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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone- and it's never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, lay the foundations for a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just (so far) lack the visions and collective will to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey, people. Welcome to Accidental Gods; to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations of a future that we would all 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 as we very obviously crest the wave of the great transformation, it seems to me that we broadly have two choices. We can, if we choose, crash into chaos and extinction. And that may well be our default. But we can also choose, each of us, to step into our birthright as fully conscious nodes in the web of life, and thereby offer all of the astonishing creativity of humanity in service to life. This is a fairly common refrain on this podcast, but it's not often that we speak with someone whose entire life is given to helping other people step into our birthright; to open the doors of what we might call nature connection, but is so much deeper than this. So that anyone of any age or circumstance can step forward into whatever it is that our birthright becomes in the 21st century. Our guest this week does exactly this. I've known of Jon Young for decades. Heard of his eight shields practice and have friends who have trained in his art of mentoring. But it was only this last September that we met in person, and I was struck by the deep inner stillness he brings to everything he does. The sense that his awareness stretches out across space and through time, and he's listening to layers upon layers of meaning, in all of the worlds.
Manda: Jon is a deep nature, people and self-connection, researcher, mentor, naturalist, wildlife tracker, author, consultant and storyteller. He was mentored by his grandmothers and then by Tom Brown Jr, who, as you will hear, had been mentored in turn by Grandfather Stalking Wolf. Jon has connected through the years with a whole host of elders and experts, and has spent over four decades leading the field of nature based community building. His work explores the impact of nature on mentoring, human intelligence, spirituality, wellbeing and development, influencing tens of thousands worldwide. He's the author and co-author of seminal works such as What the Robin Knows and Coyote's Guide to Connecting to Nature. And he's appeared in documentaries, including The Animal Communicator, which I highly recommend that you watch. I have put a link in the show notes. In 2016, John received the Champion of Environmental Education Award for his innovative and globally impactful contributions to the Nature Connection movement. So with all of this as our baseline, it was an honour and a genuine delight to dive deep with Jon into the history and lineages of his learning. To explore his views of where we are now and how we can best navigate this moment of collapse and renewal. I loved every moment of this conversation, and we're already exploring the idea of Jon coming back at the New Year, so that together we can explore the eight gates that he mentions. In the meantime, people of the podcast, please welcome Jon Young of Living Connection First.
Manda: Jon Young, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on, certainly what's here is a cold and drizzly February afternoon, but I think it's not with you.
Jon: No, no. In the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, it is not cold and drizzly. It's actually a little bit breezy this morning. And I was out looking at stars before first light. It's a lovely, lovely time of year. It's supposed to be our rainy season, but I am grateful for sun. It's been nice to sit with the lizards.
Manda: And putting up hummingbird feeders, you were telling me. I have hummingbird envy, that sounds glorious. I was out feeding the kites this morning, but it was raining so hard they couldn't get to us to begin with. It's not quite the same.
Jon: Oh, boy.
Manda: Anyways, you and I met last September. Your name has been in my radius for literally decades, but it was the first time we'd met in person. And I was so struck by your groundedness and your capacity for internal stillness and clarity, which were absolutely beautiful, and seemed to me to be part of the criteria for being one of the elders of our time. So as an elder of our time, given the great transformation of which we are clearly in the middle, what is most alive for you right now, here in the middle of February 2026, Jon.
Jon: Well, it goes back to January of 2025. So every year since I was 15, which was 50 years ago, 51 years, I've been doing a practice that my mentor brought to me. So let me frame it a little bit, because I was mentored by Tom Brown Jr. Since the age of ten years old. So he brought me so deep into nature connection and communication with the earth, you know, through this long, sort of slow, call it rigorous, unforgiving process of coyote teaching, as he called it. Which basically just ensured that everything that I learned, I learned through my own experience. And I had my own authentic relationship with it. It wasn't a thought, it was a fully embodied level of awareness, if you will. So imagine you're a high schooler and your high school friends are not being mentored by Tom brown Jr. Their worldview is not transforming because with each gateway of initiation that he's bringing me through, I'm seeing more, feeling more, communicating more directly with the Earth. And my peers simply are not. And you know, you're 15. You really want your besties, right? That's like a longing. It wasn't working out so well for me in a lot of categories. I was feeling really isolated, depressed, alone, you know, that sort of thing.
Jon: And Tom picked up on it, and he came to visit me one afternoon and he said, well, how are you doing? You know, you seem a little down. And I told him how I was doing. He asked me a bunch of questions and really got on the table my despondency and my sense of isolation in the human sphere, shall we say. And then he said, you know, I can completely relate to where you are, Jon, because when I was about your age, I was feeling really similar to you. Because grandfather had mentored me in the way that I'm mentoring you and I was having the same dilemma. So he asked me some questions that became the foundation of my life, literally. And everything that I do in my life is based on those questions to this day, Jon, so I'd like to engage you in the same questions. Would you be interested? And I'm like, sure, you know. So the first thing he said to me was, and he was basically pointing out there was two parts to this question; there was the what, but also the how. Okay, so let me let me explain the what first, which is what he did for me. He said, when you imagine yourself being completely lit up, you know, just full of energy, full of life, completely stoked about your life, what are you doing? What's the first thing that comes to mind?
Jon: And I said, oh, well, fishing. Because, you know, I think I was born with a fishing pole in my hand and I loved fishing. And every day after school when the weather was right, you know, we had our fishing season sort of April to October in the local ponds and reservoirs and creeks and things. I'd grab my fishing pole and head to one of my favourite fishing holes, and there were many of them, I could go in many directions. And he said, Great, fishing, I thought you'd say that first. Then he said, now for the how. He said, I want you now to imagine yourself standing with a fishing pole in your hand at your favourite fishing hole, and I want you to relive this experience with all your senses and tell me what you're experiencing. Everything. I I want to know what you're seeing, what you're smelling, what you're feeling, what you're hearing. I want to know all of it. So I put myself on that sandy bank and I saw the raccoon tracks by my feet in my peripheral vision.
Jon: I saw the great blue heron across the pond, which is like your grey heron, you know, the really big one. I saw the cattails lining the edge of the pond where the pond meets the meadow. And the water was crystal clear, and I could see those lovely plants, moving like this, gently. And I could smell the water. I could hear the birds singing. And I just brought all that. And then I throw my line in the water, and I see the, the curly, because I had no bobber or anything, I just used the curl of the monofilament to act as a bobber. And when it straightened, I knew I had a catfish, you know, and I love to catch catfish. And I'd bring them in and bring them home and cook them and eat them. And they were delicious, right? So I'm reliving this thing with all my senses. He said, okay, how do you feel now? And I'm like, I feel amazing. He's like, okay, good. He says, what I want you to do now, Jon, is, um, I'm going to come back tomorrow and check this with you. But I want you to now take your journal and do the same thing for 15, 20 kinds of experiences. And let's look at it tomorrow, right.
Manda: Wow.
Jon: So we did that or I did that. I was getting more and more electrified and more excited about life with every journal entry, right? And he came back the next day and he had me do that same thing where I relived with all my senses. And at the end of that he said, now whose choice is it for you to be depressed? You know, after going through that with me?And I had to think about it for a minute and I'm like, I guess it's my choice. He said: right. He said, because any time you want to, you can tap into this medicine. You can choose this over this other thing that you're talking about. That's just a choice you're making. He said really watch your choices now. You know, it was quite a transformational moment for me. He followed up with me for the next several days, and we went through eight questions, one built on the other. And when we got to the eighth question, well, let's talk about the seventh question first. So the seventh question is, okay, given everything you've learned from all these questions and all this journaling, what is your ideal scene? What do you want to manifest in your life and why? I think the why comes out of the other questions. You're like, oh no, I wouldn't want anything but this, right? So it's sort of like prep for a vision, if you will. And then when you're done and you've kind of mind mapped out your ideal scene, he says now I want you to close your eyes and go back in the generations, before agriculture. Go back to when humans were all living in that original way that they've lived for hundreds of thousands of years, he said. And show your ideal scene to those ancestors and really feel their feedback.
Jon: You know, imagine yourself sitting by a fire. Imagine yourself transmitting this. You don't have to tell them about it. You just have to hold the picture and ask them what they think. And just you'll get a vibe back. Come back to the present, make any adjustments that you feel you need to make based on your feedback from the ancestors. And we're talking about the connected ancestors who lived the original way. Now go to the future generations, way beyond your lifetime. Seven generations he would say, and do the same thing. And so for the last 50 years, I've been doing this every year. And in 1975, 76, 77, he was refreshing it with me about every six months just to make sure I didn't backslide into depression. And at 19, he started to take me even deeper into the process to prepare me for a vision quest, if you will. And at 20, 22, he gave me permission to go on a vision quest because he said I was ready. And out of that vision quest, of course, came everything that I'm doing now. But this process, this renewal process of these questions every year, has been a consistent recalibration, right? Am I still on my North Star? Have I drifted off a couple of degrees? Whatever. But everything in my life has come from this process. And thank you, Tom, and thank you, Grandfather, obviously.
Manda: Can you tell us briefly, for those who don't know, who Grandfather was and what his relationship was to Tom? And then we'll come back to you.
Jon: Yeah. I mean, there's a big story around Grandfather, and there's a book that Tom wrote called Grandfather, which would be worth reading if anyone was interested. But he was a very interesting person. He was a southern Lipan Apache Elder who met Tom back in 1956/7 ish. Kind of hard for me to remember the exact dates. But Grandfather was born into this time when the Apaches were well aware of what the colonists were up to and that you couldn't trust what the government said, you couldn't trust the missionaries. And their only option to keep their culture alive was to disappear, right? To not fight, but also not surrender.
Manda: Just go under the radar.
Jon: So they packed off into the mountains and had these enclaves. And Grandfather's people weren't the only Apaches who did this. So this was common all through the greater sort of Apache culture. They'd already had so many years of watching the westward expansion and all the lies that were told to the different indigenous peoples, so they had heard through the grapevine, if you will. You know, they're going to say this, but they're going to do that. And this has happened again and again. You can't trust them. So your best bet is to disappear. Which they did. So grandfather grew up in this village of people who were doing their best to keep alive their culture, their language, their ways. And then he went on a sojourn, because he was somehow interested in what were the universal truths of connecting to the earth? And he visited with multiple tribes in North America and Central and South America, came back and then ended up coming to new Jersey for basically, I'd say, vision reasons. But logistically, he had family there that were stationed at the Navy base, I believe, there in the region on the edge of the Pine Barrens. And he came and ended up taking care of his own family's grandson.
Jon: So a descendant. And both parents were working and busy and actively involved in their military stuff. And then they met Tom Brown fossil hunting on the shore of the river, where he was also kind of wandering along the river looking for fossils. And the two boys bumped into each other, Grandfather kind of realised, okay, I'm supposed to do something with this kid, right? So he then became kind of a latch key mentor to his grandson and to Tom. Tom was 6 or 7 years old and stayed with Grandfather for 11 years. So Grandfather took them on a mad journey based on the way these teachings are passed through generations, right? But he had that additional sort of universal perspective, he wasn't just doing it in the way of the Apache, but he was very much aware of some universal truths about what it takes to be deeply connected to the Earth and to inherit what Tom later came to call our birthright. So when Grandfather left, he said to Tom, you have to find someone to pass this knowledge on to, the way I passed it on to you.
Jon: And you'll know that person by the sign they carry. So Tom was looking around for a couple of years and not seeing anyone to pass it on to, until on one day he met me on a street corner. I had a big snapping turtle and he came up to me and he said, what are you doing? What have you got there? And I told him, a common snapping turtle. And he thought to himself, and he wrote me ten years later, you know, when I turned 21, he said, I remember when I met you on that street corner, and I asked you what you found, and you said 'a common snapping turtle'. And he said, oh, that's only half an answer. Does he realise that he's got Mother Earth on a string? Right? And that was the sign that Tom was looking for. And then he began to test me. So he didn't just immediately start mentoring me, he kept giving me errands to see if I would do them. And I would return and tell him my story and and he'd be like, huh, and then he would send me on another. And he just began to do that with me every day for the next eight years.
Manda: Can I just briefly ask a question of why did you have a common eastern snapping turtle on a street corner?
Jon: Well, I was ten years old. I was noticing that the older children, the ones I looked up to, were no longer hanging out in the woods, building dams, catching frogs. They all seemed to be siphoned off. Like there was a ceiling, you know, you get to a certain age.
Manda: And the magic stops happening. Yeah.
Jon: Something. And then you get vacuumed off by some force. But these were the people I looked up to, right. I hadn't met Tom yet. My grandmothers had been the ones who were mentoring me in deep nature connection, and it was my grandmother on my father's side whose family is from Ireland, who used the same exact technique that Grandfather used. Which is give me an errand, I go out and do it. Come back, tell her my story. She rewards me by listening, asking questions, telling me stories when she was my age, what her grandmother did with her. Send me with another errand. So I had been doing that for years before I met Tom, which is probably why he gave me the time of day.
Manda: Right. Because you had the capacity to listen to him and to engage with what he was offering.
Jon: Yeah. A capacity, you know. Because I've heard him say, I have a distinct memory, like 1994, I was standing in the back of the barn while he was lecturing. The barn was where he was teaching at the tracker Farm in Asbury, new Jersey. And he was talking to the class, and he said, in all my years of doing what I'm doing, I've only met five people who could have learned from Grandfather. And I thought, okay, he's saying this again. I'm listening now more deeply. Like, what does he mean by that, right? And then he says, Jon Young, he's one of those people, and he's standing right back there. And I'm like, oh, no, I was trying to be anonymous, right?
Manda: Right. Now I've been outed.
Jon: Now I've been outed. And he said, he's the only one I had the luxury to teach exactly the way grandfather taught me. And I started to really think about this. Learn from grandfather; what does that actually mean? And it took me literally decades to figure out, it wasn't some deep spiritual gift, it was simply that I had this momentum built up from my grandmother. Go do the thing, come back and tell me about it. We'll celebrate it. I'll tell you a cool story, ask you some good questions. Send you off again. Right? That's what it means to learn from grandfather.
Manda: Yeah. And you had that built in as a kind of pedagogy in your DNA.
Jon: My good friend Matt Goff said it's like a flywheel. It's big and heavy and it's in there, and it takes a little bit to get that flywheel going, right. So every time grandma sends you, it gets a little bit more momentum, and then it starts to build, and pretty soon it's just whirring in there and it just becomes part of what you were calling capacity. But like I just want someone to give me an errand. Give me something to do that will make this journey even cooler, right? So why am I standing on the street corner? Well, the errands my grandmother was giving me, you know, it's kind of like in my early boyhood it was perfect for her to do that with me. Now I'm ten I'm starting to feel this, I don't know what. Like I need a deeper initiation. I need the older boys to do something with me, like that's what I'm yearning for, right? But they're all disappearing from my landscape. They're not fishing with me. They're not catching frogs anymore. We're not building forts. Where are they going? And of course, where they're going is into organised sports. And I'm thinking, okay, I think I have to sign up for Little League. And my grandfather on my father's side was a left handed pitcher in the minor leagues in baseball. My dad was a first baseman at Rutgers University baseball team. We loved a lot of pickup baseball, you know, basically neighbourhood organised in someone's backyard. I loved that, and I loved playing catch with my grandfather and my dad, you know, and having batting practice. But mostly just for fun. Not because I wanted to be in Little League. But Little League is where it starts.
So Little League tryouts were coming, and I really wanted my dad, one Saturday, to practice with me and help me get ready for the tryouts. But he was too busy. He had a big work project coming on Monday, and he had his papers spread literally on every horizontal surface the couch, the tables, the coffee table, the path, the dining room table. And he was under a lot of pressure to get something done, and all I kept doing was begging him to come out and practice with me in the backyard, because there was only a couple weeks left. And he said, Jonathan, I wish I could, I really can't. He said, why don't you go fishing? Well, then I made up a little bit of a fib, and I said, well, I can't really go fishing. Why not? He said. Well, because there's a big snapping turtle at my fishing spot that comes and steals my bait, and none of the other fish come. The fib was yeah, that was true, but at one spot on one pond.
Manda: Yeah, I was thinking, there's lots of creeks.
Jon: Exactly. I had ten choices of places I could have gone where that wasn't true. And he said, a snapping turtle, how big? And I told him, you know, I said, the shells like this, you know, it's a big one. And he said, ah, when I was your age, Uncle Pete and I used to go catch snapping turtles. If you can catch me that snapping turtle, I'll make you the best snapping turtle soup you've ever tasted.
Manda: Poor snapping turtle.
Jon: Yeah, right.
Manda: But he was giving you something to do that was not involving him, right? Okay. Yeah.
Jon: And that he knew that it was nearly impossible. And that I probably wouldn't be able to actually catch it, and that I wouldn't be able to get it home even if I did, because it weighed so much. Like, how is a little skinny ten year old going to bring this massive turtle home, that weighed two thirds as much as me, right? So I knew exactly how to catch that turtle. I had multiple turtles in my menagerie that I was caring for. Wild turtles. I would catch them, take care of them for a little while, and rerelease them. If I caught them on the road, you know, trying to cross, I'd bring them home, keep them for a little while, give them a name. This was all my grandmother's mentoring, this is what she taught me. So I knew exactly how to catch that turtle. I mean, I grabbed what I needed, I ran down the street, and I was mostly down the street. It's about a half mile, right? Running down the street, it suddenly occurs to me about three quarters of the way down the street, that I have no way to get that turtle back home, and that I needed help. And it just so happened the last house on the right before the stop sign, before I cross into the woods that leads me on the trail to the pond where this turtle is, is the place where Steve lives.
Jon: And he's my age. And his older brothers and him, they're all in football, you know, he's an organised sports guy, right? And it's four brothers, two twins, an older brother and Steve, who's my age, and he happens to be in the garage. Probably no coincidence, right? Sweeping at the time. And he looks so glum, you know, he's sweeping with no vigour. He's just like his face is all droopy. And I'm all flush faced and I'm all excited about the turtle. I'm like, hey, Steve, you want to catch the biggest snapping turtle you've ever seen? He's like, yeah! And he drops the broom and we grab some pepperoni from the refrigerator in his garage and off we run. He doesn't bother telling his mother. And then we get to the pond. We have that turtle in five minutes, and we figured out how to get the turtle, working together, to go on its back so we could slide it like a sled through the grass. And we got it all the way back to the road. And then we turned the turtle over, and we helped it walk across the road so it wouldn't drag across its back on asphalt. Got it up onto Steve's yard, right by the stop sign. And that's when his mother came out, furious that he disappeared without saying anything.
Manda: And hadn't finished sweeping the garage, right?
Jon: Hadn't finished sweeping. And they were trying to go to the swim club. She had all the boys packed in the car, so she was really angry. She grabbed him by the ear, gave it a twist and walked him to the car, shoved him in there, door slammed, station wagon peels out and goes around the corner and I hear it rumbling off into the distance. And now suddenly, I'm standing.
Manda: On a street corner with a turtle.
Jon: On the street corner with a large turtle and with no way to get it home. And I was literally just sitting there, all the adrenaline wore off and then I started to feel really bad about what I had done, you know. Because it was now my turtle in my menagerie. And I was starting to feel all this empathy and starting to feel like a real loser for having done this. And that's when Tom drove up.
Manda: Oh, isn't that interesting? Don't the Gods set things up really, really well for us?
Jon: Yeah, yeah. How the heck. What are the chances?
Manda: Okay. And from then until his death, you were effectively Tom Brown's senior apprentice. I mean, I'm sure that wasn't language that you used, but he mentored you, and he mentored you in mentoring so that you became the person who set up the art of mentoring. And I diverted you from, you were telling us that in January of last year, you went through the eight questions again, or you went through a process similar to the eight questions. Where did that take you? Because we started with what's most alive for you just now.
Jon: Yeah yeah. I'm so glad you brought me back there; we've been on a journey since then!
Manda: We have and it's glorious. And it tells us a lot about who you are and the nature of connection to the web of life. But let's head back to January of last year.
Jon: So, you know, every year, sometime around November, December, I start looking at those eight questions again, right? Kind of a refresh, you know, am I still on the right path? So come January, I was totally at the refinement of the ideal scene, if you will. And it was time to go visit the ancestors and the future generations. And so I went back to the ancestors. Boy, I love going back to those ancestors, they're so stoked.
Manda: Are they the same ones? Do you go back to the same individuals, do you think? Does it feel it?
Jon: You know, they feel the same. Because there's like a presence of this profound connection to the earth; this deep knowing and communication with all the life and non-life around them, and how to tend the earth in a beautiful way and how to help it regenerate. It's such a beautiful place to go. And it's so rare in living humans now, right? That's why I go to visit the San. That's why I often go visit the people down in Botswana.
Manda: Because it's still there.
Jon: Yeah, and I have to remember, I'm not crazy. I'm not making this up. You know, it's not a fantasy. This is really who humans were for, you know, 290,000 years.
Manda: This is our birthright.
Jon: Exactly. And they, of course, were stoked, as always, and gave me the high five, so to speak, spiritually, if you will. But yeah, we're with you, we believe in you, we're helping you. You know, we see you, right? So I'm like, oh, okay, cool. I come back to the present. You know, sitting in gratitude for those ancestors who are always so generous. And then I go to the future generations and for the first time in 50 years, something very different happened. Oh, it was shocking. I mean, shocking. Okay, I'm gonna try to not break down here, but maybe I can't help it. I go to visit the future generations, and normally they're like, yes, please, more of that, right? Yes. Thank you. More of that. This time they are not happy and they are stern and they are morose. And they say, you've been sitting on this bundle of teachings and principles and knowledge; not those words but that's what I'm trying to help you see. And you're not reaching enough people. And if you don't step it up, the next time you come to talk to us, we may not even be here.
Manda: Okay.
Jon: And you know, get it done, kind of thing, right? Oh my God, was that a shock! I came out of that really a little disoriented and very emotional and really feeling a bit of guilt, shame. I thought I was doing everything I know how to do. Like, what am I missing? What am I not seeing? And it took me into a process of surrender. I just kept going into silence. And what do they want me to do? What am I not doing that I should be doing? And then I'd just surrender, go into the silence. And I got back the word surrender on every surrender. But each time it came back to me and I would, as Tom said, you want to surrender seven times. Not just once, but seven times. Each time I surrendered, the word had more power, it had more dimensionality, it affected more of my being. And I started to feel like I didn't know who I was anymore. I started to think that for the last 50 years, I might have been fooling myself or living in an illusion of who I really am or what my vision really is. Really existentially challenging place. But through surrender, I came to understand that, you know, the basket of incredible ancestral elements and teachings that I'm holding, is not mine. I'm not the the engineer who understands it against everyone else. I am a mortal. I have blind spots. I have gifts. I have weaknesses. And that this bundle actually needs a council of people, not an individual.
Jon: And that I don't understand the 15 year olds, the 25 year olds today. I grew up at a different time. What the future generations need is not something I necessarily know how to deliver on. I need a collaborating, intergenerational team to really go deeply into understanding this stuff, and I need to step back and act as maybe more like a choreographer or an elder, not the the lead doer. Because I don't even know what the doing is yet, right? So it's been a bit of a quest. And that's what's alive for me. And I'm really, really, really excited about this, you know, and I've gathered about 17 people right now, of various generations. And we're about to embark on a supported journey of going deep into this together. I'm really impressed with a man named Karl Direske who was mentored by Tom for a long time in new Jersey. He was working at the Tracker School. He learned all the map that Tom was holding, if you will. And he's currently running this class called Legend. And I happily signed up for this, and really thankful for Karl offering me a spot there. He takes us on a journey into the map, every time we get together, we get together once a month for an hour and a half.
Manda: In person or on zoom?
Jon: On zoom. Okay. And takes us on a journey into the map. And there's like 20 of us usually that show up. And to a very specific area, he kind of tells us where we're going, and we all close our eyes and he sort of talks us on a journey into the map. So we go there and then when we come back, we all take turns reporting on what we experience, what we saw and felt, smelt, whatever. Like he's looking for our experience of it. And this one person, who I won't name because I don't want to embarrass that person, says, 'oh, but what did you get Karl when you went there on the map?' And Carl said, 'I'm not going to tell you. Because I've been doing this for 35 years, and I may have a lot of experience, but that doesn't make me right. I have a unique instrument' (meaning his own body, his own perceptions, his own life experience, his own blind spots, his own brightness) And he says to the student 'you do too. If I tell you what I got, then you are going to say to me or to yourself that what you got is wrong. Because Karl said this is what it's supposed to be'.
Manda: Because that's the nature of humanity. That's how we work. Yeah, okay.
Jon: Exactly. So Karl is being very faithful to coyote teaching in that sense. No, your experience of this with your instrument is the most important thing. That's what is alive for me. I'm like, that is how I need to approach this bundle. Everyone looks to me like Jon's the last word on the bundle. Uh,uh, no more. What if I died tomorrow? Then what? Wwhat if there's 17 or 18 of us together working on this, or even more? And everyone has been empowered to trust their own instrument in the context of what this bundle can offer. That's what's alive for me right now.
Manda: Right. Oh, wow. I want to come back together in another year and see what happens when you've had time to work a few lunar cycles with this group. That sounds extraordinary.
Jon: I can't wait, I'm chomping at the bit.
Manda: Yeah. So I'm really interested in exploring...there's So many things I want to explore with you. I want to explore basic neurobiology and polyvagal theory and how it applies. But we're in the realm of our birthright. That however far back, and its different spans back for different cultures. So for Grandfather it was a lot more recent. And for people of white Western extraction, it is probably easily ten, 12,000 years. But there was a time when humanity was an integral part of the web of life. Where we asked every day, what do you want of me? And we responded so that we were the web weaving itself, and everything else, the trees and the rocks and the red kites and the hummingbirds were also the web weaving themselves. And we perhaps have the capacity for self consciousness, that I'm sure is not unique, but we do have the capacity for self consciousness, and that that is a valuable asset to the web as it weaves itself into being. And somehow we lost that. And and I think trying to work out how and when is probably a waste of bandwidth, but we did definitely lose it. Vanessa Andreotti's indigenous grandfather says that the core wounding and the core trauma was not the theft of the land and the genocide of the people, however horrendous they were. The core wounding was a belief in separability. This concept that we could even be separate from the web of life, and that everything that our culture does emanates from that. And yet you teach and you started off teaching young people, and then you began to teach adults how to reconnect, how to step into our birthright. And it seems to me we're at we're at a turning point, this year particularly. Nothing is ever going to be the same again. The old system is dying. What emerges is up to every single one of the 8 billion of us on the planet to step into something, and that if we all chose to step into our birthright as self conscious nodes in the web of life, it could be amazing.
Jon: It would be unbelievably amazing.
Manda: And so I'm really curious, because I too go way back and way forward, and I have a felt sense, that could easily be projection, that there are multiple ways forward. And some of them see humanity crash and burn, just cease to exist, and other ones see us flourishing. And part of what it is to be alive in this moment is to try to track the pathways that take us forward along timelines that see us flourishing. And I wonder what that feels like for you? Not necessarily the tracking of the pathways, because that's an inner felt sense. But if we were all to step into our birthright, have you a felt sense of how the world might look and feel and be? Does that make sense as a question?
Jon: Yeah. It makes complete sense. And in essence, you are describing my vision, when you ask that question. So I have a lot of microcosmic examples, from 50 years of doing this. Myself as an example, Tom, as an example. When you apply the coyote teaching, so to speak, which is like a series of initiatory gateways into our own consciousness, in essence; we're expanding our senses, we're strengthening our awareness of our connection to all things, at the same time we're going deeper and deeper and deeper into our own selves, understanding more and more. Then we reach this place where the earth begins to speak to us. We can then choose to step into a place where the earth speaks through us, and then we become part of the regeneration.
Manda: An integral part of the web of life, yeah.
Jon: Yes. And that is, when the earth speaks to us, we've experienced our birthright, and then it's our choice to pick up the responsibility. Do we want to be caretakers of the Earth? Do we want to care for the future generations on behalf of the ancestors? That's a choice we have to make.
Manda: Can I ask a quick question in there? Have you met anyone who has genuinely experienced the earth speaking to them who does not want to step into that?
Jon: Oh my God, could we write some books about that one!
Manda: Okay!
Jon: So when the earth starts to speak to people, a lot of times they completely, especially in these times, that trauma that you were talking about earlier, that original wound really kicks in that moment. And all kinds of interesting responses occur. My friend Paul would say, he's an Odawa elder from Michigan, and he would say, you know, when they come to that place, they do the 90 degree turn and they run parallel to the wall. Or they do the 180 and go the other way. Like my sensitivity is too great, the wound is too strong. I need to shut all this off. So I'm going to become obsessive and compulsive in my work or my addiction or whatever. Because it's not a small thing, especially if you're alone, to hit that point. If you have the support of good people, you invariably make the choice to go straight.
Manda: Right. But otherwise, we're in a culture that tells us we've just gone mad.
Jon: Yeah, exactly.
Manda: And that it's not real and that we're making it up and that you just go back to work and exactly that. Or carry on taking the drugs or drinking or whatever, playing the games, whatever it is.
Jon: Yeah, exactly. And that's the point of, you know, when I was there at 19, 20, 21, that's why Tom got me ready for a vision quest. Because in essence it's like, okay, you're prepared now. You're hearing the earth. The Earth is speaking to you. You want it to speak through you. You know what the responsibility is, you know how to communicate with the ancestors, you know how to communicate with the future generations. You know how to communicate with all that's around you now. You have the skills. You got the knowledge, the wisdom. You know how to mentor. You have to now make that choice; what is your path going to be? And that's what I did when I was 22, 23. And, you know, that set me up to where I am now. So it is sort of the ultimate moment of rite of passage, if you will, or initiation. Some people get there right away, the moment they start to feel the connection and hear the voices of the earth, they're like, I know what I have to do and they go straight there. But the spectrum is, you know, there's a bell curve, right?
Manda: Okay. Yeah. Your standard deviations either side of the mean.
Jon: Totally.
Manda: Yes. Fair enough. Alrighty. How do we shift the Overton window on that then? Because it seems to me that what the future generations were saying to you was, we need to do this at scale and in time, which is probably what the fire said to me before I started this podcast. Your teaching is not going to cut it, it's too few. You need to do it at scale and in time.
Jon: Yeah, exactly.
Manda: And again, I went and sat on the hill for months. I have no idea how to do this. Please help me. And I'm still asking that question. You know, that was 2018 and where are we now? So eight years ago. I'm still asking. And you seem to be one of the people asking in parallel, how do we do this at scale and in time? How do we reach the people who don't even know that it's a thing that they want.
Jon: Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of answers to that. But I want to back up, first of all, thank you for sitting on the hill and asking. And for continuing to ask, because that's what we have to do. That's ours.
Manda: Thank you too.
Jon: That's a core routine from here on in, right?
Manda: Sure.
Jon: I want to go back to microcosmic. Because first through my own mentoring of young people, with the help of an elder Ingwe, who I met in 1983, who himself had grown up with the San Bushmen and then the Akamba, and was initiated and adopted into the Akamba tribe. He was of British ancestry, born in the Western Cape province of South Africa. So he and I, you can imagine how much we shared in common in terms of our our visions. And Tom and Ingwe, they just bonded immediately. They were just like instantly one mind. And Ingwe was formidable.
Manda: Sounds like Tom was fairly formidable.
Jon: Tom was formidable. They they were formidable in different ways, which is cool. They had different medicine, different gifts, and they were both fully activated visionaries in modern times, which is always messy, right. Ingwe would say to me, you take the young people and go teach them the tracking and do for them what Tom Brown did for you. Which, by the way, whenever he said that, I also thought of what my grandmothers did. Because you literally have to meet people where they're at. If I'm meeting a young person and they have no flywheel momentum whatsoever, then I have to get the flywheel going first. First and foremost, that is it. So we do little things that are really fun, that have little short cycles of success where they can be rewarded. And get that going. So that's the first gate, that's the first initiation; get that flywheel going! And so how at scale do we meet that need? Okay, so let's put that aside. Because we could sit with a Council of social engineers and still not know what to do. I think some of this is going to be pure synchronicity vision. Because if enough of the 8 billion people make the commitment, you know, that's what's going to turn the tide. Nothing else would. And enough of 8 billion, how many I don't know.
Manda: Yeah. What's the critical mass? We don't know.
Jon: No, no. Some people say it's 3%. Whatever, I don't know. That's not my speciality. So, number one, I have seen thousands of young people go on that journey where the flywheel gets going, and then they begin to map out their connection with all the beings, and they develop their awareness and they develop their inner awareness, and they reach that seventh threshold of the vision. They reach it. And when they do, when they go off to university, their professors have a love hate relationship with them.
Manda: Okay. Because they're not standard reproduced automata who can just quote stuff.
Jon: Right. But they're so alive and they're so passionate and they're so curious, and they're such mad researchers. And that flywheel is now churning in a different level. And they research and they come back with great stuff, which takes the professor off course and down rabbit holes. But all of them just kill it in college, okay. Because people are wondering what does the birthright look like in modern times? Then they graduate and they get hired by somebody. It doesn't matter what field they go into, they get recognised pretty quickly for their profound awareness and leadership and conduct and amazing skills of mentoring and amazing sensitivity and care. You know?
Manda: Yes, being human, being fully alive and fully human. Yes!
Jon: And loving. With a capacity for love and compassion and brilliance.
Manda: And authenticity and integrity and that capacity to build mutual respect, which is what your grandmother was doing with you.
Jon: Exactly.
Manda: And living in that mesh of I am proud because someone I respect respects me back. And it's so rare in the rest of our culture.
Jon: Oh my goodness, I want people to hear. Like, I'm not saying let's all go back and live like the Naro Bushmen.
Manda: No exactly. This is what it looks like in the 21st century, in a world of technology. Yes.
Jon: I want to say something about the word Bushmen, because I got challenged recently. And I appreciate when people come and challenge me, right? Oh, but that's not what we call them, because that's derogatory. And I heard that and I went back to my friends; Xhoeta and Kamte and Xanama and all these elders, and I said, what do you want to be called?
Manda: Right. Yes. It's your choice.
Jon: And they said, you can call us San, you can call us Naro, you can call us Bushmen. It doesn't matter. So I just want to say that. And if there is sensitivity, I'm trying to find the right way to describe these people who are just dear friends, you know, they feel like family.
Manda: But they get to say it. If they say it doesn't matter, then that's up to them. I think people can get very caught up in performative righteousness as a way of avoiding actually doing the work. You guys are very, very good at being non-judgmental. I just end up being quite judgemental and I think, no, let's not do the performative judgement. We haven't got time. We have very tiny window; let's actually just do the work.
Jon: Right because that becomes a bit of a distraction, right? Yeah. And it would be better to get the flywheel going than to argue over...
Manda: What colour are we going to paint it. Yes.
Jon: So my point is what does it look like if the birthright is activated? Well, that means we've got visionary activated genius people who are good, kind, loving and in service to the ancestors and future generations in the earth. Like, what more would you want? Now, I began to understand that it is relatively scalable. When I began teaching through the art of mentoring and through immersive programs that we did, you know, apprenticing a number of people, that they started to get all the same results from their people that they were mentoring. It wasn't me. You know, it wasn't me. It wasn't Tom.
Manda: Which is both a difficult thing to realise and a great relief. I am not unique. Other people can do it.
Jon: And better than me in certain settings, right? So yeah, like, there's so many people now running forest schools based on these principles and I'm just like, thank you. Just think about Anna Richardson's The Children's Forest Project there in the UK and just what a beautiful inspiration that is. And how magnificently she's translated all this into that realm, you know, and that's what it's going to take. It's going to take tens of thousands of us to work within our niches and our gifts to meet the people we're serving, where they're at. And to recognise those seven gateways so that we can say, well, what do they need? Where are they on this journey? Are they at the place where the flywheel isn't going, or is the flywheel going and they need something else, right? And that's what I get most excited about. But I do think that, gosh, if even 10 million people moved into their birthright. Because let's face it, there's there's millions of indigenous people who already are around the world right now, right. But what if modern people, if 10 million modern people who are in their spheres of influence got to this place? What would happen?
Manda: Right. Yes. I mean, we don't know what the critical mass is, but it's hard to imagine that number of people. Because we're talking about the English speaking, Western Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) culture, really, aren't we? And this is the culture that is annihilating the Earth. If we could shift that, it would be transformative. I can't imagine how it could not be transformative. And this is not in any way to say that we're not connecting with the majority global South or any of those. It's just that we speak English and talk, and people who listen to us tend to speak English. And that's the nature of our capacity to connect. And the more we can bring communities together, the better. But we've got to work from where we can. And I wonder, I'm exploring this concept of - there are a number of people who are already fully connected to the Earth. We ask the web what it wants of us, and what it wants is for more people to be connected. And I'm assuming that there is a critical mass and that we could head for it. And I wonder, and this may be a non question, it may just go nowhere. But I want to explore. There's an energetic space. There's a didactic space.
Manda: I understand that we're mentoring and we're working where people are and we're not just giving them rules and telling them to follow them. That's not a thing. We're working with people so that they experience an actual embodied experience of whatever it is that's appropriate for their level. And I feel and I'm on the edges of the feeling of this, that there is an energetic space also where we can ask whatever we call it, the web of life, the Gods and the guides and the spirits of the land that we're on, and of the whole of what some people call Gaia and whatever we want to call it; we can ask that for help also, and that that help is available. And it feels to me occasionally when I push my head above the parapet, there are people who are, let's say we're in service to life. This is a framing that is in service to the greater flourishing of future generations. It does feel to me as if there are energies that are not particularly keen on the flourishing of future generations, and that the delineation between those is becoming more stark. And that may be a projection of mine, but I'm curious to know how it lands.
Jon: It's so archetypal.
Manda: Well it is kind of archetypal, and I'm trying to avoid archetypal language, obviously, and it takes quite a lot of circumlocutions to get there. But I watched the Buddhist Peace March. I'm watching it on my social media and noticing that it's not a lot in the legacy media. And I'm nowhere near it, I live in the UK and it's happening in the US, but the sense of peace emanates from the screen. I can feel it. I can feel it in the marrow of my bones. I can feel it in the roots going down into the earth and the cord going up to the heights of the sky. And I can feel the shift in the energy with every footfall that they make. And it feels real and profound and that that too is shifting things. So I think the energies are real. It's just to what extent can we offer ourselves in service in a way that is most likely to help the flow of life to future generations?
Jon: You know, it doesn't help that Tom was trying to find a word for something that did not have an English word that fit, from something that Grandfather taught. Which is awareness of the flow of life energy in the current moment. So what is animating you, what is animating me? What's animating everything right now, right here. Right.
Manda: And there's an Apache word for that?
Jon: Apparently. It did not translate to English. I mean, Grandfather translated it to the spirit that moves within and through all things.
Manda: Ok. That works.
Jon: But Tom just shortened it, because Grandfather shortened it to the word The Force, which was well before Star Wars.
Manda: And he's in new Jersey. It's not hard to imagine that travelling in certain networks. That's so cool.
Jon: Yeah. So let me just give listeners an example, because this is not a theoretical philosophical thing that I'm talking about. This is very practical. So for instance, as you tune up and go through these levels of awareness training and you become more and more aware of your connection to everything, you begin to sense things in the moment where you don't know how you know. And there's no way to know how you know, there's just no way. But, for instance, and I believe this is why humans survived, okay, because this is a survival skill. If you're wandering in the land around you, and you go to that place that you go to every day, where you like to sit and listen to the birds and all that, and you suddenly get this really awful feeling in your being like, oh my God, I feel so tense. I feel so nervous. Like I'm really paranoid all of a sudden. But five minutes ago, on your way there, you were happy, you couldn't wait to get to that place, everything is open, right? That's a communication right there. You could say, oh, I must not be aware of some dark thing within myself, which is what often we do. We blame ourselves. But it could just be that you're picking up on the vibe of all the songbirds who have gone totally silent, because there's an Accipiter, like a sparrow hawk or a cooper's hawk nearby. And the first time that happens, you're not sure what just happened. But when that started happening again and again and again and again, because once you open up at that level, you sense the force, so to speak, you sense it. So I'm out wandering and I'm looking for a particular animal that I'm trailing, and I've used its footprints as a way to find it for a while. But now the footprints are going into difficult terrain. I can't see them anymore. But I immediately know exactly where that animal is, and I walk straight to it; that's the force. One of my elder teachers, Gilbert Walking Bull, said this was practical, we needed these things. This wasn't spiritual. He laughed at that idea. The Bushmen the same, or my Naro friends the same. I'd say well, what happens when you lose the trail? They said, well, we put the mind of the animal on, and they literally did this; we put the mind of the animal on and we walk right to it. I'm like, oh yeah, that's what I do too.
Manda: And that takes us straight to the paintings in the caves in France, the Palaeolithic paintings. That I put the mind of the animal.
Jon: Oh, exactly.
Manda: And the native Australians, the first peoples of Australia, say I'd just go back in time to when the animal was here and I follow it. And it's like, of course, yes.
Jon: Beautiful. Same. Although that technique is traversing into what Grandfather would call spirit. Because that's, you know, touching in with something that happened before and being able to go back there. So in Grandfather's world, there's us at the centre in the physical. And then there's one concentric ring out, which is the Force; our ability to sense the spirit that moves within and through all things in the present. And then the next ring out is spirit, which is what those Aboriginals are doing. And which, by the way, is what the San, again, my friends the Naro people are also doing when the force thing doesn't work, which it rarely doesn't work.
Manda: Okay.
Jon: So this is what it looks like when the birthright is activated. And I tell people this all the time; I'm a practical spiritualist, right? I'm trying to solve a carpentry issue, and I cannot quite figure out how I'm going to get the latch on that thing to go, or even if they make such a latch or, you know what I mean? Like, no idea. What do I do? I connect to the wood. I connect to the vision of the project. I surrender. And then I'll come back the next day. I'll agonise over it again. Still don't see the solution. I surrender. And then in the early morning before sunrise, I'm sitting in my chair in the dark, watching the stars, listening to the day wake up. Boom! My mind fills with a complete picture and shows me exactly what I need. That is so incredibly helpful. Oh! And I'm running my company, making sure everyone knows that these principles apply not just in the wild nature, but also 24-seven in every setting.
Manda: Everything we do. Yes, yes. Because you can't separate it, that's the thing, isn't it? And with your people, this is a very mundane question after all of that absolute beauty, but it's really pressing. I've watched a lot of people holding amazing week long workshops, where they take business people away, and they give them extraordinary experiences that are transformative. And by the end of it, you're looking at different people with different energy, and their hearts are open, and they have a capacity to connect with parts of themselves that they would never have seen before. And they go back to work on Monday morning and they either quit their job or they get sacked, or they revert exactly back to where they were before. And how do we establish enough space for those three things not to be a thing? To have the everything you do.
Jon: Well, I've been asking that question for a long time. And I just first want to say, I cannot pronounce this name properly: Yvon Chouinard, who is the founder of Patagonia. And what his life journey, his book Let My People Go Surfing is a fantastic example of what could happen in the business realm. And the way he has structured Patagonia today, with the trust that gives to the earth and conservation, but also the culture that he insists upon within his company. Can we all be humans among humans? Can we all treat each other with respect and trust? Everyone's creativity, everyone's 'I need to go surfing. The waves are up'. Okay. Let my people go surfing. That's the culture he built. And all his friends in the business world said that'll never work, you can't run a business that way. Well, tell them that now, right, look at Patagonia! Also Bob Chapman, who runs a company called Barry-wehmiller with thousands of employees globally. And he had a vision, basically at a wedding. He was the CEO of this company for a long time and then in the 90s, he was at a wedding and he realised that, wow, this father is actually giving his daughter into the care of this young man, who's going to be his son in law. But this is his beloved daughter, and he's entrusting her care to this young man. How much love and trust there is, he said, what if we treated all the people who worked at Barry-wehmiller as the beloved son or daughter of somebody that is now in our care? And he completely transformed the company culture. Simon Sinek has him on his podcast A Bit of Optimism, as the man who proved me right. Because Simon Sinek is always on about if the culture of a company was this way, this is what would happen. So I think there's actually quite a lot of people who are waking up to this possibility. And my understanding is that over a thousand people and businesses have now followed the Patagonia model.
Manda: Right. Wow. Okay. There's definitely the B Corp concept.
Jon: The B Corp concept came out of that.
Manda: Yeah. It's not perfect but it's a step on the way.
Jon: Yeah. I mean I'd say it's better than the mainstream. You know, the thing that you were talking about, like you either get sacked or you go back to exactly what you were doing. You know, is there a dark side? Well, of course, because the force, may the force be with you. Of course, there's a dark side, right? But you know, what is that dark side except unhealed historical trauma?
Manda: Yeah. Projection of trauma outwards, for sure.
Jon: Yeah. I mean, so what is the solution? The solution is yes, of course we have to talk to Gaia. We have to. I mean, we don't have a choice. That's why I surrender. Because I don't know in this little thing. How could I possibly know how we're going to get through this incredible moment of the Death Star? You know, in the last episode, right? I feel like I've said it many times. I feel like I was born in the last episode of Star Wars. I mean, there's so much synchronicity for the people who work with vision and who entrust the voice of the gods, if you will, whatever you want to call that. But you could also call it creativity, right? Because if we just open up and go to the silence and expand our awareness, what comes through us is creativity. And there's so much creativity in the world right now, it's blowing my mind.
Manda: Our superpower is our creativity. And imagine if it was all harnessed in service to life.
Jon: It's healing.
Manda: It would it would be astonishing. And the whole world would be amazing.
Jon: Oh my goodness. I think we would be fine and it would be amazing. Yes, yes. And that's why I say microcosmically that is happening, you know?
Manda: Yes. I'm booked into October. I could have a podcast a day, if I had the bandwidth and the time and the money, of people who are doing amazing and wonderful things. Exactly that. But we just don't hear about them in the wider narrative because narrative shift hasn't happened yet. But you're right, there are so many amazing things happening. And it seems to me that the synchronicities and if we ask for help, the help is there, in ways that even 20 years ago, it would have taken many more weeks on the Hill to have that. And maybe one is better at surrendering because we've had a bit more practice, but even relatively new students, it seems to me that everything is more present, more alive. The synchronicities flow so that you can't tell yourself it's not happening. In ways that didn't seem to be the case 30 or 40 years ago. Is that your experience, or do you think I'm just pushing that?
Jon: I wonder if it's our stage of life sometimes, right?
Manda: Okay. Yeah, we see it because it's...
Jon: Yeah, because you can't not see it. Like my story of I'm trying to solve this problem with carpentry. I bang my head against it. I've tried things, I've measured things. I've researched things. I've, you know, modelled things and scaled and none of it worked. Okay, I surrendered. Like that's key. We have to be passionate about what we're trying to achieve. We have to put ourselves with the best of what we got to do the best we can to solve the problem in the physical. And I'm now quoting Tom Brown. And if we've given the physical all we've got and we're still not there at that point, we ask (whatever you want to put in there), and then we surrender. And then we trust what comes into the silence. That's when synchronicity just goes off the charts. Especially if it's in service to something bigger than us.
Jon: But Tom did say this, Manda. He made the same observation. You know, he said back in the 60s, it was really tough. He was very alone in the 70s. It was really hard. You know, he was really working with this and then when he opened his school, it was a struggle. And the students weren't getting things, and he would give them stuff that he thought was simple and they wouldn't get it and he would struggle. And he says, but now in these last few years, and this is just before he passed away, for the last three years he was teaching he would say this. Grandfather predicted a time when no matter what we did in the physical, it wasn't going to be enough, and that we could only help the earth and turn the tide with the help of spiritual skills, and that it would accelerate. And Tom said, I am now noticing as I'm teaching that students are getting it much faster and much deeper than I've ever seen in all my years of teaching. It's accelerating people. He said that's good news and bad news because that means we're right up on the door of the collapse. But that's when the need is so great that everybody sees we've got to do something. Right. Whereas 20 years ago there was complacency because the danger wasn't at our door. So I try to teach people awareness and learn bird language and find that silence within them. And they can't get it, they can't get it and I do these workshops and I mentor them and they can't get it and they can't get it. And I'm like, argh. So I put them all on planes and we fly up to Grizzly Bear Country in Denali National Park, and we camp in soft sided tents where there are steaming piles of grizzly poop in the early morning. And you can smell them right as the smell of a wet dog in the air. And then I say to the same people who I've been trying to teach bird language to, now are you going to listen to bird language? Because that's our only hope out here. Listen to that subtle call of the white golden crown sparrow. Listen to the calls of the ground squirrels. Do you hear them? They're very subtle. But that's where the grizzly is right now. Do you get that? Boy, did that group go into silence quickly. I mean, I'm telling you, they just went straight into silence and they went deep into spirit because of it. Their spiritual awakening happened because the grizzlies were all around.
Manda: It's existential.
Jon: Yeah. And I think that's what's happening. It's like now the Grizzly is planetary destruction. It's war. It's corruption. It's oh my God!
Manda: Yeah, but you can't pretend it's not there now. You cannot. Exactly that: you can smell it. There are the steaming piles of excrement right outside the tent. And you'd better listen to the world. Jon, we're over time. I can't believe the time has gone. Tell us a little bit before we go of how people can reach you and what you're bringing to the world in the coming months and years that you know of just.
Jon: Well, you have show notes, I presume.
Manda: I do have show notes. And I will put all the links that Aidan has sent me. Yes. So there are links in the show notes, people.
Jon: You know, I'm doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes with my team right now. So there may be a book on the horizon here. We're working on that, but I'm not going to say much more than that.
Manda: I want to read that book, though, Jon. Please bring it out.
Jon: Thank you, Josh Lane, for all the hard work you've done with me on this, because it's pretty much written. And it's all about the gateways, you know, from the flywheel to the vision, right? And we're hoping that it's a useful map and not just the perspective of one old white guy, you know.
Manda: It will be a useful map.
Jon: The other thing is that I'd love people to tune into what we said about how does Gaia or the old gods or spirit or Holy Spirit or whatever your substitution is for that blank right there. Let's just call it the sacred force energy moving through us, right? How do we access that? Well, we access it through the silence. The Grizzlies are on the doorstep. What comes through is your unique creativity, which is your genius, right? It doesn't make you a genius; you have access to your genius, as they say, right? That spirit and nature is speaking through you and elucidating your unique gifts which are going to solve the problems of our times. I only have my vision, but you all need to have your vision right? And I'd love for you to follow up on something, which is there's a wonderful book. He was ahead of his time when he wrote this book, Paul Hawken, and I'm sure you know the book Blessed Unrest.
Manda: Paul has been on this podcast.
Jon: Oh bless him. Blessed unrest is such a amazing story about Gaia speaking through human creativity. It is so brilliant, people, read it because you are in that book. You know, it's all about all the people who are doing amazing, brilliant things to be in service to troubled humans, troubled nature, helping forests and conservation, whatever cause that they're called to. That they think they're alone and they don't think anyone else is out there doing anything, but there's hundreds of thousands of projects emerging globally right now, and that's probably in the millions right now. So if you're feeling hopeless, check out Blessed Unrest.
Manda: I will link to that in the show notes, too.
Jon: This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much, Manda, for what you do.
Manda: Thank you so much for everything that you do. And I will definitely encourage everybody I know to come and join anything that you are offering online or in person. Jon Young, thank you so much for being an amazing human being and for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Jon: My honour. Thank you.
Manda: So there we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Jon for all that he has and does. For all of the courses that he has taught and is teaching. And definitely you need to go and look at the resource section of his website. There is so much on there that you can download and explore. Thank you for the books that you have written, Jon, and for the one that is incubating. And thank you for bringing the capacity to surrender, the understanding that it's needed, the willingness to do it, to keep asking what do you need of me? And waiting, letting the silence be still until something arises that feels authentic. Simply listening to Jon explaining how he does this and that it works feels to me a moment of transformation in the world. Imagine a world where all 8 billion of us pause and just do that. And then work with what we're given. This alone would shift the trajectory of the timelines that we're on. And just at the moment, anything that can shift the trajectory of the timelines that we're on seems to me like a good idea. So there are links in the show notes to everything that Jon mentioned. To his Ted talk, to his own website, to the various places where he can be found around the web.
Manda: I definitely encourage you to go off and explore these. And as I said at the top of the show, we are also exploring the idea that Jon comes back for the new year heading into 2027. But we have another ten months between now and then, so we'll be back next week with another conversation. And in the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowell's of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for doing all of the work to keep the gatherings together. We recorded this on the day after Honouring Fear as your mentor. Thank you to all who had the courage to come as well. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to begin to understand the ways that we can open ourselves to the web of life, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.