred thousand people right now. I mean, that privilege was reserved for like 0.001% of people for most of the story and it's just odd to think about how these things work themselves out in a global type of situation. It seems like they're kind of broken or I don't know how the other world is responding to this connectivity. I would expect to see way more influence from the other world in the same way, I say to people who are big on crystals, I say well you know i got crystals all over the place just because I mean they're nice to look at it. I don't feel the energy of crystals when I go into a crystal shop! You would think that

51:51 The crystal shop would be so explosive in its energy potential that how could a person not feel something going on? They might as well all be red bricks, in terms of my energetic sensitivity to them. But as things get bigger, like society or concentrations of crystals in a building. I would expect these mechanisms to kind of really light the fire. How could you possibly deny the other world when these mechanisms, these little things should be amplified even from that side of things?

52:27 Would you expect me to say that, Greg? I expect you to solve all my problems! No. Western culture has done away with the other world as it's done away with God and it's a mistake. It's done away with the gods and the tension between many gods and one god runs through the whole of Western religion and philosophy – the one and the many… As you say, it's got very big. We've gone global and so we have no choice but to fragment and each seek our own...we're now empowered to seek our own path of salvation that's very liberating. You don't have to be a Christian! You can be anything you want there's a big candy store out there. You could be as Zen Buddhist as I was for nearly a fortnight. You know? You could be a communist

53:20 The next Willy Wonka, if you so choose. Maybe it seems like we've elbowed the other world out of the picture and it's just kinda quietly waiting to be recognized or maybe not so quietly, to bring us back to what we talked about last time that the greys and abduction phenomenon is a mechanism Of the other world and the diamonds to shake people away can be like hey no were here and you're either gonna voluntarily engage with us or we will just do things like this when i got out of the secret tradition of the soul is, you talk about shamanism and dismemberment that dismemberment is such a huge.

54:01 Part of that whole motif and it is I mean people who go to the Amazon and do ayahuasca the trendy thing these days. They're always cut into ribbons by mother ayahuasca and then reassembled, and then she's like that's enough for tonight we'll see on the next ritual and then she rebuilds you and so that motif is definitely there when you think about the graze archetypal story a lot of it is experimentation probing medical type things, extracting fluids. And there is a tendency to literalize it all because we don't even recognize that we have an etheric body or kind of a dream body or astral whatever. We don't acknowledge that so we think oh that was us! That was my physical self I was on a physical craft i was manipulated and my semen extracted and i'm not happy about it

54:55 But in this wider context, that makes sense. And it is the other side reaching out to be like you can't ignore us! Yeah I think that's right. It's the problem with literalism again we mistake the physical for the literal but alien entities can be as physical as they are non-physical. They are products of the pathology of the soul What's really being dismembered is our imperious ego point of view, which thinks that we are absolutely the center of consciousness and our dismemberment is really the dismemberment of the ego and its literalistic perspective so that we are willy-nilly. We die to ourselves as it were – we don't die literally but we die to ourselves, we

55:59 blindness, our former preconceptions, our worldview. We are initiated into a completely different worldview in which the other world of the soul takes preference and comes back to us and so we become less egotistical, less self-important, less arrogant, less hubristic – that's the idea! And that is why we all need to be initiated and indeed sensibly all tribal cultures place initiation rites at certain times of a life as an absolute priority. But it's all in the ancient myths, in Ancient Egypt the key god Osiris he was dismembered and so on and reconstituted Dionysus in the Greeks was dismembered and reconstituted Orpheus was dismembered because one of the great shaman figures The musician who has the sacred songs

57:02 and thereby gets access to the underworld where his wife, i.e., the symbol of his soul has died and gone into the underworld and he retrieves her. And that's a traditional shamanistic task—retrieving lost souls! So yes dismemberment and reconstitution death and rebirth is an archetypal structure which we can't get away from and we seem to have ignored it And one of the things that makes me most angry is our neglect of, not angry but you know despondent, is our neglect of adolescent children who have no initiation rights. They remain children except when they initiate themselves which they feel impelled to do in gang culture for instance which has very strict initiatory rules and you have to show absolute loyalty to the peer group, you have to commit certain

58:04 violent acts or daring acts, or courageous act. Tremendously rule-bound you know? You have to wear uniforms and get tattooing and scars just like traditional tribal initiation rites but you can't really initiate yourself because you remain within the cohort within the gang culture. The whole point of initiation is to move you from childhood into wider society, into adulthood together with other adults and so on. And that's why when often very violent tribal initiation rites are painful you're given scars or circumcised you know? You're starved, you're put in a symbolic grave and left alone... you know? You're beset by daimons and visions the vision quest of the American Indians

58:59 But that's difficult, you know. They're real ordeals but your reward is that you come out knowing who you are feeling that you're a man or woman proper. You've undergone these tests and passed them and your reward is you enter into the fullness of adult life and the secret myths of the tribe are revealed to you. All the creation myths are given to you unfold before you like a great tapestry and so on we don't have I mean the Christian church had sort of, it used to have kind of token initiation rites. Baptism confirmation but they didn't have anything like the severity all our efforts now seem to be to protect children from any kind of suffering or harm or pain it's a mistake children don't like that they want a bit of hardship to find out who they are you know

59:55 And that's why brat camps are so successful. You take a lot of spoiled brats, then you make them walk for miles across the desert and build their own files and cook their own food, and they all cry and wail for three days but after about three days they like it! They feel they've achieved something They've overcome hardship, and they stop whining and crying. And they get on with it! Yeah you can almost see the dismemberment motif playing out in that process...the breaking down and the building up. I know we're kind of at the end of the line here but man, you are really one of my favorite people to talk to even though it is few and far between

1:00:35 I appreciate you doing this once again. We of course have to get the plugs in, but I am curious as we're talking about the things people can do to follow up on your work if you have any other favorite thinkers or authors that are out there right now throw them into but especially in the 40 and realm which is a really dwindling suffocating realm that's really hard to find gems in today But I wanted to ask you that, but also of course tell us about your work and where people can follow up if they like the cut of your jib. Oh they could just look me up on Google my books are all there. You go to my website it's a rather primitive website but i have some interesting articles i've published on it which were all written for 40 and times because i put them up on my website things like that

1:01:33 As for, I don't read many modern books. Too many! 80% of my reading is novels that's what i am a novelist. I'm not a philosopher or thinker or an intellectual you know? I like a good story and I think my non-fiction books are bit like novels in that I tell all the stories in them. You know, Diamonic Reality is full of stories from the other world wonderful things... And my interpretations well you can take them or leave them. I think having a sense of wonder is the main object, really. You know? I think people should read more Jung and they should read more Hillman and they should read more Henri Corbin who was a great exponent of imagination. He made popularly the word imaginal for the in-between realm between this world and the other world

1:02:27 the Mundus Imaginalis, the imaginal world which is now passed into popular currency. And if you can't read Corbin because he's quite difficult and is dealing with medieval Sufi culture then you can read Tom Cheetham who has written a lot of books about Corbin and tells us what's in them that was my shortcut There's probably lots of others, but mostly I'd urge people to read more fiction. Good fiction! Read proper novels and poetry and drama. You know? I can't tell you how much I got out of the plays of Henrik Ebsen. I think he is the greatest tragedian since Shakespeare. I'm sorry that more people don't read literature of that kind because in the end it's much more nourishing and rewarding

1:03:22 than reading endless non-fiction books full of ideas and theories, all of which are not as rich or satisfying. Go back to the arts for God's sake! Read my novels forget the nonfiction Yeah, the good people. I hear good things! I need to get into it. Yeah nobody's read that yet yeah Well hey i appreciate you most as a curator of good ideas so i had to ask about other things that you had read and other places to look for insight and stuff but i'm just a big fan of the non-fiction work you do It's always a big part of my job because it's hard for me to extract knowledge from

1:04:14 fiction in a way that works for this kind of show. So your nonfiction work really is useful for me, but yeah I love it! It's been an honor and pleasure thanks for spending the time with me once again and take care out there! Love you Gregor enjoy your shows! Ah thank you i try! So he's great okay though bye-bye for now we'll meet again in another life indeed okay And boom goes the dynamite, the ever humble and insightful Patrick Harper. Kind of him to say he listens to THC once in a while? I take that as a big badge of honor because i'm a huge fan of his books and having now read another one... ...I see why you might say it's like a trilogy or three-part series there are huge overlapping areas because these topics all bleed over into each other

1:05:09 So it's like holding up one grand mystery and looking at it from three different angles. Like I said in the beginning, he is a great curator of good ideas. He minds the past and pulls out the gems and gives his own personal take just really through the examples that he chooses to highlight Clearly I have an affinity for that approach. It's how I try to go about this show, at least play the part of being neutral in an interview because it's just a better way to do interviews and it's not hard to get a good idea of what I think is interesting and has merit just by who and what I'm highlighting through the nature of guest selection

1:05:53 But i had a good time with this i hope you agree I love the incorporation of indigenous models he was doing that before it was cool. I like how we talks about the western mind and the difficulty we have processing these other trains of thought sometimes, i like how we talks about mystery as not something to be solved but something to be engaged with Just a lot of good stuff and i really do feel like if you read his three books demonic reality philosophers secret fire and secret tradition of the soul. Can you find them convincing you end up with a pretty well developed and likely accurate, in detail model for life death cryptids ufo's the nature of things and all this stuff we talked about today

1:06:43 I still struggle with how something so fundamental, so influential to and for our reality could also be so subtle as to be deniable. I guess the premise though is that if you don't engage with any of it will just leave you alone clearly not true for the abductees but in general we're saying But if you do decide to explore it through half a dozen different avenues, you will get a response pretty reliably. And many guests have said that whether they're magic practitioners or Entheogen users... If you don't go to the shaman, shamanic things won't happen! I guess it's as simple as that and I personally have gotten enough to know it's real

1:07:35 But sometimes you think you just want more or you want a re-confirmation of the things that have gotten fuzzy in your mind. Either way, I'm glad Patrick was willing to do this again! Fun stuff to think and talk about A great birthday present to myself, I guess is releasing a good episode. And to me this definitely qualifies and on the subject of qualifying as a good episode let's look at the review score from plus members for The Last Show with Walter Bosley. I was a little unsure it's unique stuff it's obscure but to me some of the best episodes I've ever done are the ones I consider classics

1:08:18 They're the ones that are often about pretty obscure, unknown threads where we just really get into the minutia of things and try to give all the details that present a clear case or a full complete story. Oftentimes those ones become my favorites and I am not alone A 4.9 Unbelievable You just don't see that very often folks Big happy birthday to me indeed. That is right guys, working on my birthday! So dedicated... 39 years young Hard to believe I'm almost 40, I certainly don't feel it When i started this show, I felt like one of the cool things was being so young when it really was mostly older guys and now im almost forty its nuts

1:09:09 But yes, releasing what I consider another good show coming off a high like that. A 4.9? Things are good! I really cannot complain all i want for my birthday is for everything to keep going how it's going really in all areas of life and for you to treat yourself to THC+. How about that who asks people to get themselves something for their own birthday?! I think a selfless gesture like that should be rewarded But we will see big thanks again to Patrick. Let's take a look at the meetup calendar, look at that THC meetups as far as the eye can see March 30th We have one at Fieldhouse Brewing Abbotsford British Columbia Canada April 4th The Flame International Restaurant in LA April 6th Tallahassee Florida April 8th Huntington Indiana and Carbondale Illinois

1:10:04 April 12th, Golden Colorado. April 13th Philadelphia Pennsylvania. April 20th London Hey that's 420 would you look at that? And we'll end it there but lots of stuff happening go meet some new friends based on a mutual love of weird stuff covered on THC It's nice to know more locals its nice to have a network Go to higher side meetups.com for more details if you heard of a location near you or go make your own, it's free, it's easy, very low risk and potentially very high reward but that's it for me very happy with this one also very happy with the next two I have recorded and both very different subjects again life is good I know that the foundations of our society are quite shaky but

1:10:57 I feel like someone, somewhere has been saying that for most of my life. And yeah there's clearly always strikes and gutters but it's never really been a match for the hyperbole and the fear and the panic that i'm usually hearing about But I hope a lot of you feel that same way That things maybe aren't as bad for you personally As they seem For the wider culture out there That means we're winning? Hard to say anymore But again, loved it. Take care of you and yours I'm getting out of here i've done my part Your move demonic reality deniers secrets of the soul keepers And agents of the other world your fucking move woke up this morning with light in my eye and then realized It was dark outside It was a lie

1:11:59 Coming down from the sky Must be those strangers that come every night Whose saucers shaped light put people uptight Leave blue-green footprints that glow in the dark I hope they get home Mr. Spaceman

1:12:45 Won't you please take me along? Do anything wrong, hey! Won't you please take me along the high side. Woke up this morning was feeling quite weird I had flies in my beer My toothpaste was smeared I opened my window they'd written my name

1:13:30 We'll see you Hey Mr. Spaceman Won't you please take me along? Don't do anything wrong Hey Won't you please take me along to the highest side? Spaceman, won't you please take me along? I won't do anything wrong Hey

1:14:26 Won't you please take me along the high side? Please, take me along the high side.