Speaker 1
Well, the way it lands that is the what you've articulated in probably in about five minutes is quite extraordinary and and i would you know i want the transcript of that or the clip i show when you when this goes out i shall clip that articulation over those last few minutes because that's absolutely stunning and it's absolutely how what i believe and what i feel And so I feel completely aligned with what you've just said. Thank you. As regards your second question, it's like, how do we do it? I think probably the term at scale throws us off because that keys in, for me anyway throws me off I should say because it keys in to my almost my fear or desperation or desire to be of help and to make an impact and to you know it evokes you know gosh how can we do this quickly to reach enough people?
Speaker 2
Okay, this is too big and too scary, and then
Speaker 1
we can't do it. Yeah, yeah, and then we can't do it. You know that lovely phrase of... Vaya Kamala. Thank you. You know, who says, you know, the times are urgent. The times are
Speaker 2
urgent, we must slow down.
Speaker 1
We must slow down, and that so works for me, because I got it, I was gardening outside a few years back, musing on my fairly perpetual kind of drive to do stuff, you know, and thinking, why are you so driven? And, you know, and this sort of better, deeper voice came inside and said, you know, what you should take as a mantra is you've got all the time in the world um because of course my drive was coming from you know hurry up we've got to do this at scale fast you know so so i think that's for me at any rate i need to i need to sort of reverse that and say we've got all the time somehow things are working out more perfectly than we planned. From my rational self, when I look at the world, watch the news, and not when I look out of the window, because when I look out of the window, I see trees and sunshine, and then I walk into town, and it's all very fine. But when I watch the news, seems so clearly a mess. And despite that, I have hope. And I feel that things are working themselves out, that the story is so grand, is so, the evolutionary wave is so, you know, evolution is so powerful. That the image I have is of an enormous wave which also has sort of planks in it. You know, sometimes, you know, sort of debris. And I don't want that to sound callous as if human tragedy and suffering is just, you know, planks floating in a wave. Of course it's not. But in some way, I do have hope. And so I think all we can do, each of us, is to, if we can be true to ourselves, if we can find through whatever spiritual work we're doing, whatever kind of psychological work we're doing, insight and so on, somehow find what it is that we are called to do, and then to do it. It's almost like that's all we can do. Yeah. Does that make sense? Does that sound? Totally does. Yes,
Speaker 2
yes. Connect to the web of life. Ask what do you want of me and respond to the answers in real time is all of the law, basically, as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1
Yes. And of course, a lot of people will say, well, I don't know what to do. You know, I feel lost. That's the hard bit. Yeah, that's the hard bit. And so that's, I guess, you know, dare one say it, I don't know where people like you and I come in and people who are presenting this material, because people will listen to an idea. You see, one of the reasons why I like articulating ideas and exploring ideas in conversation and so on and writing is because one idea can absolutely fire you and help you to get on track. It's not like, you know, that we need Hollywood prescriptions of massive changes. Sometimes one thing can just get us on track and help us, you know. And then from that, everything flows. Because if we believe that consciousness is causal to physical reality, then something very strange is going on with all the awful stuff in the world at a level of consciousness. I mean, that raises this interesting question of what's happening in the world of consciousness. But it also offers the invitation for us to work in consciousness too.
Speaker 2
Yes, if everything arises from consciousness first, then how we, it seems to me, how we curate our consciousness, how we are, and this is the basis of every spiritual practice also, the genuine one, is that being, and being connected, and actually the L word of we need to be in love, and that's really hard, partly because love has lots of different meanings, and I don't know, I love gooseberry pie, it's a different kind of love, but it's finding that I find raw, wild compassion to be a more useful set of language for me. That's nice, yeah. Because it means more than love does. And being that feels to me at the moment, finding that inside is really important. And then being that in concert with the web of life, which has a slightly different feeling to it, seems to really matter. But yes, over to you.
Speaker 1
Well, that raises, you see, the interesting question of, you know, at the heart of the mystical experience is that experience of love, as you say, you know, oneness and love. But we, as well as beings, we also do. And will is at the heart of our capacities too. That's why psychosynthesis interests me so much, because it places a lot of emphasis on this. And so the question arises, you know, we have these mystical experiences and insights and feelings and so on. But then the question comes, well, what are you going to do? And we have this capacity to will in the world as well. And that tends to get under-emphasized in spiritual training, or it can be. All the stress is on the mystical experience. That's why magic interests me as a concept. So I have this understanding that there's the mystical impulse, which is to achieve union. But there's also the magical impulse, which is to actually act in the world, to do in the world. And
Speaker 2
that's, so I would call what you're calling will might be what I call intent. Exactly. That we hone our intent and we set it out. Oh, I think we just started a new podcast, but let's really go down this line because this I find really interesting because there's the whole manifesting movement, which leaves me quite cross and I have to try and remember compassion, compassion, compassion, because otherwise I want to throw things at the wall. I read something, I think Jamie Wheal, and one of his very interesting blogs that he sends out, and he was talking about he and his wife live in Colorado, and he'd been to a men's group, which he found quite challenging, and that's a separate conversation. His wife had been to the local, we're all ladies together, and we're going to set our intent, and the woman who was leading it was setting her, manifesting a private jet now, because she really deserved that. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so for people not watching the video, Philip just put his hands over his eyes. I was incandescent. If you can manifest a private jet, you could also be working on, you know, I don't know, small things like world peace. A new hospital
Speaker 2
Are you ending predatory capitalism and changing the superorganism? I know you want a private jet.
Speaker 2
yet, it's very likely that this woman has by now got a private jet. Because actually, if you do learn how to hone your intent, and I think for me, a lot of the work then is addressing all the other parts of ourselves that are going, no, you don't deserve that. No, you can't have it. No, that's too big of an ask. And all the bits that compete to tell us why that's not possible. If we learn how to bring all of ourselves into alignment, I have an image of getting all the chariot horses at least in the same field, if not harnessed up to the same chariot heading in the same direction, then human intent is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. But what we're doing with it is manifesting private jets. And imagine if it wasn't the purview of Western industrial capitalists who want more stuff. So I'll stop ranting because clearly I'm very triggered. Over to you of what is will for you and honing it, because this is the practice of what we call magic. For me, I think it was Israel Regardie who said it's the, you'll get the quote right, but it basically is the application of intent is what magic is. Talk to me about this. Open it up for me.
Speaker 1
Okay. Well, so like all these things, you know the way we talk about something as if it's one thing. You were talking about love and of course the difficult... I once had a book title, a book I wanted to write was called 42 Words for Love because I read somewhere that in Sanskrit there are 42 words for love. So...
Speaker 2
Please write it.
Speaker 1
I'll try. And likewise with Will, you see, so Asagioli, who's the psychiatrist who developed psychosynthesis, which I trained in, really good on will and he talks about how you what you have to do is you have to sort of look at it analyze it and you have essentially you have good will but then you have bad will i mean there's lots of you know people talk about bad actors bad will bad
Speaker 2
faith absolutely
Speaker 1
yeah bad will good will bad you have skillful will which can be used skillfully for bad intent or good intent. Then you have transpersonal will. And, you know, in the end, you know, may thy will be done on earth, you know, as it is in heaven. So, in other words, you know, when I'm looking at intent, what is coming from my ego, if you like, from my own personal desires? And it's not like there's something wrong with that necessarily, but you need to really question that. I mean, that thing about the private jets, there's a whole little sort of meme of tele-evangelists who ask for donations for private jets. And if you ever want to shriek a bit more, just Google that and watch the little YouTube clips of tele-evangelists asking people for millions of dollars for their own private jets. It's really quite peculiar. Also
Speaker 2
slightly antithetical to what I understand to be the foundations of Christianity. It's
Speaker 1
very, very peculiar and makes compulsive viewing, I have to say. Does it? It would be very bad for my blood pressure. Very bad for your blood pressure, that's right. So when you discover, it's a bit like, you know, the way that the experience of love opening to the reality of love as a mystical experience, when it's not tempered with understanding leads to the kind of abuses you get in, you know, you wonder how come people are so spiritual and inverted commas. And yet they, you know, and this is what happened in the 60s as well. Everybody turned on to love, took acid and smoked pot and was loving everybody. And
Speaker 2
it wasn't always consensual. And even if it was power, power dynamics were influencing what was happening.
Speaker 1
Exactly. So it's not as simple as discovering that at the heart of your being are these two capacities, to love and to will, you know. if you can develop the capacity to love and the capacity to will in a way where you're also integrating the shadow you're also coming to know yourself so that the the kind of sources of energy that you're plugging into of of love and will aren't then getting distorted by your sub-personalities that are evolved from trauma, that have desires or behaviors that are problematic, that they're not being even strengthened by that. So it's a whole work, if you like, from my understanding of it, is that we need to work, if you like, psychotherapeutically with getting to know ourselves and working with who we are. You know, the classic know thyself dictum. Yes. And gaining that level of self-knowledge. And for me, psychosynthesis happens to be a great way. I mean, there are all sorts of ways of doing it, of course, now. Because otherwise you get the spiritual bypassing problem, where you avoid all that, you try and plug into the mains, as it were, and then you get the problems. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Okay. So we could practice magic, we could learn to hone our intent, but we have to do the inner work in concert with that so that we're using our intent in service to life, basically, not in service to our whatever wounded part of ourselves needs a private jet to feel better. Because we have watched the richest men on the planet send rockets into space and it still didn't heal the wounded parts inside. And if anybody needed to understand that more boxes from Amazon is not the answer. The fact that a guy who currently seems to be running the US is on twice, once a fortnight, ketamine to combat depression, should be quite clear that the predatory capital model is broken. And you can have more money than any other human being in the world by several orders of magnitude, and you're still needing ketamine for your depression means money is not the answer yeah
Speaker 1
yeah and what what's going to be interesting in the coming years with what's happened in the states is you know we could see the way the future is unfolding as somebody's got hold of the script you know ever since 9-11 really somebody seems to have got hold of the script for humanity and is writing a really bad B-movie. Yes,
Speaker 2
I know. Yes, I keep looking at this going, if I sent that to a publisher as a possible book, they would have said, no, don't be ridiculous, I can't have. Oh, look, it did. And the really scary thing now, if I'm trying to write through Topian novels, is anything that I write now is going to be obsolete by publication. It'll take me a year to write. It'll take a year to edit. Earliest it could possibly come out is going to be mid-2026. It's probably 2027. And it's going to be obsolete. And it will have been supplanted by things that I could not possibly imagine. It's quite terrifying. Yes.
Speaker 1
You know that phrase, you know know, you couldn't make this stuff up. Couldn't make it up. Is what, you know, Stephanie and I sitting in front of the television,
Speaker 2
you know, we would say
Speaker 1
that every evening. Yeah. You know, and yet, there's a lovely haiku by the poet Basho, you know, and the only line I can remember is, and yet, dot, dot, dot. Oh, fantastic. You know, right. And it's...
Speaker 2
Yes, time is not linear. I think we have to remember this. Time is not what we think it is. Time is not what we
Speaker 1
think it is. And if you believe that at the heart of reality is love, and that at the heart of reality is meaning as it were by definition you know somehow despite all evidence to the contrary you know it we we have this conviction if you've had mystical experience you have this profound kind of conviction that life is meaningful that life is at its heart is good and is coming from a source of love somehow at, in a way that we absolutely can't understand with our rational minds, this is all part of this plan. So the madness that we're witnessing. And I suppose it's easy to criticize that approach and say, well, that just will provoke a kind of fatalism. I think it could do. You know, you say, oh, this is cool, man. You know, somebody with a joint in their mouth saying, it's all okay. I'm not saying, it's not, it's profoundly not okay. You know, and yet. And
Speaker 2
yet we can still find the practice of being and leaning into the service of life. Yeah. Because we can't do anything else, I think. You
Speaker 1
can't do anything else. And, you know, a friend said to me when I was articulating this idea, he said, but of course that's a delusion on your part. Which
Speaker 2
is, it's a belief that is not provable. Yeah. And so therefore that is, and another word for that is a delusion. Yes.
Speaker 1
And it's an experience, for me, it's an experience, you know, and it may be because, you know, because I'm deluded, it may be because I'm sort of temperamentally optimistic, and sort of even-natured, and, you know, that's my temperament. I'm just lucky to be a sort of a happy, optimistic person most of the time. That's kind of where I'm at. And it may be coming from a delusion, but deep down, I don't believe that. I believe I've contacted, you know, which is, I guess, what everybody does who has firm convictions, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2
this is the nature of belief. Yeah, yeah. It's that it's solid. But it gives us a route for action. And if anything that we believe to be true, if we adhere to the concept that consciousness creates matter, for instance, which is a belief system, but that one's quite easy to test. Yeah. I think this is the thing, that you and I exist in a world where we have seen that honing one's will or one's intent can have actual real world outcomes. And that changing who we are energetically shifts the world around us. And it does it in ways that would appear to be miraculous, actually do appear to be miraculous. Things happen that are not explainable within what we consider to be ordinary reality. And we know that this happens. We have observed this. And therefore, I think the belief systems that we build may not be accurate, but they are actionable. They give us an action route to take. And that's really vital in the breakdown that we're seeing. The system needed to die. The system is currently being hit by very large-sized chambers, by people who would not necessarily take it the way that we feel to be leaning into life. But they are breaking apart a system that needed to go. Maybe,
Speaker 1
yes. So maybe from the screenplay point of view, maybe it has to be this way. Maybe they have to be smashing, messing stuff up more quickly than would otherwise occur, you know. No, no, exactly. And I think you've homed in on a very interesting point that, you know, I talked about this belief system I have inside, or this belief I have inside, based on experience. But then exactly as you said, the way my life has unfolded has confirmed it. In other words, you know, we could have a whole conversation about all the extraordinary, miraculous kind of synchronicities. Maybe we should. That would be a good conversation for people
Speaker 2
to hear, but not now, but yes. Yeah, not that yet. But that has enabled you to get to
Speaker 1
where I am. So, you know, all the things that have happened, all the things I've achieved have been as a result of working from that place in consciousness and things have unfolded accordingly. Yeah. So that confirms the belief. You say, well, I must be onto something because of this. Yes.
Speaker 2
We could take this so far. We need to stop shortly. When I get to that, and this is actually where I come from, so I'm completely in alignment with that, but I'm also aware that when I have conversations with people who hold almost antithetical views to me, they have a similar experience. And their belief system is as rooted, you know, fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalists of any stripe. They have very similar narratives. That
Speaker 1
life conforms to whatever they believe.
Speaker 2
And I wonder where that takes us. That their belief is so powerful that they are able, that around them, reality... Constellates. Yes. Which is what we've just been talking about. That's how you get the private jet.
Speaker 1
Yeah. And which is what, you know, that fascinating work they've done on expectancy theory, where the best predictor of when you're going to die is when you think you're going to die. Yes. So that people who generally have a mindset they're going to live into their 90s are likely to live longer than people who constantly tell themselves they're going to die in their 50s.
Speaker 2
Yes, that's interesting, isn't it? Because I saw my own gravestone in a vision when I was 26. And if I'm still alive the day after that, which is roughly 10 years from now, I'll be extremely surprised. Quite happy, but extremely surprised. So, yes, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1
And likewise, even with exercise, somebody's written a whole book about it. And it's so fascinating that, you know, it's that what we believe tends to manifest in that way. So it's not so much the amount of exercise you take, but it's what you think about the exercise, whether you think you have enough of it or not. So if you think you're not getting enough exercise, although you're pounding away on a bicycle.