Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we believe that another world is still possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to shape that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and I spend quite a lot of my time searching for people who are on a parallel path, who might even cross over. People who understand that this is the moment where we shed the shackles of modernity and step into a new set of stories that could help us grow into the fullness of our potential. And obviously, because I wouldn't be telling you this otherwise, this week's guest is one of these people. You may know Alexander Beiner from Rebel Wisdom back in the day, 2017 to 2022, when it was helping us all stay sane through the pandemic, exploring the cutting edge of systems change and cultural sense making. Holding so many fascinating conversations with the people who are thinking very hard about where we are and where we might go. He's an executive director of Breaking Convention, Europe's longest running conference on psychedelic medicine and culture. And then he wrote The Bigger Picture; How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the world, which detailed his part in a clinical trial that took him deep into what it is to be human.
Manda: On top of that, he has recently launched Kainos, an alternative media platform and studio that is on both Substack and YouTube. And he says of it that: 'in an age of upheaval, we tell stories that help people make sense of the world and imagine new futures. Our films, articles and experiences combine cultural sense making with hope, imagination and impact'. And this is where we need to be. This edge place where spirituality meets psychology and mythology. Where culture meets politics and everything meets our desperate yearning to grow up and become the good enough ancestors we know we can be. And we need the pathfinders, people who have the courage to stretch out beyond the edges of our being. And Alexander is so clearly one of these. His explorations of what make us human in the psychedelic realm merge with his documentary making. And then Kainos takes up where Rebel Wisdom left off, delving deeply into the nature of the moment and how we might become more than we are. I spent the whole weekend before recording this conversation, listening to Alexander having conversations with Nora Bateson and Jamie Wheal and Daniel Pinchbeck, and I totally recommend that you head off and find them. They were all inspiring. They all took me to places I didn't expect to go, and they all taught me things that I am glad I know.
Manda: And they all gave me a grounding for this conversation so that we could go to the places that we need to go, the places we don't go to often enough, beginning to ask the questions that we are going to need to ask, individually and collectively, of ourselves and each other, if we're going to take our place as Conscious nodes in the web of life. So this was a genuinely inspiring conversation in a series that I hope is helping you to make sense of these times. To accept that the old system is gone, and that something truly generative could arise if we all take part in its making. So here we go, people of the podcast. Please do welcome Alexander Beiner; Psychonaut, author of The Bigger Picture, creator of Kainos and deep, Deep Thinker.
Manda: Alexander, I may remember to call you Ali at some point in the course of this conversation. Thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I was a huge fan of Rebel Wisdom. I am now a huge fan of Kainos, having spent the entire weekend pretty much exclusively listening to you and reading your Substack and your book. So let's start with the easy ones. How are you and where are you this glorious morning?
Alex: Well, firstly, thanks for having me. It's good to be here. And I where am I? I'm in south east London, at home. And how am I? I'm doing well. I'm really immersed in our first documentary, so I'm in a kind of creative flow. So yeah, I feel overall pretty good.
Manda: Okay. So we'll definitely come back to talking about the documentary, because you're a filmmaker and a writer and a podcaster, and it feels to me that you're aiming into the thrutopian space that this podcast is also aiming for; how do we set the imaginal space for a future that we would actually be happy to bequeath to the generations that come after us? How do we be good ancestors on a narrative level? And that means on an emotional level and on an energetic level. And you're one of the few people I've spoken to that I think gets all those levels. So I really want to explore those. But let's just start with where you're at at the moment, other than the fact that you have a very beautiful working cocker spaniel who is waiting for a walk. Thank you. Thank you for giving us time. What is most alive for you at this moment? We're recording on the day, it's basically a month since Trump was inaugurated. The whole energies of the world are changing. You've started Kainos, you're working on a documentary, your book has been out for a while. Of all of these things, what is most alive for you?
Alex: Yeah, that's a great question. What is most alive for me is holding uncertainty and trying to be comfortable in it, which is something that I believe is essential for the times we live in. I don't think it's something I'm naturally very good at either. And maybe that's always true, you know, we're trying to get better at the things that we're not naturally good at. So, I agree with with what you said, I I think the most important thing we can do at this time in history is to figure out how do we move towards, as you said really beautifully, a world we would like to leave to the generations who come after us. And that's such a complex problem. And as you pointed out, it touches on pretty much every level of what it is to be a human being. So what what I feel most inspired by at the moment is the idea that with the end of the liberal world order, which I can define in a bit; let's say the kind of global agreement that we've had since World War two, I think is now really coming to an end in quite a profound way, not just economically and politically, but in our own minds, because the assumptions behind it are being shown to be incomplete at best and maybe actually harmful as well; so that opens up a huge opportunity for choosing, imagining new futures. It's very difficult, I think, to imagine a new future. There's that famous phrase, you might remember who this is, but that there's nothing harder to imagine than a world without capitalism, right? Like it's impossible to imagine.
Manda: Frederick Johns, I think.
Alex: Yeah. So I think that's probably true of any system that we're in. It's probably true of the earlier 1500s, if you'd said to someone, look, there could be a world without the influence of the Catholic Church being the dominant paradigm.
Manda: Or the divine right of kings, as Ursula Le Guin said.
Alex: Exactly, yeah. So it would have seemed absurd to most people. And so I think we're in a similar moment now, but a much stranger moment because they didn't have the internet. And I think that's a major, major factor. And the reason that's important is because our town square, where we go to exchange ideas and foment revolutions, is actually controlled by algorithms and by billionaires or near trillionaires. So it's actually where do we go to organise? And of course, you know, it's not black and white because there's what Yancey Strickler, who is an interesting thinker - he was actually one of the founders of Kickstarter, he writes on Substack now - but he has this great theory called the Dark Forest theory of the internet. Which was the idea that particularly during sort of 2014 through the 2020s, when a lot of people felt very constricted about what they might share, ideas they might share on the internet, because they didn't want to get cancelled or in trouble or lose their jobs. People started retreating to the the dark forests; so WhatsApp groups, private conversations, where they could explore ideas and express themselves. He actually takes the metaphor from The Three-body Problem, the Chinese science fiction novel, which was recently made into a show on Netflix.
Alex: Because in that story the question is, well, why haven't we gotten signals from alien civilisations, if there's all these billions of planets that could sustain life? And the answer to that is, disturbingly, that any one who makes noise in the dark forest attracts predators. So once you do have the technology, once you are civilised, you don't make any noise. You don't want to get eaten, right? It's kind of like a little mouse in a dark forest. And so, in Strickler's view, that happened online. But I think if we take that idea and maybe evolve it a bit, we now have a situation where lots of us, can gather on zoom, we can gather in WhatsApp groups, we can arrange meetings in real life to really come together and ask the question 'okay, what does it look like to create the conditions for a new culture to emerge from this in-between time'? Because it's an opportunity. It's so difficult when the culture is so embedded and fixed, but when everything gets flipped upside down, there's opportunity. And there's also great threat because it's also a very dangerous, chaotic time.
Manda: Okay. My goodness, there's so much we could explore in that. All right, there's two avenues that I want to go down. One is the road much less travelled that I think you get, because a bigger picture, the book that you recently published, looks at your experiences of DMT. A very well structured five sessions over time, with time in between to process. And you met a teaching presence. And it seems to me, I come from the contemporary shamanic world, I did a seven day ayahuasca retreat back in the 90s.
Alex: Wow.
Manda: I suspect that might be before you were born.
Alex: I was born in 1987, so I would have been young.
Manda: It totally transformed my life. I haven't done any work within entheogens since, but my core belief is we ask the web of life, what do you want of me? And we respond to the answers. And trying to think that we can sort things out on a head mind level; particularly, I'm reading a lot of cognitive neuroscience on behaviour and how behaviours shift and how beliefs shift and all of those things. And so much of what we do is so far below our cognitive level that we have actually got very little chance of cracking those things open unless we get to a really deep, energetic space. But most of the people in the shifting narrative space are not interested in energy and where our energetic space is. So I would really like to unpick that with you because I think you get it. I would also like to look at the cognitive level. But can we begin with, I have a core question, which is at one point your teaching presence said: in a bigger picture, it doesn't matter if the human race becomes extinct. Which is more or less what Chris Bache got to when he did his very long, over 20 years, LSD sessions. Which was there is a chance of the future human arising, but it might not, and actually we don't care. 'We' being the grander space of everything. And I wonder two things; did you get a sense that there is a possibility, as Chris did, that a future human could evolve? But second, and more importantly, if it doesn't matter, what does matter? Did you get a sense of that? Over to you.
Alex: What a great question. I've done so many conversations about the book, and that's one of my favourite questions, actually. Like what does matter, if that doesn't matter? So yeah, maybe I'll start with my thoughts on that. I have the sense that it helps to hold all the possibilities at the same time. Because on one level, it matters very much to me and probably many of us, that the human race does survive and flourish. And on a grander scheme, it doesn't really matter, because in the grand scheme of things, I think there is simultaneously Free will and predestination happening. Which is kind of a hard thing to explain in language, but in one sense everything is destined to happen and the other sense it's happening through the exercise of free will. And I think what really matters is that process. That there's a process of, I suppose as Hindu philosophy would say, it's a kind of a dance. It's existence dancing with itself, and it's a game, it's Lila, it's play. And so that for me has always been very resonant. And from my psychedelic experiences, not even being particularly well versed in Hinduism, I would very often come to that sense and a laughter from that, like, oh! What a ride! Like Bill Hicks says in his famous comedy bit about life is like a roller coaster. It's just a wild, chaotic, dramatic experience. Alan Watts speaks to that beautifully. And I think also I've been very influenced by Taoism and a sense that there's an unfolding balance to the world. You know, white implies black, light implies dark, and that this process is deeper than anything that might happen to human beings or anywhere else, because it's kind of a deep code of the universe. And I think stories are also deeply encoded into the fabric of reality in some way. So it's like an incredible story that we're living through. And if the possibility isn't there that it could all go wrong, then it's not really a good story, right? You know, you have to have the stakes. You have to have the possibility that things might not work out. And I think we can't really get anywhere interesting to some kind of more evolved future unless we're able to be with that and embrace it and enjoy, almost, the drama of the uncertainty of will we make it or not?
Manda: I hear you. And two things arise to me. One is I think it was in Vanessa Andreotti's book Hospicing Modernity, but it might have been something else that I read from hers; she wanted to marry a man of Spanish descent and her indigenous grandfather, because she's half indigenous, half German, Brazilian. Her indigenous grandfather said, no, you can't do that; he won't know how to laugh and he'll get bitten by a snake. And both of those only made sense when I unpicked other indigenous concepts. One, I think it was Rob Percival in his The Meat Paradox, he visited various indigenous tribes and he said, they laugh all the time. They laugh when they're sad. They laugh when they're happy. They laugh when half the tribe has just been machine gunned. And it's not inappropriate laughter, it's that they are connected to the web of life in a sense of that compassionate resilience and being and belonging, where laughter is what we offer. We as human beings, we offer our joy. And when that joy bubbles over into laughter, that is our gift to the web, which seemed to me very beautiful. And the other part, if you get bitten by a snake, only made sense when I read Tyson Yunkaporta (his new one) and he said: we don't feel that fight and flight response that you all talk about, because we know where the predators are, always. And what turned out was Vanessa's future husband was welcomed in, because they were able to teach him how to know where the snakes were and he did know how to laugh. So it occurs to me to wonder. I lean really heavily into Francis Weller's concept of the trauma culture and initiation culture. Is that something with which you are familiar?
Alex: Not really. No. Interesting, though.
Manda: Okay, so very briefly, because listeners to the podcast have heard this a lot. Francis Weller was a trauma therapist who was influenced very heavily by Patrice Malidoma Somi, who wrote Of water and the Spirit. Patrice Malidoma Somi was indigenous and he was kidnapped by Jesuits, very young, really unpleasant, but escaped quite late in his teens and managed to get across Africa back to his people and was allowed to go through their tribal initiation process late and with a western mindset.
Alex: Yes, I have heard of this.
Manda: And then he wrote the results. And so he influenced Francis Weller a lot. And Weller's contention, or their joint contention, is that all of human evolution, 64 million years since the last mass extinction, billions of years, if we go back to us being hydrogen boiling in the sun, we were an integral part of the web of life. We knew our place as that. And we were what they call an initiation culture. And the hallmarks of an initiation culture are that the members of it undergo intermittent, episodic, contained encounters with death. And the containment is held by the elders, the shamans, the people, and the web of life. You get taken to the edges of yourself. At the moment of potential death, you ask for help because you know it's possible to ask for help, you know how to ask for help. If you are able to receive that help and embody it, then you come back to the people alive. If you don't, you don't survive. But if you come back, then you know your place. And you know that you can ask for help. And you know that the help will be given. And you have that sense. I had a vision recently, I was asking, what do you want? And the answer was trust. And I had that sense of the web of life being really like it was made of bungee cords, and it was very resilient. And I could relax into it and rebound and relax and have that sense of flow and of being held. And that somewhere along the line, something happened to cut a portion of humanity off from that knowing of belonging and that birthright of belonging, and we became the trauma culture. And we aren't held in our contained encounters with death, they're not contained, they're just encounters with death. And the traumas stack and stack and stack until they overflow and we have an epidemic of mental health crises and the dark triad ruling the planet.
Alex: Yes.
Manda: But that was relatively recent, in millions of years of human evolution. It came to Britain, I would say with the Romans. That's because I wrote the Boudicca books, and I think that. But I think it did. I think until the Romans came, we were an initiation culture. It's only 2000 years, that's nothing. And even if we go back to the start, my contention is you can't have our version of agriculture, which is basically enslavement of the web of life, unless you are already separate. So something happened ten, twelve thousand years ago and we are at the evolutionary end point of that. We get to the point where the tech bros think that the the web of life, the natural world is an aesthetic option, which by definition you could choose not to have. Which is functionally insane. But why we get to all of that is, it seems to me that the idea that we need the potential trauma of extinction, maybe a trauma culture meme. And what happens, what would our world feel like, I am asking this because I don't know the answer, but I think you might have got there with your journeys out to the teaching presence. What if there is laughter? What if there is joy and compassion and gratitude, and joyful curiosity of that epistemic humility that Jamie Bristow talks of? What if that's there? Do we need the trauma? I don't know the answer. I'm asking you.
Alex: Mhm. Yeah. What comes to mind is that we rarely laugh alone, even when we watch comedy. My wife and I are really kind of comedy nerds, so we go out to comedy a lot. And it's always striking,if I watch something at home that's really funny, I don't really laugh out loud. I might occasionally, right. But laughter is a communal activity. And so I think that touches on something pretty profound about the situation we find ourselves in culturally, socially. In that I think it's very, very difficult to Laugh in the face of the pain of existence if you think you're alone, which is what our culture believes. For the first documentary of Kainos I've got a section about how did we get here? You know, mentally, in the West. And some of the most compelling reasons I found come through John Vervaeke, and others, he's certainly not the first person to to talk about this. But to go back to sort of pre agriculture, I think it's Charles Taylor, historian, who talks about writing, the written word, creating symbolic representations as one of those first moments of disconnecting, disembedding from the natural world and from one another. And I'm a writer, so, you know, I love the fact that we can do that and I think it's incredible.
Alex: But, it's interesting to kind of trace it, if we really go back. And then I think in the West there were two moments. One was the scientific revolution, in which, quite rightly, there was an understanding that our subjective perception is often wrong, especially when we're trying to agree on things together. So there was a movement to say, okay, right, from people like Galileo and then Descartes and Hobbes, how do we take a step back and observe the world in such a way that we can sort of agree on it, and we minimise our self-deception? But the consequence of that was seeing the world as a machine. We started to see the world as a machine, we started to then think like machines, and now we feel like machines, so we're in this kind of very difficult situation. So I just interviewed Douglas Rushkoff, who's a media theorist for the documentary.
Manda: We've spoken to him on the podcast. Yes.
Alex: Oh, great. Yeah. So Douglas was great as always and was saying, you know, the tech bros see the world as kind of a giant piece of dung with everyone as kind of maggots on it, and they want to be the maggots that grow wings and fly away, either by escaping the world and going to Mars, or transhumanists like Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, wanting to upload themselves into machines. And I've written about it also being a sort of inversion of Christianity, in the sense that there's a moment in the future which will be kind of a transcendent moment, where we escape the bounds of the flesh and live forever. Except it's an inversion, because there is nothing sacred in that worldview. And this is the problem. If you look at the sacred as something that moves beyond the social games we're playing, and that's based on quality instead of quantity, and so thereby can't really be defined. It can only be a lived experience felt with one another. Then without the sacred, there's just really no way I think to genuinely be able to dance with life and laugh in the face of death, because death is just way, way too serious. I mean, it's the end of everything. It's the ego's version of annihilation. Everything will end. Everything. There will be a nothingness. But, you know, of course, Alan Watts points this out.
Alex: You can't really imagine nothingness. There's a yogic practice where you try and imagine going to sleep without ever waking up. And of course, you can't really, because you're paying attention. You're imagining. Even imagining nothingness there's a quality, there's an experience of being alive. And I think if you go deep enough into that through different practices, meditation, psychedelics, it takes many people to an understanding that that quality isn't just bound up in you as who you are, it's universal. You're actually tapping into something that is everything when you do that.
Manda: Exactly.
Alex: And so from that place, then I think we can move into being an initiation culture. I really like that model, I think it makes a lot of sense. And I've written a piece called The Truth About Trauma a couple of years ago, where I interviewed, Bessel van der Kolk and George Bonanno, who wrote a book called The End of Trauma, and Rachel Yehuda, who's a very experienced trauma therapist. And I'm very curious about trauma and the role it now plays in the West. And I think it plays a lot of roles in a society that has stripped religion out of it. So trauma becomes, I think, our society's answer to the question of evil; why do bad things happen?
Manda: Because we're traumatised.
Alex: Because we're traumatised. yeah, bad things happen because you were traumatised as a child. Now the truth is, much of that is actually true. My wife's a clinical psychologist and 95% of the time, if you had a difficult, terrible childhood, you are probably going to really be suffering and maybe hurt people from that place. So there's certainly truth to it, I don't want to knock the whole thing, but I'm very interested in the way in which trauma has become this almost religious force for some people. Where it's all encompassing, it's ancestral, it moves through everything, it's sort of inescapable and it crucially explains why bad things happen. Because you have to have an answer in any religion to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen? And so it's the answer I think we now have, because we don't really have, in secular cultures, anything else.
Manda: My goodness. Okay, again, we're at a forking point. So I have two questions arising at separate places. I lean very heavily into Thomas Hubbell's work on individual, collective and ancestral trauma. But in his model, which I love, is that trauma is a moment frozen in time. Or a trauma response; not everything traumatic evokes a trauma response, but that moment freezes in time. And if we can do the work to unfreeze that individually, collectively and ancestrally, then the healing ripples out. Which strikes me as, first of all, it's not impossible to heal. And if we do the work, there's a compounding effect, which strikes me as good, and I'm wondering where that lands with you. But before we get to that, this is the question of evil. So again, in contemporary shamanic work, there's what I would call Disney shamanism in which everything in the garden is lovely and fluffy and beautiful, and we all skip around with unicorns and roses, and everybody has an eagle as their power animal and let's not go there because it's just too horrible for words. But the actual reality is you put your head above a particular parapet and there are things out there hunting and not all of them like people. And some of them actively dislike people, and some of them feed on people, and that's just the way that the universe is. And if you can connect with the things that understand these realms, then you can be safe. And provided you don't do something functionally stupid, then safety is possible. But there are things out there that I would consider to be extremely nasty, that nonetheless must exist within a universe that I believe at its ground level is infinite compassion. And it seems to me that in the world at this moment, we are watching the rise of both the bit that thrives from compassion and gratitude and wonder and joyful curiosity; and the bit that really thrives on everything that I would consider unpleasant. And there are people who view the things that I consider to be beautiful, right and gorgeous as evil, and vice versa. And that the energy that we put out into the world is either compassionate and full of gratitude, awe and wonder, or it's full of retribution and hate. And that it doesn't matter what the ideas are, the energy is what feeds the two wolves, if we like, in the old metaphor. And you're the only person I've listened to who has spoken of that. And I thought first of all, it was really courageous. I think you were talking to Jamie Wheal. That there are things out there that are feasting on what's happening at the moment, and not all of them are good. And I would like to see if you could explore that more deeply.
Alex: Yeah. I think there's a huge problem in the kind of New age and spiritual worlds, with a lack of comfort around the shadow and around darkness. I think it's also one of the reasons that those worlds and spiritual communities have been so susceptible to sociopathic and narcissistic characters, because it's like this uber acceptance. And that's really not what you even do in nature. I think it's rare you'll find an indigenous culture that's like, yeah, let everything in! I spoke to Josh Schrei, who hosts the Emerald Podcast, about this. He's really got great thoughts on this. And he points out that anyone going into other realms, in different cultures who have experience with that, they guard their minds. And I just started doing that naturally because of experiences I've had, you know, in shamanic experiences. But the key thing, I think, is Carl Jung's concept of the shadow. I think this is the most important thing. I think you can't meet the darkness of the world unless you've connected with and somewhat integrated, or at least are in the process of integrating, which I think is more realistic, the darkest parts of ourselves. I had an experience in Peru when I was in my early 20s, when I went out to drink ayahuasca for the first time. And I had an experience, actually, on San Pedro, it was actually at night, by myself in this kind of dorm room, where it felt this very malevolent, dark presence kind of came in and I felt like I could die at any moment.
Alex: It was like, I could kill you at any moment. And this encounter with it left me quite shaken so I spoke to the Shaman the next day and she said, well, I don't think that was the medicine; I think that was you. And I was so love and light new agey back then, I was like, no, no, it couldn't be that level of sadism, that level of maliciousness. And then I read Ken Wilber's Integral Theory, and Diane Musho Hamilton has very specifically developed a lot of shadow work processes for the integral community, one of which is the 3-2-1 process, which I think is essential for all psychedelic journeying. Because Jung pointed out the dark parts of ourselves we disown them, we push them into the basement of our unconscious, and then they wreak havoc from there. You know, it's like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde comes out at night and he's so cut off from the good, well-behaved doctor that they're not even aware of each other really. Or at least the doctor's not aware of him. I think that's actually about alcoholism, that story, because I did English literature, and I looked at that, I did a few essays on that.
Manda: But then alcoholism is because we're trying to suppress this, yes.
Alex: Yes. Exactly. So it releases inhibition and then the shadow comes out for many people. So the integral method that they use was 3-2-1. So first it's a three. It's an 'it'. So my experience it was so disowned that it's an 'IT'; something is coming in from the outside. And then it becomes a two, so a second person; okay I'm going to have a dialogue with it.
Manda: With you as an other.
Alex: Yeah. How do you see the world? This is a great exercise. Anyone can do this exercise. I do visualisation practices around this and it's really powerful. You go down into the cave and have this encounter, and the third stage is the hardest one, where you genuinely become 'it'. Now everyone's afraid if I become this sadism or whatever it might be, I'm suddenly going to run around like a Viking, just burning villages and raping and pillaging. That's not what happens. What happens is that it becomes a part of you, and it takes its rightful place in your personality. Because everything has a place, everything has a function and has some time or context where it will be useful. So that for me has been a most powerful practice, psychedelically. And to link back to the original question, I think that also helps us to acknowledge that there is evil in the world, and to acknowledge that not all the entities we might encounter in a psychedelic experience or online are benevolent. But more importantly, not every person you encounter is benevolent and just trying their best. And really it's only because of their trauma they're like this. That is way too simplistic. Because we also have to acknowledge even if someone who's highly narcissistic or sociopathic probably did have a traumatic childhood at the root of that, and that holding that compassion is also very important.
Alex: However, you also need to have healthy, firm boundaries, and you also need to be able to fight back when you need to. So that is, I think, crucial for any journeying, any kind of human interaction. And we one of the things religion gives us, it gives us a lot of other things that might not be useful, but it certainly gives us an understanding of what is good and what is bad, in terms of morality, behaviour. So we at least have a guideline in a hyper relativist postmodern culture, it's very confusing to say, well, if everything is relative and there's no such thing as truth itself, how do I know if that's good behaviour or bad behaviour? As soon as I say that it's good or bad I become essentialist in some way, which is the kind of bad word in postmodern thoughts. Because nothing is essential. And I think what's happening now globally, culturally is that people are recognising on a deeper cultural level, some things are essential. You can't have spirituality without essentialism, there has to be some deep down truth to things. And so there's a sense of like, you know what, some behaviours are just wrong and we're going to stand up for that. It's a shame that it's really only the right who's recently been telling that message, because there's all sorts of other problems with the consequences of that.
Manda: Well, their definition of what's right and what's wrong for starters.
Alex: Yeah exactly. However, I think there is something moving around our sense of like, wait a minute, maybe there are essential truths that we can come back to.
Manda: Okay, So what would for you at this moment, and this is our truth for now and it changes, what would your essential truths be?
Alex: Oh interesting question. So I think I'm quite Jungian in this regard. So I think that there is a clear difference between intention and behaviour that comes from a very deep place in what Jung would refer to as The Self. This kind of essential human part of us that goes beyond our personality structure. And if anyone's familiar with the diamond approach, or A.H. Almaas work, the Ridhwan school it's sometimes called; they also have a similar model and this is a big part of my counselling training, so it's one very close to my heart. There is a core essence of who we are and it's simultaneously unique to us but also connected with everything else. And through our life experiences we develop personality structures which are, as one of my teachers, Rafael Morgan always used to phrase it, they're intelligent strategies to survive in the environment you grew up in, but they might be out of date once you evolve and you go, okay, actually, I don't need to be this defensive. I don't need to be this scared of people anymore, whatever it might be. And that, I think, is a core fundamental truth. The Gnostics also pointed to this idea that there is a difference; that's why Jung loved the Gnostics. There is a very clear difference between a personality structure and a thought structure that is disconnected from everything else. It's isolated in its own world, and one that is connected to a deeper foundation of being. And overall, I think, decisions, policies, behaviours that come from a place of pure egotism, where there is no higher purpose than self-interest, are inherently destructive and bad. I don't think self-interest itself is bad. I think self-interest disconnected from any deeper sense of connectedness with the rest of humanity.
Manda: The rest of the web of life, could we say?
Alex: And the rest of the web of life, absolutely. With reality itself. That's why the tech bros are like you said, you know, I think you put it nicely. We don't need the natural world, it's like a nice to have aesthetic.
Manda: It's an aesthetic option.
Alex: It's an aesthetic option. Because of course, from that very disconnected place that seems true. It's not true. And what's very interesting is that the Gnostics had a brilliant take on this, where they pointed out that the ego, when it's disconnected from the self, can't make anything truly new. It's not connected to divine creativity in the way that the self is. It's not authentic, it's inauthentic. So all it can do is replicate the values of the deeper values of our essence. So it's reality TV love instead of genuine love. It's Disneyland reality that gets created. You have these embedded hierarchies instead of the hierarchies in nature. And that process of replication, I think, is a really interesting concept because you can see it in culture and you can see it in art. Like you take Marvel movies versus a really beautifully thought out, heart led indie film. You can feel the difference. Because one is empty and hollow, but compensates from that by being noisy, and the other is heartfelt and connected to something deeper. And this is what Pirsig, who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's what he referred to as quality. How do you know that something is beautiful? How do you know something is of a higher quality than something else? It can't be explained through reason. It's felt. It's an aspect of reality.
Manda: Okay. So we have values of connection and coherence and courage. And my therapy is internal family systems and they have the eight C's. And again you have a Self with a capital S which is enduring, and the parts. And once we can unburden the parts in IFS, you get to the exile that they are protecting and they're saying never again. And once we can heal those, then that part gains its full creativity and becomes a part of the blend of the total self. And then we're much freer. And for me, it sings very strongly with Thomas Hubbell's sense of the trauma response being a moment frozen in time. If we can unfreeze that and free it up then it becomes something that we can work with, and we have that sense of generative capacity connected to all parts of myself, to all other people, and to the whole of the web of life. The whole thesis of everything that I'm doing at the moment, and I think that you're doing, is that we need a new set of stories. They need to be predicated in different values, and those values need to sing to the maximum number of people who have agency. I created an acronym at the weekend which was motivation, agency, direction and empowerment. I don't think they work in quite that order. I think we need the direction first, then the motivation, then the agency, then the empowerment.
Manda: But we need all of those. We need to see a future that we want, that we could get to, that we would be happy to bequeath to the generations not yet born. We need to understand the routes to get there, because there's no point having a utopia that we can't reach. We need to understand that I can do something, and I need to feel that I know what my next step is, and after that everything is emergent. But unless or until we have those stories out there, until the Marvel movies are embodying that, and EastEnders and the bond movies and the op eds in the Telegraph and the Mail and Fox News. Maybe not Fox, but anyway. Then it's not in general society and we're all still going to be worrying about how we pay bills and then die, which is what our culture currently gives us. And I wonder if you have any thoughts of what the vision looks like that we could be aiming for? Does that make sense? Of the light at the end of the tunnel, and it will be something else by the time we get there. Every novel I've ever written, I've had a light at the end of the tunnel, but when I get there, it's something else, but It took me forward. Have you a sense of the light at the end of the tunnel for you?
Alex: Yeah. This is something I think about a lot. What always comes up for me is a feeling I would like to move towards, and I think it's important to move towards, truth.
Manda: Truth is a pretty variable feature in the world we live in just now.
Alex: The truth is very variable. Yeah. So I mean truth in the capital T sense, which doesn't mean that my or your perspective is ultimate truth, but that collectively we come back to a sense that there is such a thing as truth with a capital T. I think without that it's very difficult/impossible to move forward meaningfully. Because it's the Tower of Babel, right? We don't have a common language. And I think that truth is very, very simple. So one of my favourite books is Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots, which is quite a Jungian analysis of storytelling, which I think took him about 20 years to write. And it's a really extraordinary piece of work. It's something like my Bible. And people might be familiar with Joseph Campbell's work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It's not dissimilar to that, but I think a bit more general. And I think if you had to boil it down very simply, what stories are is the journey of an individual from immaturity to maturity.
Alex: And that immaturity is based on gormlessness and isolation, the sense of not being fully connected to the world. And it could be just because they're a child and they're like, oh, look, there's a house full of gingerbread, maybe we should go in there. It's like, ah, well, no, after this experience, you're going to think twice about that, because you'll have more wisdom. But the process is of someone going from a sense of an egotistical perspective where they're disconnected from the world, to one in which they become a part of the web of life, to say it in those terms, and the wider community. And that their action is in service of the wider community. And this is why I'm quite sceptical of the hero's journey playing such a big role in how we understand stories. Because firstly I did a great conversation with, uh, do you know Charlotte Du Cann? Have you come across her?
Manda: Yeah, yeah.
Alex: So, she was talking about the female initiation myth being sort of the inverse where you begin as a princess and then you come back to the earth and that's the wisdom. The male version of go out into the world, step beyond the threshold, encounter the darkness, overcome it. This is also a female version, it happens to men and women in stories, and then come back. It's one of the trajectories. But I think the aspect of it that's really important is the sense of it's not about doing it for our own self-interest. And the hero's journey can get really wrapped up in that. So, for example, Aragorn in Lord of the rings, he begins as the Strider. He's already a hero, he's doing all this cool stuff, he's just by himself. He's a king, or he should be a king but he's rejecting that role. And in rejecting that role, what he's actually rejecting is responsibility to the wider whole and to the community and his ancestry as well. So when you first come across him in the story, he's already heroic. Great, good for him, he's a hero. But actually his journey and probably the narrative thread of the entire series or the entire trilogy is him becoming a king, which is why the last book is The Return of the King. That is the archetypal movement that needs to happen, I think. And so for our stories, if we can return to a collective story where we understand, particularly in the West, because of our hyper individualism, which was an intelligent strategy to survive in the environment our ancestors grew up in.
Manda: Well, it was in a trauma culture that we created.
Alex: Yes. Yeah, exactly. It's now out of date. And so if we can move towards a just very simple human sense of we are here for one another as well as here for ourselves. And our growth is a growth together, not alone. Because that's completely counter to the tech bro, what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno feudalism. The sense of we are back in in this hyper dominated system run by the few. That I think can be countered with just the very basic human value of, uh, well, no, that's not fair, that's egotistical, and we won't have it, you know? That for me feels very important.
Manda: I'm aware we're running out of time, but this has just opened up. Bill Plotkin has this concept, I don't know if you're aware, that every human being goes through four stages of evolution: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood and each of these is split into two. One is individual and the other is collective. And from his perspective, which again leans very heavily into indigenous thinking, our entire culture is locked in early adolescence, which is the individual bit. And that what we need to do is find a few people who have got to be adults and elders in a way that we can respect, because from his perspective, and I would think probably yours and certainly mine, there are a lot of people who get to dying in old age, and they have never got past early adolescence. And actually, we're watching now the toddlers have taken over, so we haven't even got that far. Because I hear you. Absolutely. We live in a world where these narratives of collective endeavour are said to be unrealistic and untenable, because we've created the dark triad, gets to the top by destroying everything else and who dies with the most toys wins. Have you a sense of how we create the stories that reignite the awareness? Because it seems to me everybody is yearning for connection. Everybody knows that another box from Amazon is not actually going to heal the the void inside. The richest man on the planet is on ketamine every other week, because sending rockets to Mars is not healing the void inside. Another box from Amazon is not going to do it, but we still buy the boxes from Amazon. Nate Hagens says we're in a culture that's turning barrels of oil into microlitres of dopamine because we don't understand that a serotonin mesh is what we need. How do we create the stories of connectedness being The Thing?
Alex: Yeah, also a great question and one I think about a lot and one I have the beginnings of a sense of my perspective on. So I'm very focussed on Western culture because that's my culture and I think it's the grammar of my thought. And having explored a lot of eastern traditions, I've also then come back to, as beautiful and valuable as they are, I think what we need in the West is to return to the prophetic tradition, which is what the Abrahamic religions are centred on. So that means that it's a very different kind of mystical experience that Buddha had, and equally valid, just different. It's a different way of experiencing reality. Of letting go of attachment, melting and connecting into the wider web of things and thereby vanishing as an individual to some degree, right?
Manda: Which is an interesting viewpoint, but it's not where we're heading.
Alex: We will not do that in the West, because the grammar of our thought, the journey we're on, is to explore individualism in some way, and hopefully to go so deeply into it that we come out of it. I think that's our best bet. So I think one aspect of this is that we have to have stories, or a collective story, rooted in the prophetic tradition. Because if you think about Moses and the burning Bush, the prophetic tradition is we have a relationship with the divine that is rooted in history and movement, forward progress, because that is how we think, right? We're progress obsessed, and it's very difficult to unpick that.
Manda: We live on a linear timescale, so we need that sense of this is an inevitable progression. Okay.
Alex: Yeah. And you're not going to convince people in the West, I think, to do anything other than something that looks like we're going somewhere, because we are so deeply rooted in that. And so it's almost like not necessarily reconnecting to the religions themselves, but just understanding that we have to have this sense that we are on a mission that is beyond us. It's not about us personally. It's about something beyond us. So I think that we can do that in the West. And then the other aspect of this is that I think the mystical experience that is best suited to the Western mind, in my view, is the overview effect, which is something described by astronauts.
Manda: Total perspective vortex. Yes.
Alex: Yeah. So what's great about that, if people aren't familiar with it, this is something that astronauts reported from seeing the Earth from space for the first time. Where it recontextualized everything. All of the dramas, all the struggles, all of the petty status seeking.
Manda: Because you zoomed right back.
Alex: You seen it from so far back, you can't even see the people on it. You think, oh my God, look at this tiny, fragile, beautiful planet floating in the void. It just gives you context. Now, that experience phenomenologically in terms of what's happening in the self, I had an experience like this in my DMT dosings. It's quite extraordinary because your ego doesn't get crushed or destroyed, it just gets recontextualized to be just really small in the grand scheme of things. Great, so the Western mind doesn't have to get all hung up about like, oh, I don't want to be annihilated. That's fine, you won't be annihilated, but you'll be recontextualized very extremely. So that experience is great because you can have that experience, as the romantics did. You know, we've been skirting with this in the West, with the Romantics having an experience of the sublime; going into nature, looking at a mountain and being in awe, in the traditional sense of almost being kind of like recontextualized, like, wow. That I think is an experience we can come back to and we can recreate that experience with virtual reality, with psychedelics, with just the way we talk about the world. I think if we can route stories in that experience and the prophetic energy of we are actually going somewhere, then we're in business. Then we can start creating stories that really land collectively and land in the mainstream.
Manda: Yeah. Okay. I've been toying with the concept of the next novel, and they are just beginning to land in the scale of what you're saying, so thank you. Right. We are so out of time. I have taken up as much of your time as we have free. This has been amazing. I could easily talk to you for another 2 or 3 hours, we might come back again sometime. But in the meantime, you have a dog that needs to go for a walk and we honour the walks. So is there any last thing that you wanted to say to people for this time around?
Alex: Um, well, no. Just firstly, thank you. I enjoyed this immensely. The hour has just flown by.
Manda: It really has.
Alex: But my main hope is that we all keep experimenting together. Like, storytelling is also a collective endeavour. So let's all...
Manda: Tell the stories.
Alex: Let's all experiment. All tell stories. Yeah.
Manda: Fantastic. All right, Alexander Beiner, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. It has been an absolute delight. Thank you.
Alex: I've enjoyed it very much. Thanks a lot.
Manda: And that's it for another week. Huge thanks to Alexander for everything that he is and does. For going to the places that we need to go. For being a Pathfinder, a waymaker, for being one of the thought leaders of our time. This is such a moment of transformation. Everything that we thought we knew is being taken apart in real time. And our current understanding of psychology teaches us that when our certainties crumble we basically have a couple of choices. We either crumble with them, or we let the crumbling of the things that we thought we knew to be true open doors to whole new ways of seeing. And there is no question but that psychedelics open those doors. I think shamanic practice opens them. Meditation can open them. All kinds of other ways of experiencing the world can open them. What matters is that we let them open, that we don't try to cling on to the old certainties. And I am fairly certain, and this may be an old certainty that I let go of, that where we are energetically is the single most important thing. We can have all the ideas that we like. We can restructure politics, we can restructure the way laws work, we can reshape the nature of our culture; but at the heart of it all, we need to be coming from a place of interconnectedness between all parts of ourselves, ourselves and each other, and ourselves in the web of life.
Manda: And you have heard me say this once or twice, but it's kind of nice to hear it said by somebody else, someone who has a huge platform in the world and who quite clearly spends a lot of time thinking about the things that we need to know. So there we go. I strongly recommend reading Ali's book. It is utterly fascinating. Kainos is a brilliant resource. I have put links in the show notes, and I really look forward to the documentary that is in process as we speak. If you do nothing else this week, sign up to Ali's Substack. Go and watch some of the Kainos videos. Have a think about what you can do to increase the connectedness within yourself, between yourself and the people around you, and between yourself and the web of life. And yes, that is exactly what all of the Accidental Gods membership is for. And yes, as somebody asked on a recent Ask Me Anything, do I mean this all of the time? Yes, I really do. But the great thing about connection is that once it starts, you will want to keep connecting. It's not a thing that we want to do in small, isolated capsules.
Manda: Once you've tasted a bit of it, I really do think you will want it to extend from the moment you wake, till the moment you go to sleep and all the way through your dreaming. So give it a go. And that's it for this week. We'll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot and for the production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for sorting out the videos and keeping our YouTube channel bright and shiny. Thanks to Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for the website, for all of the tech and for the long, long conversations in front of the fire that keep our ideas fresh and moving. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. We wouldn't be here without you, and we genuinely appreciate the gift of your time. And if you know of anybody else who wants to explore the leading edge of where we're at, who wants to help us to hospice modernity, and to see how we can step into the bigger picture of all that we could be, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.