Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Well, Keelan, thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Glad to be here.
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Glad to have you.
So, yeah, getting right into this thing, how would you explain what formscapes is all about?
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Oh, Lord, that's. Yeah, that one in itself is a doozy right off the bat. Yeah. Formscapes is a.
I mean, really, it's my way of doing metaphysics, essentially. Right. Like, every video is me taking ideas from philosophers and also sometimes pop culture and science and really anything I can get my hands on and trying to weave things together into really just a coherent picture of reality, of what it is to be alive, what the nature of life is, what the nature of being is. Right. You know, taking these very kind of abstract philosophical questions and approaching them from a variety of different angles. Right. And so I draw a lot of stuff from, you know, really all across the board.
Rupert Sheldrake is a person I talk about a lot. Carl Jung, Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Rudolf Steiner, and the whole Anthroposophy thing, that's. That's another topic that I tend to come back to.
Also. Julian Jaynes work with the bicameral mind theory and all that. Jean Gebser, he's a really major one. And so, anyway, overall, know, I could keep listing names, but the point is that my attitude is that. That any thinkers that are worth paying attention to are giving us a window into the same reality. Right. They've. They've got their hands on the same elephant, as it were.
And so I feel like my goal then is to take those different perspectives and. And to bring them together and to see, like, what the big picture is. And so, yeah, I mean, that's. That's really what the whole thing is.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: Cool, man. So it's creating some sort of perennial philosophy.
[00:02:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you call it that. I mean, perennialism, you know, that in itself is kind of its own little ideology, in a way.
A lot of perennialists like Aldous Huxley and very often people like Rene Gunon and who else, Julius Evola, sometimes even get considered within the umbrella of perennialism. And perennialism, it's generally taken to be this idea that, you know, you have one underlying philosophy that's kind of eternal and static and has been the same, you know, throughout human history.
And I would say that there's. There's a grain of truth in that. I mean, it's. It's certainly the case that there. There is this kind of underlying syncretism between the. The spiritual traditions that we see throughout the world. That's definitely the case. And there's Definitely a. A consistent continuity there, moving through history.
But I would also say that there's. There's also a kind of evolutionary continuity there in which human consciousness has been shifting and evolving over time. And. And so this is. This is one of the. The ways that John Gebzer's work is extremely significant for what I do, in the way that he traces out the. The successive development of what he calls these different structures of consciousness.
And. And that is. Is. That's been very central to my entire project, right, of looking at history, the history of philosophy, the history of human culture, and seeing that as the development of these different organs, one could say, of the human soul, the human ego, the sense of selfhood. Right. And the way that. That has this.
The way. Really the way that it conditions the way that we experience reality, the way that we think about the world, the way that we relate to each other, the way that we relate to our own inner composition, the way that we talk about things. Really. Really just everything. And of course, downstream of that, you also have things like art and technology and so forth. And so, yeah, that's. That's. That's a very big part of it. And that's. That's a way in which I diverge pretty sharply from a lot of the people who would consider themselves to be traditionalists or. Or perennialists.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: So essentially, the story is still being written.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Indeed.
Yeah. I don't, you know, very often from. From guys like the. That you'll get this kind of degeneration narrative whereby, you know, everything was great in hunky dory until, you know, fill in the blank. You know, maybe it was the nominalists in the the 12th century or the great schism in the 11th century, or maybe it was the Renaissance. You know, they'll all, you know, pin it on something else. But there was a breaking point, and then it was all downhill from there. And things have just been getting shittier over time. That's. That tends to be the way they see the story.
And I would say that's a very superficial way of looking at it, honestly. There. There has been a kind of degeneration, a kind of breakdown that has been occurring for a very long time now.
But there's more to it than just that, first of all. And also, even before the beginning of that process, things were already in motion. Things were not just static for, you know, 100,000 years or whatever until, you know, the Renaissance or the nominalists or whatever this breaking point was.
We've constantly been in this process of ego metamorphosis. Is what I would call it.
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Never heard that one before.
Yeah, I like the thread of the story too. Like there is some kind of story being written. It's being unveiled and written at the same time literally right now as we speak. I actually put out a post today before this. I said we are involved in the greatest story of all time.
And I truly believe that.
And a lot of people think, as you said, it was, you know, a thousand years ago we have this over glorification of the past that all the saints and sages of the past were like holier than thou in some way. And we revere them, which I do definitely. I revere the philosophers and saints and saints ages of the past for sure. But it's also don't negate the, the current times and the miraculousness of the current times as well.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Yeah, people tend to do this kind of pendulum swing and, and you see this in so many different ways. You see this with like political people. Right? They'll be on one end of the spectrum and then they'll have some kind of, you know, disillusionment and so they'll swing all the way to the other end. And so, you know, and you see this with this kind of thing as well where like people, you know, they, they go to high school and college and they're taught kind of the textbook version where like the you know, pre modern peoples were all idiots and all of the myths and whatnot were just these like, yeah, bad approximations of scientific explanations and they were all idiots. And then we got smarter over time.
They realized that that's.
And so what they do is then they swing the pendulum all the way in the other direction where they'. No, no, it's actually the ancient stuff that got everything right and everything after that is.
And yeah, I mean that's, that's just as bad. Just in the other direction. Right. There's. I mean it's definitely true that the, the pre modern understanding of the world was significantly more significant, more more sophisticated and more accurate than we tend to give them credit for within modern culture.
But at the same time those ideas were also developed by human beings. Right. And so the, the, the picture of the, that they give us of reality can be a variable resolution. Right.
There are a lot of things where what you get, it's not necessarily wrong, but it's fuzzy. Right. And, and, and we have to kind of pick things apart in order to increase the resolution in order to clarify things and, and make them explicit in ways that weren't the case previously.
And then on the other side of that, you know, you've also got the thankless task of filtering through the deluge of ideas and theories and viewpoints that started to come about after the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment and, you know, that whole story.
And. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna get a lot of things that are brilliant, and you're going to get a lot of things that are nonsense, and you're going to get a lot of things that are kind of in between. I mean, but if you look. I mean, even if you look at something like medieval alchemy. Medieval alchemy is a great example of this because we have so many surviving texts, and some of them are very cryptic. But if you. If you look at what's going on in medieval alchemy, the. The manuscripts and. And the grimoires that they wrote, you can see that in a lot of ways, they were doing the exact same thing that we're doing now. They're, you know, taking all of these symbolic clues and. And myths and ideas from Plato and Aristotle and everything else, and they're trying to connect the dots. Right. Trying to, you know, reveal the mystery by. By seeing how all these, like, archetypes and. And, you know, angels or deities, whatever you want to call them, how all these things fit together, and then also playing around with. With physical substances and things like distillation processes and how metals change through oxidation and things like that, you know, what would eventually become modern chemistry.
And. Yeah, it's one of those things where you just have to take it for what it is. There's some really brilliant, fascinating stuff within that world, and that's great. But, you know, you can't say that they had all the answers. Right. Because a lot of them are contradicting one another.
Right. They were clearly trying to feel their way forward and figure things out in much the same way that we are now.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: Well said.
Yeah, it's the revelation of the mystery, I think that's constant no matter what time period. That's the story itself. It's the revelation of the mystery and the connection of the dots to figure out who and what we really are. Yep, that's it.
So I want to go off your point of ego metamorphosis.
What would you say if we can try to explain it? Here we are metamorphosizing into.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Oh, well, that's. That's. That's kind of like the. The. The. The really big picture where you kind of have to see the whole scope of it to really see where it's going and why I can. I can state it kind of briefly.
Briefly.
What's happening is that we are internalizing a kind of creative power which previously had been attributed to the gods, to the angels, to this kind of celestial realm which was understood to be generating the world. Right. Human beings were not understood to be creators. Okay.
And what starts happening in. And it really begins in Europe during.
Well, really, you could say it begins with Christianity, if you want to back it all the way up. But. But to make a very long story short, what begins to happen is. Is our way of understanding reality starts to take a very sharp turn.
Begins with a nominalist movement, but really that the place where this all kind of starts to bloom is the Renaissance period with these figures like Rene Descartes and Galileo and Copernicus and Leonardo da Vinci and the development of perspectival art in European paintings.
All of these are different manifestations of a shift that is occurring whereby we are beginning to understand human beings as a kind of inner universe of experience, of subjective experience. So a private inner world of appearance in contrast with an outer world, such that every individual human being is kind of their own universe unto themselves.
That way of thinking about consciousness is. Is so pervasive now that I could literally just go outside and pick up a random person off the street and be like, hey, tell me what consciousness is, or tell me what you are. What is your soul? You know, and they'll tell you, well, I am the thing that experiences stuff, right? Like, I. You know, if.
If you ask a person, like, what would it mean for someone to survive death?
They'll tell you something like, well, it's a matter of whether their consciousness survives death. Like, if they're. If they're.
And, you know, of course they'll kind of stumble over the question because most people don't have the kind of, like, philosophical articulation needed to. To say this clearly. But what they're going to be trying to get at is the idea that, well, I'm an inner universe. And the question of survival after death is a question of whether that interview inner universe persists somehow or whether it blinks out. Right. Okay. And so this is a very natural way for us to think about what we are and what consciousness is.
It's become all pervasive.
And what we don't understand is that that is a radically new way of thinking that just did not exist in the ancient world at all. Right? For, like Plato and Aristotle and Heraclitus, you.
Their idea of the world of appearance was that there was, like, the World of forms, there's the world of universals, the celestial world. Right. And then in contrast to that, you had the world of appearance, which was nature. Right? Okay. And so the, the world of appearance was something shared. It was something that we were all in. Right. They, they would not have recognized this idea that every individual soul or consciousness or whatever you want to call it is effectively a world of appearance unto itself.
Right. And so what's going to happen then is this shift is going to begin to occur a little bit in the, the 12th, 13th century, but then it really takes off during the Renaissance where we really start to think of things that way very thoroughly and to such an extent that like, I can say something, for example, like the, this eyeglass holder, I can be like, okay, the redness of this is like in my mind, right. Rather than in the world. Okay. And I can say that to you and you can understand what I mean. That, that it's that, that the redness is somehow something being contributed by my consciousness to this kind of like phenomenological horizon that would have been gobbledygook to Plato. I mean, they pre modern peoples just did not think that way at all. For them, this internal, external distinction just did not exist yet. Right.
And, and so this goes hand in hand with this, this transformation whereby we're going to start seeing forms, ideas as things, as, as categories, effectively. These or, or these like linguistic artifacts that we use to kind of project onto the world or to, to, to, to like a, like a grid that we're slapping onto the world or something like that. Right.
Such that ideas, we, we feel like ideas are things that we create and then impose on the world. And again, the pre, pre modern peoples just did not think that way at all. Ideas were forms and forms were actually out there in the world. Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here of course, but let me try and tie this in a bow real quick.
[00:19:26] Speaker A: So this is good, man.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: What's happening here is this, all these, these things like forms and experiences, consciousness, these things were for pre modern peoples like an ocean that they were swimming in. Right? Like fish don't know what water is because they have nothing to contrast it with water is just a fact.
That's just the background of their existence.
Right. So it's, it's not an object of concern for them. Likewise, consciousness is you. There is no equivalent of the word consciousness in ancient Greece or an ancient Sumeria or ancient Egypt. That word just does not exist.
You have words for things like thought or things like Forms or animacy, but an idea of consciousness as that which experiences, right, as. As a field within which private appearances occur. That. That would have been completely alien to the ancients. And as we develop that, what's happening is we're taking all of this stuff that used to be the water that we were swimming in and we're internalizing it, okay? And through that process of internalization, several things start to happen. One is that we begin to feel completely disconnected and alienated from reality.
Because then if all of that stuff is inside of me and I'm projecting it onto the world, well, then those things aren't in the world anymore, right? There's no actual color in the world. There's no actual meaning in the world. There's no actual emotion out there. All those things are just inside of me, right? And so the world ends up being this just like dead, lifeless rock.
And. And all of the cool stuff is happening inside of us. And so it creates this kind of rupture, this gap begins to widen between human subjectivity and the world, okay?
And then on the other hand, our creative power begins to increase dramatically, such that, for example, I could sit down right now and start writing like a fantasy novel and just like completely concocting a universe of like, something like Dune or Lord of the Rings or whatever you're into, right?
That was not the case in the pre modern world. In fact, human beings really didn't create myths.
Myths and folklore and. And even like musical compositions really just kind of developed on their own where there was no, like, individual authorship. There was no, like, person who wrote the Homeric epics. Homer just wrote them down, right?
Because these stories developed over time, probably through innumerable generations, probably thousands, thousands of years, where no individual person just came up with that stuff, right? And so it felt like this omnipresent background to them because it was right? But because of this transformation in the way that we relate to ideas, not only am I able to sit down here and imagine a completely different universe and imagine what it's like to be other subjectivities in that hypothetical universe.
I can sit down and I can. I can craft that in a way that really was not possible in the pre modern world. And you could say very similar things about the development of science and technology which have occurred since. Since the Renaissance period. There's this power that we begin to develop as we begin to internalize these things. Because what we're internalizing really is this creative power which had heretofore been attributed to the sky, Father, God, Right. Jupiter, Zeus, Thor, you know, beings like that, right? And there's reasons for that that we can get into and why it was that paternal archetype to which that power was attributed. But in any case, so you've got this double motion happening. You've got a breakdown and a process of alienation, a widening gap whereby human beings are feeling themselves more and more to be alienated from the world, okay? More and more to be in a world that is in itself completely inert, gray, meaningless. All right? And on the other hand, you. You've got the development of this creative power that is highly significant because ultimately resolving that alienation into something stable and consonant is going to require exercising that creative power in a way that has never been done before. All right? And so that's what we're getting at. So one last thing before my voice completely gives out on me.
Just. Just to illustrate just how dramatically different we are from the ancients. We're much less like the ancients than we like to imagine we are. If you look at the Greek play, Greek tragedies and comedies, one of the most iconic features of that was the chorus, right? And so you had these people, and they would. They would sing these parts in accordance with certain events in the narrative.
And.
And you could look this up, you know, like 19th century philosophers, you know, waxing philosophical about, you know, what the meaning of the chorus was supposed to be.
And they came up with a bunch of different explanations for it. But the truth is actually quite simple.
The chorus within Greek play represents the objective reality of narrative and semiotic and emotional contents of the world.
So in other words, somebody gets stabbed, and it's surprising and tragic and sad. And we would think of all of those things as things inside of us. Like my private experience of a world that in itself is none of those things. Right? The Greeks did not see it that way. For the Greeks, the sadness was in the objective reality of the event taking place.
Okay?
[00:26:25] Speaker A: The.
[00:26:26] Speaker B: The tragic irony was actually a thing in the world, not just our emotional reaction to it, you understand? And that's what the court was. The chorus was the embodiment of that. The objective reality of what in. In esotericism, we today we would call the astral plane. That's really what. What it amounts to. And so. But that's the shift is. Is that we. We've. We've changed in such a way that we, in the modern world, we find it difficult to even understand that viewpoint, that emotions, for example, or narrative meanings can actually be things in the world as opposed to just inside of us, projected out onto it.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Wow. Well, thank you for sharing that, brother.
[00:27:09] Speaker B: You're welcome.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Awesome.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: We're gonna see how much voice I've got left for the rest of this interview. Apparently I need some honey and tea to get.
[00:27:18] Speaker A: Drink as much tea as you need. That was wonderful. I'm glad you shared that.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: No problem.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: So it seems to me like we are realizing maybe we are in the realm of the gods.
It's like we're taking on that power ourselves through that co creation you spoke of, right? We're gaining that godlike power or at least realizing that godlike power.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: Well, there's an irony to it though as well, because here's the thing.
There's also been this widening gap that's been occurred. Oh, I'm blurry now for some reason. Hang on, let me fiddle with my camera.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: I just have to put your hand in front of it and then go back like that.
[00:28:06] Speaker B: Maybe that'll work. Maybe that'll work.
Technical difficulties. Come on.
A few moments later. So, yeah, there's, there's an irony here because like I said, there's. There's a widening gap between human beings and the world that's occurring. There's also a widening gap between human beings and our notion of the transcendental or the celestial.
Okay, so if, if you go back to. Again, I'll use ancient Greece as an example.
And you asked some random peasant, you know, where, where are the gods, right? Because this is the way that we tend to think of it. We tend to think of it like believing in the gods means believing in these beings that exist in some other world that we don't have access to that we can't see.
And because that's how we tend to think of believing in like the Christian God, right? He's this thing off somewhere. And so you have to believe in this thing that you can't actually make contact with in order go along with that, right? But you know, if you asked some Greek peasant like, where are the gods? They would look like at you, like you're.
Because them. It would be like, it would be like if somebody asked you, like, show me gravity.
What do you mean show me gravity? You know what I mean? Like, if. So, you know, here's Demeter, right? And they would point to a field with wheat growing in it. You know, here's Demeter and you know, a piece of bread.
Where is Jupiter? Have you never seen rain before? Do you not understand that rain impregnates the earth and therefore it's masculine and Then the earth is, you know, like, it was just the gods simply were the basic principles of nature, right? And those were all around us. There was no need to believe in anything invisible. It was, it was all completely imminent.
[00:30:05] Speaker A: And.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: But then what happens though is this gap starts to emerge. And it really begins with Plato, actually with, with Plato because Plato starts to present us with, with this understanding of the celestial domain where the gods are forms and the forms are not just imminent anymore. They're. They're instead these things that, you know, they have an imminent aspect to them, but in themselves they are understood to be universal, eternal, perfectly pure, static, like, like these, these mathematical crystals, you could think of them, that just kind of exist in this hyperspace, which is, is very different than the world of particulars and bodies and, and time that, that we experience imminently. Right? And so this is the beginning of it. This is the beginning of this gap. And you can actually see if you go back and look at the ancient literature on this, the, the way that the, the, the Platonists and the traditional Hellenic henotheists would, would kind of argue about this because the, the Platonists would would say, oh, you, you know, ignorant, you know, traditionalist. The way you see it, you have all these gods that are just a bunch of like horny assholes. Like, why would you want to, to worship these, these, you know, if they're just as bad as we are, if not worse, right?
And, and then the counter argument coming from the, the traditionalists was, well, sure, but you Platonists have basically just reduced God to a concept, just an idea that's off in some other world rather than something that's actually imminently here.
Okay?
And ultimately the Platonists are going to win this one because there's going to be this movement towards seeing the divine as consisting of this like, ultimate purity that transcends this world. And obviously we see that influence very, very sharply within Christianity as well, which in itself is a little bit of irony, because Christianity is really interesting precisely because of how it, it transgresses that boundary between imminent and transcendent and that, that the very idea of the God man as, as that which is somehow both. But anyway, so that is then going to continue over time is, is the thing. As you move through the medieval period and into the early scientific period with Renaissance and the Enlightenment, what's going to happen is the gods are kind of going to be swept under the rug, okay?
And in their place, you're going to get this notion of divine laws where these, these, these Mathematical constructs are understood to be the things that like, tell the universe how to be right.
And, and, and it's essentially the exact same thing. Like the laws of physics are gods by any definition, but it's the, the difference. What's changed here is that now your gods, not only are they pure, perfect, eternal things.
Now, in addition to that, they're also meaningless, except insofar as they were created by the one big God. Right? So as soon as you take the one big God out of the picture, then the laws of physics are just completely meaningless. They're just there, just like the principles through which the cosmic clockwork operates.
And so what's happened here, if you zoom out and look at the big picture, what's happened is that we've taken the gods, which initially were very anthropic. They were, they were really understood to be living, animate, temporal, to have purposeiveness in their behaviors, in the, in their manifestation within the world. They, they were not understood to be perf.
And what happens is that we're gradually stripping away those. The. That animacy and that humanity from the transcendental world until all you're left with is some equations.
And so those are the. That's what's left of the gods, in other words. And, and so that is a process of a. That's another widening gap where the transcendental is now something as far away from us as we can possibly imagine because it's become so thoroughly de. Animated and dehumanized and abstracted to the point that, you know, like, if you ask a physicist, like, what is a law of physics? Where are they? Where do they come from? They're just gonna like shrug or roll their eyes at you because they feel like those questions are meaningless or unanswerable or that our stupid monkey brains aren't wired up correctly to figure it out.
But they're, they're pretty cool, with those being questions that they don't have answers to.
But we really have to look at why those questions are unanswerable. And the reason they're unanswerable is because of this process where again, this, this gap between the transcendent and the imminent, the universal and the particular form and substance has widened over time. And so you can. You need to think of that widening, like all of these gaps.
And this process of widening is like a rubber band being stretched out. The more you stretch it out, you're creating tension, you're creating friction, you're creating incommensurability that causes problems. That's A friction that leads to all kinds of problems and chaos, really. But ultimately it's a tension that points in the direction of a resolution. Right. In the same way that, like, you know, male and female, it's specifically the differences and the friction between those two that kind of necessitates their being brought together into a syzygy.
And then that syzygy, of course, is necessary for the. The reproduction and perpetuation of life. And so what we've got going on here is something very similar, but happening at a cosmic level and a psychical level, the collective level.
[00:37:20] Speaker A: Well spoken again.
Wow. Okay.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I see the current times, is that anthropic viewpoint of being in the realm of the gods. We lost that, but I think it's resurging. It's an archaic revival, as Terence McKenna says, but it's not the same way that the ancients saw it. I think it's like 2.0 anthropic animus. You know, I think it's like a. It's a new rendition of being in that realm. Right. I think it's less so at the whim of the realm and more so as a. As I said before, as a co. Creator of that realm. You know what I'm getting at, Right?
[00:38:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And. And you know, McKenna McKenna's viewpoint on this was, was he was very suspicious of any. Any anthropocentrism. Right. You know, he was. He was still very Copernican in that regard, in a way that Steiner is not, a way that Gebser and I are not.
And you know, to just put it very bluntly, I think that the Copernican principle is. Is one of the major dogmas of a modern worldview that have to go because in order for. For us to really reintegrate with the world in the way that I've been suggesting and indicating, there's a need to recognize the fact that we actually are a very special place in the universe. We are kind of the central protagonists. Right.
And that's very significant because it means that we have a kind of responsibility that cats and dogs and dolphins, as cute as they are, do not have.
And it also indicates that many of the inferences we've made about the world, scientifically speaking, which have been grounded fundamentally in that Copernican principle need to be called into question. Like a vast amount of astronomy is playing with very limited information. Right? And when you're playing with limited information, you have to make inferences Based on things that are simply taken for granted. And one of the things that has been unquestionably taken for granted for a very long time, 300 years or longer now, is the Copernican principle. The idea that we're just floating on some random rock, floating around some random fireball, floating around some random, you know, black hole, I guess, at the center of the galaxy.
And, you know, it's. We're. We're just a moat in. In a. Essentially a random distribution of such moats. If that's not the case, then that has very profound implications in, in terms of our moral thinking and in terms of the way that we understand our relationship to truth, the relationship between our beliefs and the world, our experiences and the world.
But also in. In very specific, concrete terms that can have a massive influence on the way that we interpret astronomy, which. Which could result in a completely different way of understanding the place of our solar system in relation to the rest of the cosmos as well.
[00:40:59] Speaker A: Yeah, the Copernican viewpoint just doesn't add up. The more you go into yourself, the more one explores it all.
It's like, you really think this is random? You think this is just a happenstance. We just so happen to appear here.
It may seem like that at one point, you know, from one perspective, we are just a pale blue dot. As Carl Sagan says, we are literally just a speck in the entire universe. So in terms of the magnitude and the size of the universe, like, yeah, we don't really mean anything. But I think that meaning is brought into our lives in a way that goes beyond size, it goes beyond linearity, it goes beyond locality. In some way, it's intertwined with story, right? There's some kind of story that we can feel in that subjectivity that transcends and transgresses that Copernican view.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: Well, I mean, and if you just think about it in terms of just the solar system, just to keep it limited for the sake of illustration, if we are looking at the solar system in such a way that we believe that we're in a purposeless universe in which the only things that are really objectively real are like, quantifiable physical properties of objects, physical objects, then it kind of makes sense to think of the sun as the center of our solar system because it has more mass. It's the big thing. And so far as there seems to be a correlation between mass and gravity, then it would follow that the. The sun exhort. Exerts more gravitational influence upon the other bodies, bodies within the Solar system.
And yet what is always left out of this story is the fact that the Ptolemaic solar system still is 100% perfectly compatible with empirical observation.
We could easily just model the solar system without changing anything about the laws of physics. By the way, with our current, you know, we can understand gravity in the exact same way that the masses of the different planets. We don't have to change any of that. All you have to do is just hold the Earth still, you know, pretend that it's holding still and that everything else is moving. And then, boom, you get the Ptolemaic model right back.
And in a sense, we're doing the exact same thing with the sun and the heliocentric model, where when we model the solar system that way, we are pretending that the sun is the thing that's not moving and that the other bodies are moving around it.
But, you know, as you zoom out a bit more, that that's not really true. The sun is really moving in relation to other stars and in relation to the galaxy as a whole and to other galaxies. Right. And so when you ask a question like, well, what's the, the really true way of looking at it?
You start to realize that, that we've, we've maybe screwed up some of our assumptions along the way, actually, actually, because the only way for there to be any kind of absolute truth to models like that would be if you had an absolute spatial background like as the space just had this, like, grid with like a zero point or, or something equivalent to that, where you could have this absolution of kinematics where you could say, okay, the, the, this object actually is holding still in relation to this static spatial background. Because if all you've got is the laws of physics, then you don't have a way to distinguish those things.
An object moving at a constant velocity is equivalent to an object that is holding still. There's no difference between them. Now, Newton, of course, course, did believe in an absolute spatial background because he saw that if you completely remove that absolute spatial background, then things started to get really weird. You actually could not definitively say that the Earth moved around the sun and that the sun was, was static relative to that.
He saw that there were problems downstream of that if you got rid of absolute space.
And, and this is, this is one of the main motivations for the development of ether theories actually during the 19th century is, is that the ether could not only be a kind of medium for the propagation of light and, and the circulation of electromagnetic fields and so forth, but, but it could also be this absolute spatial background.
Right, but the problem is that there doesn't appear to be one, right? The. The absolute spatial background is something that has never been observed. And then you also have the Michelson Morley experiment as well, which also complicates this.
And anyway, I'm saying all these things not in order to say that there is no ether, but rather that this notion of an absolute background is something that if we're going to believe in it, we're going to have to believe in something that has never been observed, something that is completely hypothetical.
But, but look at what the alternative is. The alternative is to say, actually, you know what? Ernst Mach was right. There is no absolute background. Things are actually constituted relationally in one another in the way that they empirically seem to be. And once you bite that bullet, then you can look back at that distinction between heliocentrism and the Ptolemaic geocentrism, and you can actually be like, you know what? Actually, they can both be true.
And not only that, when we look at the Earth as the center of the solar system, right? Look, look at what we're doing. When we put the sun at the center, we're saying that what's significant to us is mass and gravity. When we put the Earth at the center, we're saying, actually what's significant here is the, the fact that Earth is where the life is happening, okay? And of course, then you might say, well, that matters to us, but that doesn't matter to the universe. Okay, but what if it does, right? Like, what if, you know, the Earth stands in relation to the other planets in much the same way that the human brain stands in relation to your bones and kidneys and whatnot, right?
And I think that that's precisely what's going on here. There's a very real sense in which the Earth is the, the. The head of the solar system. If you, if we're, if we're talking about the solar system as a biological organism, effectively as an organic whole, the Earth is the center of the solar system in the sense that it is where the action is happening. It is. It is the.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: The.
[00:48:27] Speaker B: The point of the damn thing, right? And the other planets, including the sun and the Moon, are organs of that larger organism, okay? And so then when you look at it that way, you're like, okay, maybe the, the Ptolemaic model isn't just outmoded, unscientific. Maybe there's actually something here.
Well, then you can start to say, hey, wait a minute. If we look at it that way, then suddenly these celestial spheres line up perfectly with the order of the thunderbolts and the Tree of Life and the Kabbalah with the Tree of Life, and you can start to see that there's a whole other compositional layer of reality above that of mere physical properties, and that those higher layers, let's say, sometimes have a very different organization than that strictly physical layer. In fact, I would say there isn't really a strictly physical layer because all of these layers are interwoven with one another.
And so, yeah, that, that, that's, that's the big picture here, is that we. That same thinking that I just kind of illustrated with regards to the organization of the solar system, we can zoom that out further, right? And then we can start really thinking about the, the, the, the, the other stars and, and, and, you know, the Oort cloud and, you know, all of these other astronom thinking about the universe as a whole in that way as well, and realizing that there are these different layers that are different from one another and which can nonetheless cohere with one another into one big picture. In the same way that the Ptolemaic and Copernican models of our solar system can fit together, you know, showing us two aspects of the same reality.
[00:50:40] Speaker A: Very powerful. Yeah, I like that. When you look at it as Earth being the center, which I think some physicists would have a bone to pick with that. But I understand what you're saying.
Earth as the center, it's this. It's like the center of.
Not necessarily like.
[00:51:01] Speaker B: Well, you gotta understand, though, there's not much bone that they can pick with it though, because most physicists would say, oh, Einstein debunked the absolute spatial background. And that's the one way in which I would actually agree with Einstein. I think the rest of his stuff is basically bullshit. But if that's true, then there is no distinction between a constant velocity and, and, and a static object.
They would have to agree with me that in our heliocentric models of the solar system, we are pro. Pretending that the sun is holding still and everything else is moving in relation to it. And there is nothing stopping us from pretending that the, the, the Earth is holding still and everything is moving around it. Right. So even at the physical level, you know, the only way to push back against that is to say no, there actually is an absolute spatial background.
But then you're conjecturing the existence of something that has never been observed, something that is by definition, therefore unscientific.
So anyway, go ahead that's good.
[00:52:11] Speaker A: I would love to host a debate between you and a classical physicist. I can imagine that would be extremely interesting, because I'm not a physicist, you know, I don't have that background, so I wouldn't be able to go off any notes. But I totally understand what you're saying.
And maybe that inaccessible background, that unseeable background, right? That immutable, unmoving background. Go ahead, you gotta say something.
[00:52:35] Speaker B: I was gonna say you should. You should look at the. The. I've been doing a series of discussions with Chris from the. The dialect channel, and he does have a physics background. And. And so I've done a number of discussions with him on his channel, the Dialectical.
And he. He's of the.
He thinks that there has to be an absolute etheric background. Actually, that's his perspective on it. So if you want to see me and him talk about that, then that exists for anyone who might be interested in that. But anyway, continue.
[00:53:08] Speaker A: Sounds good. Maybe this, I think, would be a good note to go down. Maybe that immutable background is quite simply consciousness itself, right? That subjective consciousness, the viewpoint from where it all stems from.
Literally, your consciousness is the center of the universe. I know that's kind of like going down some dangerous routes of solipsism, as I said, but we can't. How do I put this? We can't see our own consciousness. You know, like, that is the. That is the viewpoint of viewpoints.
That is the center.
You know what I'm saying?
[00:53:44] Speaker B: Well, and then that raises the something that's kind of been in the background of this whole conversation that we haven't explicitly touched upon yet, which is relativity. Right?
And so this comes into play as soon as you start looking at the world in a subjectivistic manner, this becomes a problem.
Right? It was like I was saying before, this wasn't a problem for the Greeks. The emotions, the meaning, all of that, those things were in the world, not just inside of us. Right? So let me give you another example of that just to. Just to highlight this. Like, if I step on a bug, I can meaningfully ask, did that bug experience pain? Okay. And so. And what I'm asking then, within the context of modern metaphysics, is. And again, you don't have to be a philosopher to understand this. I could ask this to any random person off the street and they would understand what I'm doing. Saying what I'm asking, does the bug feel pain? Or is it just like a robot or something?
And. And we. We have the. The conceptual background. Needed to make sense of a question like that.
If I asked that to Plato or Aristotle, again, they would just look at me like I'm stupid, like, well, the bug's dead, so of course it. Experience. Well, they wouldn't use a word like experience, but of course pain happened to the bug because pain is by definition the breakdown of a living body.
Therefore.
What. What are you even asking? Are you just asking me whether it's a real bug or a machine? Is that what you're asking? Like, they would not understand the question the way that we would understand it. The way that we would understand it. What we're asking is, does the bug have an inner universe like I do, within which subjective experiences like pain can arise for that particular entity? That's a mouthful. But you. But you got to realize here that that. That is a background that is running for all of us, even ordinary people all the time in the modern world, because it's that deeply embedded in the way that we think and the way that we. We. We relate to our own and existence, really, and to nature. Okay, so with all that said, then once you make this kind of subjectivistic move, this internalization begins to happen, then you've got this problem of relativity then. And then you can start asking questions like, okay, this is red to me, but what if I'm calling red, and you're calling it red too, but in your mind, the quality of the experience is what I would call blue. Like, if I could just enter into your consciousness somehow and see the world through your eyes, maybe the whole spectrum would be flipped somehow. Like, how would I know?
And again, I can ask a meaningful question about that within this kind of really solipsistic understanding of the world.
Because I don't think that redness is actually out there. I don't think that blueness is actually a thing in the world. If I think that it's. It's basically just like a stamp that my, you know, occipital cortex is, you know, it's getting these signals from my eyes. And, you know, there's some kind of little program homunculus in there that's taking these color quality stamps and like, stamping the incoming data to turn it into an experience, which is definitely not what's happening, but that's the implication, right? And so what you're asking is like, well, what if your little goblin has the wrong stamps? How would we ever know, right?
And the reality is that there is no stamps and that colors are actually in the world, but nonetheless, it's also true that our constitution, our, our attunement to the world, let's say, plays a role in how the world is disclosed in relation to our individual subjective consciousness. So in other words, when I look at a painting, I might see something completely different than what you see. Right?
Or, or when, when, when I hear, especially with music, we could, we could both list musical composition and hear completely different things based on our musical education or our, the, the, the emotional constitution of our inner worlds.
All kinds of things like that. And so there is this relativity, there's this variability there. And that's, that's significant because understanding that subjectivity and that that variability is, is crucial for the development of this creative power.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: Right?
[00:58:57] Speaker B: You need to have this kind of arbitrariness in order to have that elbow room, as it were, in order, in order to be creative in that way. You've got to be able to understand that there is this kind of co. Participation between us and the world that's actually generating that which is experienced. Right.
Necessarily the same thing as saying that it's all just in our heads and there's nothing actually out there. Okay. And so this, and this, we really have to get to, in order to, to resolve this. But anyway, so back to this, this, this thing about subjectivity being kind of the, the background.
So yes, in a sense. So.
What happens here, if you look at it that way, if you look at the ether, for example, here. Actually, let's, let's bring this back to the Michelson Morley experiment. I don't know if you're familiar where that is, but I'll just briefly run down what that was for anybody listening who might not be familiar with what that is. So you had this notion of an absolute etheric Background during the 19th century in Western science. Okay. And the idea was there, this was this invisible stuff that permeated everything and it was like static, like it, it was the thing holding still that everything else moved through. Right? Okay.
And so if that was the case then, and light was a wave, a propagation through that etheric background, then we should be able to set up an experiment where we measure interference patterns to determine how the earth is moving through the ether. Okay? So for example, it could be that the, that the sun actually is holding still and the end and the earth is moving through it. So if the earth is moving through it, then it would be like, like if you, if you imagine it as being a kind of liquid and you, you, you're on a boat, right? And you want to understand how your boat is moving in relation to the water, then you can create waves along the water. And because you're moving through the water, then when the waves come back to you, like you're. You're going to see it. You're going to see that effect because of the way that the, the. The. There's this kind of drag effect. Right? So this is what we see in, like, the Doppler effect, right. When a car is moving towards you, it.
Right. Like there's waves are getting squished as it's moving towards you, and they get elongated as the vehicle is moving away from you. The same principle here with a Michelson Morley experiment. Basically, they've got this setup where they're shooting light beams and reflecting them off these mirrors. And the whole idea is if we're moving through an etheric background, then that we should be able to detect a kind of drag, which. Which basically is a measurement of how fast the Earth is moving through that ether. And ultimately the result was null.
In other words, no background was detected. The results weren't actually completely null. They were very small and within the margin of error.
But subsequent experiments tightened that margin of error further, and it's.
It's generally accepted that there is no ether drag that's actually detectable. Okay, so if that's the case, what does that mean? And the answer that a standard physicist will give you is that there are these dilation and contraction effects of space time which occur, whereby basically as things move, they're kind of contracting or expanding, and it's all about the speed of light remaining invariable across different reference frames. Okay. And so to make a very long story short, what you end up with is this extremely arcane, mathematically convoluted theory postulating the existence of a whole bunch of really fantastical. Which is not only non. It's not just that we haven't observed these things, it's that they are by definition not observable. So, for example, if I'm saying that space expands, how would you check that? Right. Well, you could take out a ruler and. And see, right, Whether. Whether things have expanded or contracted. Right. But no, that doesn't work because it would stretch out your ruler too. Right.
So. And it's all like that, basically. And it's like. Like if. If you've got some kind of thing, like if I tell you there's a unicorn in my living room, and you're like, well, where's the unicorn? And I'm like, what? Well, it's an invisible unicorn. And you're like, well, can I Touch the unicorn. And I'm like, oh well, yeah, but every time you try to touch it, it moves. It's like that. Like you, you've defined things in such a way that they're not able to be contacted through actual concrete empirical observation. Right? And so you end up with, with these things where they'll try to validate relativity through jumping through all these weird hoops.
But, but, but in any case, I don't want to go on a huge rant about that. I want, I want to bring this back to the consciousness as the absolute thing because that's, that's.
So forget about relativity for a second. What's the more obvious way of looking at this? And for people within the kind of esoteric world, it's really obvious to them, which is like, oh well, if the light is a, is etheric, then it's moving through etheric bodies. So of course there's no drag because the thing emitting the light is moving with the earth. So in other words, if, like, if my body were producing light and it is propagating through the ether and etheric bodies are things that are produced by bodies, well then there's not going to be a drag because that background is going to move with me, you understand? So there's just like a halo expanding outward from a body.
Then what you're going to end up with is a thing where you're never going to detect a drag because basically like the Michelson Morley experiment was producing its own etheric background that it was moving with. You understand?
[01:06:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:13] Speaker B: So if you look at it that way, then, then, then that gives you a much easier way to resolve this.
But, but then you end up with this situation where you've got to, you've got to stop looking at the world as just a bunch of dead inert objects because you, you've got to, you've got to take into consideration a theoretical bodies, right? And then astral bodies and so forth. These things that were, have, were. Science was very eager to just kind of like cut the cord with those things and relegate them to the woo woo and the esoteric. And ironically what they ended up doing is in trying to get rid of those woo woo things, they ended up coming up with something which was infinitely more woo woo relativity and quantum mechanics and things like that. And so, so that, that then brings us to, all right, if there is this kind of matrix, let's say, of things being interconnected.
But that is, but, but the, the nodes of that nexus are, are what's kind of Creating it.
Then you end up with this world that. That is relativistic in the sense that, like, you have these etheric bodies that are overlapping with one another, and things like light and magnetism and electricity are moving through those.
Okay. And so that then brings us to this idea of fields, okay. Like morphogenetic fields, bioelectric fields, and introduces really, a completely different way of thinking about life and how form comes about and things like that.
And let me see. I'm kind of. I'm kind of losing my own plot here for a second. But I wanted to say something about this idea of. Of relativity and. And submission. Subjectivity, Right? So let me put it this way.
What if you get that far with the reasoning, you end up at this place where it's, like, experience and form and all these things that we had internalized previously. Instead of them just being, like, locked inside of my skull somewhere, now we can start thinking of them as things that are actually constitutive of the world.
Because we're actually a lot bigger than we realized, right. We actually, like our consciousness.
It doesn't feel like it's just locked inside of my cerebral cortex somewhere. Right. It feels like it's enveloping the world around me and. And my visual field and things like that. And. And so what I'm getting at here is that that. That's actually true. It's actually true that there is this kind of expansiveness to consciousness, subjectivity. Right. The etheric body. And there's. There's more than just the etheric body. But then you end up with this thing where everything is kind of interconnected with everything else because everything is kind of overlapping, right?
[01:09:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:09:36] Speaker B: And then you can start to look at it in such a way that there is this totality that encompasses everything, but it's not this static background.
It's rather more like a web that we're building, right?
[01:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Indra's web.
[01:09:58] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, yeah.
Right. Everything's a reflection of everything else. Yeah.
[01:10:06] Speaker A: This is very powerful, man. Yes.
Somewhere between form and formless.
Ultimate subjectivity, ultimate objectivity.
Somewhere in the middle, we find ourselves between either of those poles.
That's the magic I feel.
Do you ever use that word, magic? Because I'm using that word a lot more now. I'm sensing the magic more. So the more that I, you know, dive into myself, the world, and do this stuff with other people, I just simply feel magic in it all.
[01:10:41] Speaker B: Well, there's. There's a lot of magic in the world, for sure. Sure. When I. When I, when I talk about magic though, I'm usually talking about like, like, like actual magical practices. Right?
[01:10:54] Speaker A: Magic with a faith.
[01:10:56] Speaker B: Yeah, like, like, like animal sacrifice, for example, things like that. Or different kinds of like ritual magic performed in temples and that kind of thing. I mean, we could have a whole conversation just about that. But even, even that, I mean like people did those things because they worked, simple as that, you know, and you don't even necessarily have to believe anything. Woo woo. To accept that the, those magical people practices have these very real psychological and social functions, psychosocial I guess, functions which are very, very real. And as soon as you start taking into consideration the interconnectivity of everything through morphic resonance or etheric bodies or whatever, then you start to realize even more strongly that yes, magic is real. Magical practices have been conducted by every single culture that has ever existed on this planet for a reason.
Because those things do have a very real power.
[01:12:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I think this is totally shifting gears, but let's go down that route.
What is it about these rituals that allow us to affect the field in a way that just simply works? Is it a psychological thing? Is it we're actually affecting something at a level that we can't see in terms of those etheric bodies, the astral bodies. What is it about magic that works?
[01:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean you can just start at the, at the, the most directly visible level and then, and then go deeper. So a great example to start with would be the Spartan initiation ritual with the Helots. This is a great one because it illustrates a lot of motifs that we see consistently throughout different kinds of magic.
So in ancient Sparta, the young Spartans would have this initiation ritual where they, they would partake in this kind of group murder of a slave, a helot. Right.
So within Spartan society they had a rule that helots were not allowed to be outside after, after dark. Okay. And the reasons for this are, are kind of obvious. If you've got a whole class of slaves in your society, then you probably don't want them congregating together while you're asleep. Right. So inevitably though, you know, the hell odds they have work to do. They work the fields, they're doing construction, labor, all kinds of things like that. Inevitably one of them is going to end up kind of straggling behind and end up caught in the dark.
And so what they would do, the, the, the young Spartan soldiers, they would form a little posse and wait to ambush a hell odds on his way back as soon as the sun went down. Because as soon as it became dark, it was legal to kill them. And so the initiate would go and, you know, grab the, the, the helot from, from behind and, and take a knife and slit their throat, okay?
And this is a kind of magical practice because what's happening here is, is you have a kind of ritualized transgression, okay? And, and you see this kind of practice, I mean, you see it in modern gang culture. You see it in even, even militaries, sports teams, even things like this where, you know, they'll do something illegal. The more transgressive, the better.
And because they're doing it together, right? Because there's this kind of collective transgression of the boundaries.
Everybody is kind of mutually implicated, right? So if me and my boys, you know, we're trying to form a gang, you know, what do you do? Well, let's go rob the lake liquor store, right? Well, now that's how you know that nobody's going to talk. That's how, you know, to trust one another. Because if one goes down, you all go down, right? So there, so it's this, there, there's this kind of mutual connection, this bonding that is occurring through the transgression, okay?
Now transgression is also significant because of the way that transgression works psychologically. Okay?
So this is, this is a trope that you see in Greek tragedy. You also see it in modern movies, especially like horror movies, where transgressions serve to kind of break seals, as it were, which, which constitute this boundary between the normal, ordinary, civilized world that a corporate accords with the laws of man. You know, ordinary life, right on the one hand, and then beneath that surface, you have this world of the Dionysian, the Hadean, the, the world of primal instincts and libidinality and, and, you know, monsters and things like that, right? And so you'll see this in, in, in like movies and whatnot. Actually, the, the, the Greek tragedy is also a great example of this. Where in Oedipus you see this in the Oresteia, you see this, you have these transgressions that happen like Agamemnon walking on the red carpet or, or Oedipus, his mom, right? Where these transgressions are, are kind of thinning that boundary between the ordinary world and the, the, the magical, dark, chthonic world beneath it, okay?
And once that boundary is broken, then all hell breaks loose, okay? And what this symbolizes then is something very real where transgressive acts, whether, you know, it's doing something illegal or killing somebody or whatever. The case may be it has this kind of psychological effect where your, your mind has these different layers, okay? And the higher layers are really attuned to ordinary society, right? There are things that you don't do. You, you're nice and polite, hold the door for little old ladies, you know, don't cuss at your boss, whatever, right?
And then you've also got this primal id, this, this, you know, libidinal reptile brain, you know, fight or flight aspect of your nervous system. This very animalistic layer of, of the human psyche which is usually kept under wraps. The higher levels of your psyche are kind of, it's their job to make sure that those lower layers don't, you know, go crazy and cause you to do things that everyone will regret.
So what happens then is these acts of transgression, not only do they, they facilitate this kind of bonding between individuals, but they, they, they also serve this kind of activation of those deep primal, phonic layers of the psyche, those animalistic layers of the psyche. Because that transgression is essentially telling those higher parts of your psyche, hey, your rules don't apply here anymore. We're in the other world now. We're, we're in the dark. We're, we're in a place where, you know, it's, it's, it's you or them, right? Okay? And, and so that then is conditioning, a kind of collective activation of those primal instincts, right? And so you see, you see this, this very common thing with like, you know, mercenary bands or G, or even entire armies in certain cases, especially Mesoamerica, where you're enacting these forms of transgression in order to kind of prime your group of young soldiers for activating those primal aspects of the human psyche within certain conditions.
And it works there. I mean, you know, you want people, you know, soldiers to fight and die for one another. To be willing to die to, to, to, to be able to enter into that mindset where fear just isn't there anymore, right?
And so just, just with all that, you can see that, that magical practices like that have a very real form and function and really a very real practical value even without talking about anything remotely. Woo woo. I mean, that's all just in terms of, of social dynamics and psychology right there now it gets, it gets more intense though if we start talking about something like resonance, morphic resonance, etheric resonance, the way that different layers of the human composition can kind of become attuned with one another and resonate with one another and entrain one another. Right? Entrainment Right. The way that two different oscillators will entrain one another, they'll. They'll hone in on the same frequency. Right. You can do this with tuning forks or piano strings.
Something very similar happens with human beings and our kind of psychological emotional disposition. Right.
So, I mean, that. And that's just. That's just one layer of it. I mean, we could talk about this from a number of different angles, but in general, ritualistic practices.
And again, you know, animal sacrifice could be a part of this conversation. Things like.
Even things like. Like collective prayer and whatnot, they all serve functions like this in basically weaving together social groups.
[01:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah. All in all, as you said, it works depending on how you look at it. Doesn't really matter is for some reason it does work. And I think it's, as you said, you just tune yourself to that.
There's something about tuning. That's how I see the body now is I'm just an instrument. Just like you tune a guitar, you tune the body.
And you can tune it to the dark forces, or you can maybe tune it to the light forces.
Either way, it works. Yep. I mean, for some reason, what's coming up for me is like the battle between. Because I think this is a motif also that has been going on since the beginning of time within the story is the battle between that dark and the light.
It seems like that's what we are in the middle of. Humans are in the struggle between the dark and the light. And it's like, what do you really want to choose here?
What side are you on? Do you ever sense that, like, there is.
I guess I'm asking, like, is there good and evil? Right. Is there a light side and a dark side? Are there two sides to this thing in terms of what we can tune ourselves to, what we can tap into?
[01:22:47] Speaker B: Well, I mean, if.
If there's going to be a good and an evil, and there's got to be a point to all this, right.
And then it becomes a matter of what is serving that end.
So ultimately here, you kind of have to back up and look at the big picture in terms of life in general, human life in general, this huge cosmic journey that includes historical evolution, biological evolution, the evolution of human consciousness, where's it all going? Right. And the answer, I believe, is discernible.
And the answer is that this is a process of kind of separation and reintegration where you begin with a kind of primordial oneness that is completely undifferentiated and thus essentially indistinguishable. From nothingness. It is just pure being. And then that splits apart. And we could talk about how and why that happens. But ultimately, as the world becomes more differentiated, right? As you get lots of stars and nebula and then life forms and then different species and then different kinds of minds, different kinds of. Of. Of. Of consciousness and so forth, this novelty, you're creating more and more differentiation and more and more separation.
And. And that separation then is creating a kind of intensity, a kind of intensity that needs to resolve itself again. It's. It's like friction. It's. It's like a rubber band being stretched out that needs to snap at some point. Okay?
And.
What that friction overall is pointing towards is the realization of a kind of cosmic harmony whereby all of that difference is maintained.
Things don't just dissolve into one another, back into a homogeneous goop, but rather there's a reintegration of the many into a one which includes and encompasses all of all of that difference. Right? And so you can. You can see this in many different ways. I mean, if you just look right now at the process which has been happening to us historically, the way that human beings have become more and more and more diverse over time, right? The way that our. Our minds, for example, are. There's so much diversity now that. So much more so than was the case, you know, during the medieval period or. Or in ancient Greece or whatever. You know, there's been this kind of fanning out, this. This explosion of novelty which has been happening.
And that in itself is an intensification of chaos. It's an intensification of pain in a lot of ways, too.
It makes things harder. It creates more friction. But the thing is, if you look at this musically, and music is always a great metaphor. Well, I say metaphor for these things. It's not even really a metaphor. I think that the basic structure of reality is identical to the basic structure of music. They are identical. Okay, and what all this implies then is that beauty is intensity.
We're aiming towards the intensification of the experience of beauty, where beauty is weaving greater diversities together into greater wholes. Right?
The universe isn't trying to create bliss. Right. If it wanted bliss, then it would just. It wouldn't have done anything. It would have just stayed pure. Being, slash, nothingness. Because that in itself is, as the Hindus say, Satchitananda, right? Being, consciousness of bliss.
It's just, you know, that that's kind of the ultimate form of consonants, right? It's homogeneity. Everything's the same. It's like Perfect oneness, stillness.
But the universe isn't doing that. It's clearly not satisfied with just sitting there as pure infinity forever.
It creates particularity, it creates diversity, it creates nuance and individuation.
Because once that diversity is reunified together into a greater whole, then that is. Is a far more intense experience of beauty again. It's like you, I mean, you could sit and play the same note on your piano or guitar all day, just one note over and over again. And like, yeah, that's consonant. It's perfectly harmonious, technically speaking, but who fucking cares? It's only, it's only exciting and interesting and vivifying when you're taking a whole bunch of parts that shouldn't fit together and making them somehow work. And that's really what the universe is trying to do. So to bring this then back to the morality question, the question of good and evil, then any moral questions are then about how we can play a role in that narrative, right? Or how that process can, can be enacted within us. We are also multiplicities of lots of different parts that sometimes don't fit together all that well. And so the question of morality isn't just a question of how we relate to one another. It's also how we relate the different parts of us to one another in, in our inner worlds as well. And so, and this then is the way in which this, this, this kind of creative power really comes to, to tie everything together. Because that power to reorganize ourselves internally and reorganize, renegotiate our relationships with one another at a communal level, familial level, and internally, the power that we are using, that we can use and should use to do that is the creative power that we have achieved through this process of internalization that started really with the advent of Christianity, okay? Because in the pre modern world, in the classical world, the kind of coherence you had was given. It was like the. Your society, for example, was fit together on the basis of social norms that just developed on their own, basically. And things fit together a certain way and people did what they did because that's just how we do things, right? You know, don't question it.
You know, there was just a very stable, static, traditional form of life. And that also applies to human beings. Internally with human beings were psychological sculpted by their upbringing within a society like that.
And things had a very regular kind of rhythm to it, right?
Such that there wasn't really any room for an individual human being to step back and be like, hey, is this really how we want to do things or to be like, hey, actually, I don't want to be like this. I want to be something different. Those are things that we can do now, okay?
And, and, and it's important that we can do that. This is, this is, this is why we've seen this massive expansion of diversity, okay, and, and complexification of human beings internally. It's causing all kinds of problems, undoubtedly. But there's a point to all this. And the point is that at the end of the day, what we're going to have to do is recreate ourselves, recreate our familial and communal structures and into something completely new, which has never happened before. Human being. No human being has ever created a human culture. Human cultures created human beings. Human cultures developed on their own through this very slow unconscious process over time. This will be the first time in human history that we are actively reforging ourselves and our families and communities in order to consciously create something that accords with what we see the highest values to be. And so that's the new thing. That is what's on the table. That is the task at hand for humanity in this stage of our evolution.
[01:32:19] Speaker A: That's the metamorphosis.
[01:32:21] Speaker B: Yes. Yes, it is.
[01:32:22] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. I like to call it conscious evolution. And that's exactly what's happening, is we're taking a hold of the steering wheel. It's like before evolution was Darwinian evolution. We're at the whim of our environment. We're at the whim of everything, essentially. And that's how life forms came into being.
But now it seems like we're taking a hold of that same energy, that same, we could say potential energy, and kinetically moving it into a way that we want to. Right. We're morphing the world. We're morphing ourselves and we're morphing the world. And as you said, that's never happened before. And that's why this story is so interesting and so miraculous and magical to me, because this has never happened before. It's like peak novelty. Exactly what Terence McKenna was saying. This is the transcendental object at the end of time approaching. And, yeah, this just an amazing time to be alive and be able to chop it up.
[01:33:26] Speaker B: Right. And our agency in this, the freedom that we have to participate in this, is really crucial too, because even though the big picture is kind of already there, we can see it.
The details have not been filled in yet. Like the script has not been completely written yet. And so, for example, I mean, you Know, I can look at that prime attractor, that eschaton or omega point of like. Ah, yes, bringing together everything into some kind of harmonious unity of diversity. Great, I'm totally down with that. But that doesn't answer the question of like, okay, how do I actually constitute myself? How, how do I actually constitute my relationships with other people? What kind of culture do we want to create? There's a lot of variability there. There's, there's innumerable ways that we could actually go about doing that, and some ways probably better than others. But nonetheless, the point is that just because you have this kind of prime mover that's kind of pulling everything towards it. And by the way, what we just described is Aristotle's understanding of, of the prime move of the like, that that's not a new idea. Like, you know, Tara de Chardan and myself and McKenna and Whitehead, we kind of all have our own plays on this, but this idea has existed forever. But in any case, which again, it's not to say that that, that we're just rehashing Aristotle right now, but a lot of these ideas are actually very old. And that's something worth keeping in mind. But anyway, my point here is that there's, there's a lot of room for creative freedom in this. And that's, that's by design. Like, and, and that means that we actually have to really think about what we're trying to do and why and, and what we value in terms of what human relations should look like and what human being should look like. What, what virtues are most important to us, what kind of forms of beauty and art and that kind of thing. You know, again, we can look to that kind of ultimate attractor and be like, you know, that's the thing that's universal, that encompasses everything, which is great and all, but at the more microcosmic level, the more particular level, there's a lot of blanks that aren't going to be filled in for us where we kind of just have to be the Ubermensch, as it were, and be like, you know what?
I value this and this matters to me and I want this to be part of what we're trying to create. And so, and that's, and that's always going to be the case.
[01:36:14] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the miracle is it's always the case is in some sense we have it figured out. We know that there is a prime mover per se, yet as you said, the details are still being worked out as we go.
And that's so Beautiful. To me, it's like the realization of beauty, but also the uncovering of beauty as the story unfolds.
[01:36:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it means that we're undoubtedly going to create things that are surprising to us and, And. And surprising to God. Right. You know, things that really are. Right. Completely new, that aren't necessarily prescribed by that, you know, grand cosmic teleology. Right. Because there's so much wiggle room in terms of the details.
[01:37:19] Speaker A: Yeah, man.
Yeah, I feel that.
Very powerful stuff.
Well, I thank you for creating alongside me today and uncovering beauty, realizing the beauty and novelty as well.
You are a special being. Guelin, I really appreciate you coming on here. This was awesome. Do you have anything else you want to say? Because I think that's a good note to wrap it up at. But if you have something to say, feel free.
[01:37:55] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I'm. I'm always bad at coming up with nice one liners to end things on the slide. Other than thank you. This has been a great conversation and. And you as well. You know, we're. We're all in this boat together, for better or worse. So that's it.
[01:38:12] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:38:13] Speaker B: And yeah, I guess we'll just leave it at that.
[01:38:17] Speaker A: Leave it at that. Keep on keeping on everybody. I guess I'll say we all have our part to play. It might seem a little cheesy, but I'll say it. You know, I got my part as the host, you got your part as Keela Morgan. And the listener has their part that only they could fill.
That's also part of the beauty, is you have your own special puzzle piece in the puzzle of the divine. We're all special snowflakes.
So it's just up to you to be able to find out what your role is and carry on from there.
So on that note, Caleb Morgan, thank you for joining me today. Keep up the awesome work, man.
[01:38:50] Speaker B: All right, take it easy.
[01:38:52] Speaker A: Peace and love, everybody.
