https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Z9u2Yqc8O5k
Welcome everyone to another voices with Reveki. I’m excited to talk to Ben Holden. Ben reached out to me a while ago and we met and we had an off camera, excellent conversation. I really enjoyed it. And I invited Ben to come on and share his story with us. It’s very relevant to awakening from the meaning crisis. So welcome, Ben. Why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about why you reached out to me, how you think your work intersects with my work. Sure, I think, yeah. Well, I think you’re an interesting character, John. I think I found you through, I think it was through Zach Stein and I found Zach Stein through Ian McGilchrist. Right. Because there’s a company, an organization in the UK called Perspectiva. Yes. And they’ve published Ian McGilchrist, The Matter with Things. Yes. And they published some of Zach’s work. And, you know, I guess Zach is a colleague, a friend of yours. Yes. I’ve heard you guys speak. Brilliant stuff. Luminous ideas. It just, I love it. It gets me going. Sparks are firing off and I come away with ideas and excitement and a sense of possibility. So I love that. For me, my background, I’m a writer really. I write fantasy. I’m dedicated to it. I’ve done a bunch of other things as well. I was born into a circus called Snapdragon Circus. That was in the mid 80s. So for the first four years of my life was spent traveling around the UK and parts of Europe with this very unusual group of people. You know, people getting fired out of giant crossbows and tightrope walking across the top of the circus tent and watching my dad get devoured by a dragon every night. And obviously, you know, for a child, you just think that’s normal. That’s your reality. And I was fortunate enough to grow up in some unusual places with unusual people, not only the crazy people in the circus, but a kind of working class alternative culture village in the north of England in the South Pennines called Hebden Bridge. Yeah, and because it’s a little bit of a numinous location, you know, it’s a beautiful place and the houses were cheap. So you’ve got loads of artists moving in there. And because artists tend to be a little bit more open minded, a lot of gay folk moved in. So, you know, all these lesbians, gay folk artists, hedged witches and wizards knocking around coming around for cups of tea and stuff together with the circus, but very working class at the same time, it’s quite gentrified now. But at that time, it had an unusual mixture of creative vibrancy with the working class really embedded in that. And then then, you know, you figure out the world is not like that. It’s not all like a circus and this unusual kind of place that I grew up in. So that was a shock to find it wasn’t like that. And so discovering like your work, people like James Hillman, who is a founder of archetypal psychology, drawing on the work of young but taking it in a new direction, Emma Gilchrist, David Abram, the cultural ecologist, a whole bunch of other people. And that has been kind of a journey of figuring out piecing together my tradition, the idea of tradition as a living force, you know, because otherwise you just see up against it, up against you’re being digested in the belly of Moloch. And it’s not a pleasant experience. So I felt like, God, I’ve got to get some sort of soul armor or some some defenses and like just just some kind of sense of vibrant community and a community of ideas and a living tradition, which I feel is linked to the mythopoetic tradition. I sometimes imagine it as animistic. None of these are quite right. So I’m still figuring it out. This is the neoplatonic thing that I feel an allegiance to. And just odd, eccentric people that have chosen to live in a way that’s true to them. You know, these are the people that I really feel a connection with. And so partly as a response to trying to do social media in a creative way that does not devour me, I’ve started this YouTube channel called Fantasy Creates Reality, where I’m trying to have conversations with people in this sort of mycelial college. I like to imagine it as a mycelial college. It’s this diffuse underground network of people that fit into these these kind of living traditions. And it’s still forming. I’m still trying to sense what it actually is and what my relationship with it is. And also to draw on that and put it into my work as a writer. I should say as well, I’ve not done a whole lot. I’m sort of a journeyman. I’ve published a book of poems called Vespers. I’ve written a bunch of short stories. I’ve written like well over a million words of fiction and burned them. That’s what you’ve got to do for practice. So I feel like I’ve just now been a father as well and having been through some stuff and done the million words and burned them. I feel I’m just about ready to do something decent. That’s not just more filler. Like there’s something half decent. That’s what I hope anyway. We’ll find out though. So do you meet with other people in any regular fashion in this community building or is it sort of more ad hoc? Yeah absolutely meeting in person. That’s vital isn’t it? I mean for these film conversations for the YouTube channel I try as much as possible to actually travel down to people and meet them and have that face-to-face connection. But then where I live in the north of England there’s a whole load of people that are doing unusual things and you know there are little mini forest villages in the woods. There are people into permaculture here. There’s a whole lot of gardeners. Loads of gardeners here and often they have a sort of side hustle artistic practice as well. Not to say gardening itself isn’t artistic. And then yeah there are storytellers. There are academics. They’re a little bit spread out you know throughout the British Isles up in Scotland. I live on not far from the border of Scotland, the border of Northumberland. And yeah you get little clusters of these people that are spread out all around the British Isles in unusual places often like edge places where the landscape has a little bit of a numinous quality. You can feel the presence of the land and that’s a sustaining force in some sense and maybe it’s cheaper to live so you can pursue some sort of a creative work. But I’ve been listening to your conversation with is it Damien Walters? Yes Damien. Yeah on science fiction and cognitive science. I thought that was a great conversation that you were getting really into these ideas of I think you brought up the Tolkien essay on fairy stories and he’s talking about recovery theory and escapism and talking around questions of are these stories fantasy and science fiction, speculative fiction, is it just escapist or is it not? Is it doing something else and what is that something else? So that would be really interesting to get into because I revisited that essay. It’s a brilliant essay talking on fairy stories. I would love to talk about that but does that sound exciting to you? Yeah very exciting. I enjoyed the conversation with Damien a lot. I hope to talk to him again in the future. Yeah I think that there’s a lot that’s converging now with me between Tolkien’s idea of the recovery theory, the work I’m doing on the imaginal and the work I’m doing on ritual as the way of enacting an imaginal way of knowing. So yeah I’d very much like to talk to you about it. I’ll quickly review the recovery theory for people who might not have seen. So Tolkien is confronted with the fact that many people accuse fantasy literature of being escapist which is just kind of like analogous to spiritual bypassing going into an alternative world to escape one’s responsibilities or one’s problems or one’s tribulations and trials. He doesn’t deny that some fantasy literature might be doing that function but he argues for a different kind of function and it’s analogous too in many ways. Corbin’s distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal. Tolkien argues that going into that other world is like an anthropologist going to another country. The anthropologist wants to do ethnography so the anthropologist has to take learn how to take off his the cultural lens he grew up with, the cultural glasses, and become inculturated in the other culture, put on a different set of glasses by which to make sense of the world, different prospectable and participatory knowing. And then when she returns to her home culture she sees it but through the eyes the lens of that other culture and so she can see into the depth of her own culture in a way she couldn’t before and then she can integrate the judgment from within and the judgment from without and almost like a stereoscopic vision she can come to a more profound insight into the depths of her own culture. So it is a way of recovering something or perhaps a little bit more precisely recovering the depths of something that was previously so familiar to you it was practically transparent to you. And Tolkien argues that this of course is an incredible gift of fantasy and speculative fiction in general because very often our lives are beset and undermined by a kind of entrapment at a superficial level that disconnects us from the depths of our experience and our understanding. How is that for a presentation of the theory? That’s great let me enrich it with a quote from Tolkien from that essay. So he says why should a man be scorned if finding himself in prison he tries to get out and go home or if when he cannot do so he thinks and talks about other topics than jails and prison walls. So I really feel that Tolkien has this sense that the way the world is now is nothing like what it could be or what it has been. It is infinitely rich, deep, mysterious and we’ve created I mean this is what Ian McGilchrist argues really well in The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things that it’s sort of the world of the left hemisphere characterized as the high functioning bureaucrat. So we’ve created a world of the high functioning bureaucrat and growing up in the circus and these unusual villages and places I feel I’ve got heightened sense to that bureaucratic culture of advanced capitalism and you know I don’t want to just slag it off one dimensionally but I really do feel that there’s an ugliness about it often and it doesn’t encourage me to be aesthetically alive to the beauty of the world because there’s a lot of industrial estates and broken glass on the wall and motorways and roadkill and you know not to mention all the species, all the animals that are going extinct, all the interconnected existential crises that you and Schmacktenberger and Zach Stein talk about. You know to open yourself up to that and the general architectural aesthetic ugliness of day-to-day life that takes a lot of courage to do and Tolkien with that essay is saying of course we should escape from this it’s the same thing to do it’s insane to be blinkered to it and only stay within it only accept the prison walls and just go this is it this is real this is all we’ve got so let’s um or not even let’s this is all we’ve got that this is all there is anything outside of this is um unreal and an enchantment or something and Tolkien goes on to say it may proceed from a considered disgust for so typical a product of the robot age that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness so utility and ugliness and often an inferiority of result and he’s and he’s talking about these electric lights that are everywhere that’s one of his big concerns the mechanization of of um of his world back then and you know he’s saying well well people say to him electric lamps and factories these these are just here to stay they’re what they are he’s saying no it’s all transitory um it’s all transient uh we’ve we haven’t had them in the past we used to light our homes with fire lights and candle light and in the future it might be some kind of of bioluminescence in the alcoves and shelves that there is a deeper more pleasing quality of light that evokes certain emotions and and thoughts and maybe conversations that would not happen under that sort of harsh fluorescence that you get in a lot of the office blocks so i love that talking is sort of giving the finger to the ugliness of of the modern world and saying we can do better than that and fantasy can help us do that right the imaginal yes or we can you we can use the imagination uh to see into the untapped depths and to see into real possibilities that were otherwise blinded from seeing um and that’s the imagination for the sake of perception which i take it um which i which i take it to be sort of one of the core ideas of his uh theory i mean that that distinction actually goes back to a distinction that some of the romantics made between uh fancy and imagination where the imagination was an enabling of a recovery of a connectedness to the depths of nature and to as we as i just mentioned real possibilities is that the role you see your fiction doing is that what you want your fiction to do yeah 100 um i want it to be about ensoulment i want it to be connected to this project of of re-ensouling the world or maybe that’s wrong because the world is already deeply and sold we just don’t always recognize that so it’s waking up to the depths of soul that exist in the world and i want to make work that that does that but also has some of these these ideas embedded in it i don’t want it to be you know quixotic overly romantic and um i mean that the story i’m working on at the moment is set in a city and a city is you know um a habitat of technologies yes and and and technologies and and the furniture that we live with um the the ordinary familiar everyday objects of our world um those should be included in this idea of the numinous it’s not only forests and rivers right and mountains and these like enchanted otherworldly lands right um it’s not that you know we i mean talking says it in that essay he’s he’s talking about the familiar you you know you um and i think yeah drawing on wordsworth and colorage for these ideas it’s like somehow it’s like somehow there’s something to do with because of history a lot of history we’ve got these we’re living behind a windshield we’ve got these kind of blinkers on yeah and something to do with being over familiar as as well when you you you take the things around you for granted and you can’t see them with with the the the fresh eyes of a person from another world or another culture or a child might see them where they’re really presencing themselves they’re glowing you can feel the flame of things in them um and that is when uh it becomes it becomes this a numinous experience a life feels like a gift and all the stuff that you talk about john with a rich sense of meaning and and awe and reverence being the virtue of all all that all that stuff you can’t have that unless you’re able to to clear that that gray film away from from your eyes somehow um i would like my work to do that but it takes a whole concerted effort and one of the things you and damien were talking about was you can’t you can’t really do it unless the consumers or readers transform themselves into participants and active agents in the world’s becoming there’s something about only receiving things that’s when it becomes almost like um you you can turn a beautiful work of art into a burger and it’s just yeah you devour it and get the next one and get them ah yes yeah the aesthetics of the smooth yeah where we we reduce beauty to uh what is what is pleasing and most easily consumable by our cognition or our bodies yes i yes i i understand what you’re talking about um so that that brings me something up because you’ve invoked the term a couple of times um the numinous and how it’s distinct from the aesthetics of the smooth um i can’t remember the author’s name which is unfortunate but the short story the universe of things she was and she writes about this mechanic and he has this sort of awakening experience where everything is doing as you says it’s really presencing itself to him um but he experiences it horrifically he experiences it as overwhelming and oppressive and i’m thinking of you know the classic definition of the numinous by auto you know the the mysterious you know uh the the fascinating mystery that’s also terrifying uh that also shakes us to the core and when you read about you read ancient authors or even rilke about beauty you know beauty is that terror that deigns to just not kill us and you know these these notions of how uh how awe is one step away or or on the on the horizon of horror in a very powerful way because of course um what the familiar does well listen to the term family it makes everything part of your family part of your home uh then you understand it and when you lose that there’s a um there’s an exposure to the wide open that can be quite terrifying and i’m wondering if part i mean part of the reasons for the aesthetic is the smooth and taylor goes back to this is that we’ve created what he calls the buffered self we’ve tried to enclose ourselves with psychologically and psychotechnologically and and technologically all these layers uh that protect us uh from anything uh being shocking to us or radically surprising or mysterious or terrifying uh because one of the theses is as as we’ve lost the ability of the sacred canopy of religion to protect us in that way we’ve been in in the secular world we’ve built up these alternatives uh the problem with the alternatives is they only get one half of what the sacred used to do yes the sacred did used to home us but it also used to expose us to the horizon uh reverence awe wonder even horror i mean you couldn’t uh god forbids moses from seeing all of him because it would destroy him um that that kind of idea and so i’m wondering if two points to put to you then i’ll give you time to uh respond at length i think one of the reasons why there it’s familiarity but it’s also a kind of insulation uh that is also now becoming a suffocation uh for people we we’ve we’ve insulated ourselves against the mysterious and then of course we try to get it um in sort of uh substantive fashions psychedelics etc um i’m wondering therefore if to challenge and i think you can hear of charles williams for example the other one of the other inklings if to really get fantasy that challenges the familiar and exposes us to the numinous we need to come up against the horizon of horror and i don’t mean hollywood horror which is just things jumping out of the dark and stabbing you i mean the kind of horror where you realize how profoundly richer and deeper and dangerous reality is beyond what you what you conceived do you think that needs to be a proper part fantasy literature given how you know numbed we are by all of this layering around us did that make sense even as a question yeah that makes sense for sure it’s really interesting yes i would say but let’s we have to we can’t say it has to be a part but but we should nuance horror i mean there’s so many different flavors and kinds of of horror and darkness but definitely well it makes me think of um zack stine talking about the pre-tragic the tragic and the post-tragic yes you can’t really move through in from the pre-tragic into the tragic or have any glimpse of what post-tragic even means unless you engage with grief as well as as well as horror and darkness i mean grief is something slightly uh different but related to to horror but but all the all the dark things of of the world i mean nature nature is terrifyingly destructive and brutal and full of things that will destroy us wipe us out so it’s true it’s it’s honest to to engage with that and to engage with you know that there’s so much suppressed what’s in my mind now is a book by james hillman called the dream in the underworld and all the suppressed denizens of the underworld and the inhabitants of hades and what does percephony learn being being an inhabitant of that world and what does psyche learn from her because in the appalachian tale psyche journeys down into the underworld to to meet percephony and you get something very specific that she can only get from the underworld percephony which um is a kind of beauty that aphrodite doesn’t have um so so you know this this is super interesting territory man you know um uh this is why i i’m more drawn to to polytheism than than monotheism just because of the the richness of and you could probably summon some you know eastern orthodox christianity or something that was more um lively perhaps but basically the um yeah the the cavalcade of of terrifying creatures and characters that you get down there and all the nymphs and nixies and uh all the creatures of the fe and and the trolls and goblins that inhabit the imagination of you know the british isles and many places in in the world and in japan they’ve got their own um yeah pantheon of of sort of polytheistic creatures you know the yokai kappa and kitsune and uh tengu all these and i just find that that um i mean i’m smiling i’ve just caught myself there because sometimes i just get like um captured by the spell of them um and and uh what we’re talking about is the terror and the horror and you shouldn’t smile too much these creatures if you really know what they’re about um because they will try and kill you you know you could relate them to pathologies and our pathologies are wiping out so many people in um supposedly you know happy developed yes uh western cultures yes so yeah i i want to say the work that i’m drawn to is is work that creates a space for those those suppressed unconscious creatures that that people our our dreams and our pathologies uh i want to i mean that that’s using conceptual language though really no but in fantasy you can give them you can you can give give them blood and breath and and scales and and claws and and a kind of inhuman speech that can do terrible things to a person uh all these kind of things you know i’m very interested in in a friendship there’s a book called feeding your demons by um i think a tibetan uh american woman who based on the tibetan book of the dead and that’s about coming face to face with uh with with these things breathing life into them with imagination and and and and sensei courage so you said you said so many interesting things there though so first of all what what can fantasy literature do by um in bringing us into this confrontation how can that help us address the meaning crisis and you mentioned polytheism this brings up the next question which is what’s the relationship between uh fantasy literature and science fiction and uh you know and religion uh broadly construed um because of course one of the jobs one of the jobs that religion used to do uh you know this is sort of a classic yungian thesis is to help uh give us a framework by which we could confront these things so that we could bring about an overall increase in the scope of consciousness we could integrate the conscious and the unconscious mind better etc and that that would enliven and enrich our understanding of ourselves and our connection to other people in the world that’s sort of the yungian mythos and of course religions did that young famously said of religions were doing their job he wouldn’t have to do his job and things like that so what it what is what what is the function of fantasy literature is it taking over um that function from religion or is it informed by a particular religious vision or is it uh trying to come up with a new uh way of orienting to reality and the sacred or the numinous within reality what do you what do you feel that you’re doing in that area yeah sure well it can’t possibly take over religion if it tries to do that and we’re in trouble yeah elron hubbard kind of thing yes yeah yeah exactly yeah things like this and i wish there were more options for religions you know yeah um yeah i’m not i’m not inspired by what’s on the table ah ah quintessential statement of the meaning crisis now i’m not inspired i just want to savor that sorry for interrupting but i just want to savor that i’m not inspired by what’s on the table don’t you don’t lose your thought but could your train of thought but could you just unpack that that was that was really juicy could you just it’s the same it’s the same with um the political parties right uk and probably other countries you know um they should helman suggests that they they all politicians should have to state their their depth aesthetics policies yeah and so how would that inform the way we move through the world and and experience things like um public places courtyard squares uh you surf what would service stations look like you know this kind of thing um having imagination and and and courage and daring and stepping away from the um the bureaucratic that the emissary and the master and his emissary that fucking boring like limited scalpel logic um gray speech bureaucratic mode which is so entrenched i can’t see it happening i don’t have faith in the political machinery to make this happening so some unusual sophisticated move between the edge and the center but um i mean oh you guys are on that one but uh schmack senberger elucidates it pretty well doesn’t he and you and zack stein have got some great things to say about it uh so yeah daring imagination and a courageous sensuality this is what aphrodite gives us you know that if you can imagine your version of of or your sense of of aphrodite smiling at you in a sort of um dangerous but encouraging way and and that is encouraging courageous sensuality and that’s that’s a political act because that is that is opening yourself to a whole lot of of pain and grief and terror that’s present in the world but if if you can do that and god i struggle with it all the time but but if you can do it then then you’re um then you’re open that the gateways are open like david abram talks about sensory perception as the silken thread that that binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystems and the way the the way that the the um everything good about existence the cosmos the world whatever you love the way that it gets in is through the senses these these gateways our skin and and taste and you know vision smell god we’re such visual creatures you know me and you now on this uh little zoom box um but if we can do that then imagination starts to get fed uh we’re more awake to what our own desire might be and these questions of what’s the heart of your desire and where does it meet the needs of the world are political questions that could lead to political action and who knows in the future it might create some more interesting options so we’ve got yeah some some richer meals on the table so that was a fantastic answer about the uh the junk food of our current political arena but you you you got to that by mentioning that none of the you actually first stated that you’re uninspired by what’s on offer on the religious table um is it also the same critique there it’s not challenging it’s not the courageous it’s not the encouraging challenge to the imagination and to a kind of courageous sensuality and pursuit of deeper understanding and connectedness so are the religions also all failing in the same way to offer that well i’m sure they’re failing and succeeding at the same time but just for me personally i i i see i’m put off by all of them and i’m attracted to certain parts of them simultaneously like ah yeah with um with with with islam my way into that is on record and yeah and that’s that’s that’s the mysticism i’m always interested in the more the more um the the the mystical side of monotheistic religions that leaned more pagan right and then with christianity um people say that that there are certain branches either not orthodox and some of those like paul kings north who was a former uh writing tutor of mine and martin sure who i did the school of myth and storytelling with in dartmore of they’re both uh great characters and they’ve both converted to eastern orthodox christianity and like that’s happening a lot that’s cool that’s that’s good for them that doesn’t really appeal to me like a lot of the the clothing that the priests wear there’s like drab and i mean i wear fairly muted colors but i love it when people dress up and there’s a sense of like in mexico the day of the dead like the vibrancy there you know and the the priest they put in hell to skelters in some of the churches to make it more sort of a snazzy and but it’s like that’s not it either and the images you know like or what you’re fed in the mainstream of what they like our sense of angels on recall ben’s sense of angels is much more vibrant and alive and interesting the mainstream sense of angels is not like the the christian sort of uh arrogance that you encounter a lot of the time is our way is the only way that a lot of the monotheisms have that puts me off as well um buddhism is attractive um shinto is attractive but then that’s going east and i like the idea of i just it feels like a wise move to to be aware that you’re bedded in a living or a confluence of living traditions in your own land in your own culture um that is christian for the last 2000 years so you can’t ignore that yeah of my friends who are you know um uh kind of pagan inclined earth-based spiritualities um i i share a an affinity with with these guys we gather around the fire at samane and and do some some rituals but but um the idea that you could just sort of suddenly become a pagan and ignore the 2000 years of christianity is naive isn’t it so that needs thinking about so with all those things considered i’d like shinto is a is a really interesting one but um it just makes me wonder you know what was what was um what could our kind of shinto be or like i want i want um um and a new animism of the of of um the western civilization which is inflected by bio region and locality yes individual character and spirit of place and that is infused with an imaginative science the best of you know the creative science not the the new atheist like yeah scalpel language crap something better than that that was wonderful um yeah that the i mean and you came very alive there which was really um you know on fire it was it was quite wonderful to watch it um yeah i and and this is not a criticism that i’m now offering i i just want to share this back i noticed that and i think it is extremely telling and pertinent that your critique of the religions was there was twofold was the lack of vibrancy aliveness and you were doing and then also right a lack of rootedness in the depths of history right and then tradition and that the the religions on offer are not doing those uh we we we can’t just import something from elsewhere because although it may have the vibrancy it doesn’t have the rootedness and and the problem with the christianity of today because it doesn’t have the vibrancy its connection to the tradition is is merely sort of nominal um rather than substantive or rich and in no and in no and at no time and again this isn’t criticism this is it i think an important observation did you say well i reject them because i find them simply false or something like that that wasn’t the issue for you this is something i keep trying to express to people about the meaning crisis that most people’s rejection of the legacy religions isn’t some sort of like you said new atheist scalpel well look i can cut it apart and it falls to pieces under under my you know under on the deft use of uh the invocation of this logical fallacy or that you didn’t say that and i thought that was important and that goes back to your uh the that original juicy statement you know you’re you’re not inspired by what’s offered on the table of religion because it doesn’t have the vibrancy it doesn’t have that life and it doesn’t have that deep rootedness and it doesn’t have the imaginal like corban says integrating those two together in a profound way and i i think well i want to thank you i mean you’re helping to articulate the phenomenological structure the depth and the intricacies of the meaning crisis right it’s exactly that sense right that no no but i want i want something that enhances vibrancy and life and yet is rooted deep in my own tradition and yet when i turn to the legacy religions they’re not doing that and i can’t just import a religion from elsewhere it won’t the transplant is very liable to fail and so you’re bereft and you’re hungry and i and i just i just picked that up from you so powerfully and i wanted to thank you for that that’s right man yeah well well mirrored uh it’s true it’s not too much to ask is it a vibrant rooted yes sense of uh uh religious practice or whatever yes would be yeah the ratio religio that that really rightly proportioned and dimensioned and and shaped the world and so is the is the job is is and i i’ll use religious term here and i i want to use it in the biblical sense not in the modern sense is the job of fantasy literature prophetic again not in the sense of we’re telling the future but trying to wake people up and become aware again of pertinent patterns and pressing issues that they’re otherwise blinded by and so that’s the job of the biblical prophets do you think that fantasy literature has the role of like a of prophecy to try to wake us back up so that we can find uh that that religiosity go ahead people are so familiar with the word prophecy to mean predicting the future like you said yeah you don’t mean that you don’t so we have to say it again because it’s so way to imagine it for me is if you take take anything piece of furniture bookshelf steaming cup of tea or um the it at the dying ash tree outside your house. And you sit with it for a minute. You can imagine like, you can imagine a worm perceiving that same ash tree or steaming cup of tea or, you know, an anaconda or a badger or whatever, an amoeba. And each perception is completely different because their structure of their bodies, their autopoiesis, their sensory perception that binds them to the encompassing ecosystem is very different to yours. And so you all have a unique, different, the way the whatever the ash, the mystery of the ash tree or the steaming cup of tea really is, is presencing itself differently, depending on the structure of that organism’s sensory perception, his body and his relationship, his body’s relationship with the surrounding body, the world, right? And so right straight away, that starts to liquefy my imagination in an amazing way, because suddenly things can come alive that the way that you’re coupled to the to the world to the steaming cup of tea, very, very specific. It’s almost like as a kinship and a brotherhood about it, you know, the the stream that’s moving between you and and the drink, the teacup, the the ash tree is that is unique. That’s co-evolved over millions and millions of years. Yes. Yeah. Incredible. You’ve got that. That’s that’s a gift that and the crows got hers and the worms got his. And that makes the world straight away come more alive for me. And I think the kind of fantasy that I’m interested in and the field of fantasy literature, just fantasy literature, never mind all the movies and all the other stuff, games, etc., that we’ve got. It’s very, very broad, isn’t it? Yes, yes, yes. And if you just look at fantasy magic systems, you can see that. But one example is sometimes magic is used as a metaphor for domination and control, which is sort of the antithesis of what I’m interested in. I’m interested in in magic as something numinous that can that can restore your sense of the flame of things in the world. So when you put the book down, you go outside, the world seems to glow more, you feel more at home in the world, or there’s a sense of possibility that was not there before. You have more energy and ideas. And maybe the invisible threads and fairy streams that are linking your heart to the world, they’re a bit more healthy. They’re not as blocked up. Yeah, this is very hard to do, you know, like a good, good fantasy book will do that. But they’re extremely hard to create. Tolkien took an awful long time to make his. Yes. It strikes me that you’re invoking something similar, and Jordan and Hall and I talked about this, to the distinction within late antiquity, especially circling around the neoplatonic world between theurgia and sorcery. Sorcery is the the magic of domination and trying to control and theurgia, the work of the gods, theos or urgon, right, is that what you’re trying to do is exactly that. You’re trying to you’re trying to allow yourself to see everything animated by the gods. You’re right. And so the point of the ritual was to do exactly what you said. I love that metaphor. You know, these silken threads, I guess you got them from Abrams, but you know that unblocking them and the disclosure of them and also allowing them to move and weave. I like that, what you were talking about when you’re talking about the teacup. I was getting the image of almost that weaving between you and the teacup and realizing it. And then you were also reminding me of Oaxacold and his notion of the umvelt and how every creature lives in like in a different world because of the different ways in which their senses and their body give them access. And then I think about the stuff I’ve been doing with other people like Daniel Saruba and Christopher Mastro Pietro and Guy Sendstock and Jordan Hall about, you know, finding the through line through all of the different aspects within any perspective and then between all of the perspectives. Because then I come back and I want to say, yeah, but what is the ashtray such that the worm can see it that way and the hedgehog can see it potentially that way and each one is fitted and discloses the depth in that fittedness and such that I can see it this way. And you know and for me the imaginal can extend therefore our ability to find the profundity of that through line and as the more rich the variation that is bound to it the more we appreciate its capacity to bind all of those different aspects and all of those different perspectives together. And for me rituals that do that are theurgic. They’re like you say they’re waking. The job is not to help give us any kind of dominance. In fact it’s the reverse. It’s to it’s their job is to so awaken us to this connectedness that we seek to more and more conform ourselves to the depth of that reality. It’s not how can I make everything shape to me? It’s how can I be better shaped unto this sacred depths of things? Does that land for you is what I’m proposing? Yeah it totally lands and it makes me think of something you said to Damien. You’re playfully asking the question. I’ve got it written down here somewhere. This is what you said. You said is there that much of a difference between internalizing Socrates and internalizing Gandalf which I thought was really funny and interesting and obviously Socrates has certain rich infinitely deep living tradition surrounding him but perhaps so does Gandalf. Yes. One of the sources of Gandalf was that guy from the Kalevala. What is he called? I can’t remember his name. It begins with V. Damn it what is his name? Perhaps we’ll come back to it. But the guy from the Finnish mythology the Kalevala. Venomunen I think he’s called something like that. Yeah he’s one of the sources of the Finnish Kalevala. I mean that is a rich mythology. But Tolkien you know Gandalf declares himself to be or reveals that he’s a servant of the secret fire. And Tolkien’s language that has to do with the Holy Spirit which obviously has roots in Plato and Plato in Socrates. It’s related to Numa right and world soul and this sense of imaginal air element air and element fire kind of combined. It’s an intermixing of the actual physical in my imagination. This rich life-sustaining substance that we call air or wind moving. It’s animate, invisible, keeps us alive, carries all our voice and ideas and fire Prometheus, fire of the gods, all the things to do with fire Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of fire. All of this stuff so somehow that’s been intermixed in this idea of Numa in Plato you know obviously drawing on Socrates and in the Holy Spirit inspires Tolkien’s work and Vainamoon from the Kalevala inspires amongst other things Tolkien’s Gandalf. Tom Cheatham does this amazing thing with I think he’s got an essay called The Flame of Things which I’ve stolen. It’s such a beautiful phrase. I don’t know if he robbed it off someone but he’s probably drawing on Corvain a lot and Hillman and it’s that what is the flame of things? It’s what you were saying there but you were wondering what really is the ash tree or that steaming cup of tea? What’s its true nature, true reality and the plurality of its realities? This just invites you right into the heart of mystery and awe and I love this phrase that you use of reverence being the virtue of awe. I see fantasy that is its main job for me anyway. To cultivate the virtue of reverence. That’s a beautiful statement. JP Marceau, I can’t remember, he cites one of the physicists who asked the question what breeze fire into all of the equations? So they go from being these eternally unmoving you know structures of intelligibility to being the vibrant and alive that we find. What’s needed there exactly is the education of the virtue of reverence. So I want to ask you the same kind of question I asked. I think I asked Thomas Cheatham when I was talking to him. I know I asked Damien when I was talking to him. You can see from my enthusiastic engagement that so much of this connects with what I’m talking about but what about one of my sort of standard criticisms of the romantics per se which is they didn’t give us a proper account of how to deal with self-deception and irrationality. Not in the scalpel sense but in the platonic sense and the silliness and the self-indulgence and the narcissism of so much of the new age movement and things like that. You know what I’m talking about? There’s a whole constellation of ways in which what we’re talking about can go radically wrong and you can get spiritual bypassing and you can get the noxious kind of escape where people aren’t escaping from the prison they’re escaping from their responsibilities and they’re escaping from their moral obligations and they’re escaping from their own existential commitments to their aspirational better self. All of this kind of stuff. You know the Peter Pan person who never grows up and faces the requirements of responding and taking responsibility for their lives and the way their lives impact on other people’s lives but endlessly spinning off right and I can tell you that that’s also something that because you’re nodding as I’m mentioning it you you you put some thought into and one of the my criticisms of people like Courage and and Woodsworth and others is they didn’t that yes they were criticizing the Enlightenment’s idolatry of a certain computational sense of reason but they didn’t give us much about how to deal with our endless proclivities for self-deception and self-centeredness and spiritual materialism and obscuritism and silliness of thought as opposed to seriousness of thought. That whole realm of ways in which stepping outside of the buffered self can also expose us to that kind of whirlwind of foolishness. What would you say to that as a challenge or a question? Sure well I agree with what you’re saying about romanticism and the question of what’s romanticism come of age or post-tragic romanticism. That’s an interesting question but I’m not sure if a close reading of those guys I mean that Wordsworth and Coleridge are sophisticated philosophers of imagination and very precise and deep phenomenologists as well so I’m not sure if a close reading of them wouldn’t contradict what you’re saying a little bit maybe Ian McGilchrist could tell us because I think he reads them all the time but I just wanted to come back at that a little bit. There’s probably there’s probably some hidden gems in there but anyway point is you’re totally right there’s a kind of enchantment with romanticism and with the numinous and with fantasy and it goes right back into the idea or the land or the creatures of fairy. Those can hypnotize you and enchant you and lead you astray. There’s all kinds of stories about that you know very old stories in many many different cultures where people are led astray and hypnotized and sometimes don’t return at all to the to the human world or if they do they’re just completely dazzled and they can’t see what’s in front of them. They might let their own son or daughter die. I’m a father now I have a boy who’s nearly four years old and a daughter who’s like seven months. Wow. So this is a huge thing for me you know because part of it is my wife is a musician and she has a creative life but being a mother she loves motherhood but keeping the spark alive just the whole ridiculous challenge of how can I write good work good stories which is monumentally difficult just to write good stories be a good father pay the bills also difficult sometimes and like not gobble up all the free time and make sure you know my wife has time to pursue her creative calling. These are all things that enrich this idea of romanticism come of age. The Peter Pan character or the naive blinkered romantic would ignore all these things you know not be married not try and engage with these difficult questions or sacrifice. In that Rilke poem there’s one a man stands up during dinner and just leaves and goes off to find the church that’s forgotten you know the sacred place in his life and culture and another man does not do that stays and dies a different kind of death in the dishes and so if you go off on the on the creative quest the calling only then for me if I do that I’ve failed the mission that my deepest quest and if I ignore the quest the calling and just do the dishes and be you know a sort of a passive domestic house husband I’ve definitely failed as well. I need to integrate them in some interesting way whilst contending with all this this trouble this grief like you know Zach Stein’s book Education and a Time Between Worlds we’ve never been in this situation before you know what what’s an appropriate set of actions and ecologies of practice as you like to say. How do you be a good father you know these are very interesting questions that I don’t have answers to and I want to put into the work and try and live. That’s that was an excellent answer. Yeah I was talking to Paul Manafort the other day and I was said you know about a disturbing I find it disturbing motif around sages. Siddhartha leaves his wife and kid to go into on the quest and Jesus talks about rejecting your father and your mother and you know and letting the dead bury their dead and of course within the Jewish tradition we have Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac up to the calling from God and you know Kierkegaard wrestling with that and of course your point is right Kierkegaard doesn’t give any simple answer there’s a tremendous amount of reflection and that motif is I think there’s I want I sorry I want to be very clear I am happy that the mythos and I don’t mean myth in the pejorative sense but the mythos around the sages you know gives us that motif because I think it’s something we’re meant to wrestle with that and I think you put it really well and D.C. Schenle puts it really well in his discussion of Plato’s critique of impure reason in the republic and through Highland in Plato’s notion of finite transcendence all of these are ways of saying we have to somehow integrate this two together we have to the absolute has to also include the relative the transcendent can’t doesn’t ever liberate us from our finitude right we don’t give in to just our finitude because then we become servile and we despair but if we just pursue transcendence then we become Icarus and we inflate for every heroic myth there’s a myth of hubris to counterbalance right and I’ve been trying to understand like you what does it mean to really try to live that tonos that living polarity and I think about almost like the poles of a magnet generating a magnetic field that were always caught we’re always metaxu we’re always in between that’s how Socrates described himself and how he described the eros as the daemon that drove him it was always between always between and I’m coming to think that that’s the thing that needs to be emphasized in the current I don’t know advent of spirituality in this kairos the in the between the transjective this is why because that is the proper place now where we should be putting the emphasis on how we see ourselves as well I’ll quote the police as spirits in the material world how do like and I know this is vague so because because I’m entrusting myself to you to find what I’m trying to say in here but is this landing with you as I’m trying to get at that this it right this is actually the the place the locus where we should be trying to situate so as to awaken our spirituality does that land at all for you or yeah the idea of the the betwixt and between the borderlands and yeah the liminal edge and sort of an uncomfortable place to be yes probably a good thing the idea that this in betweenness has intrinsic value and yes it’s its own thing yes it’s got its own internal sovereignty even though it’s not one or the other it’s it’s the it’s in between um young’s got its whole thing on the tension of opposites yes yes which he gets from Nicholas of Cusa who’s the combination of the neoplatonic contemplative tradition in the west yeah I because I I I think that’s I mean I don’t think that’s that’s the life of the gods or is it the life of the earth but that’s that’s the form of spirituality that will perpetually preserve while enriching our humanity it never tries to get us to escape from our humanity but it always demands that we enrich the depths of our humanity well said yes and so trying to do this whilst doing the dishes and paying the bills yeah yeah and doing the creative work that’s an enormous challenge and one thing I keep coming back to is any small business or artist of any kind probably anyone trying to do anything is kind of forced to engage with social media and this is a problem yeah you know you know uh the accurate precise scientific way to understand um what social media is is as an enormously powerful monster or demon of the underworld yes ai-backed social media yeah and if you think you’ve got the the strength to resist it then good luck to you so I’m a writer and I have to do social media if I want to make any even a small portion of my I understand what you’re talking about completely yes I’m like how the hell do I do it without that’s the other thing you know to use McGillchrist in McGillchrist language you got the the quality of attention of the right hemisphere which is like it’s like the wise sage is um deep sustained and and broad quality of attention whereas as the left the high functioning bureaucrat is more precise focused better to deal with manipulation control and bureaucracy and actually probably posting social media uh videos and things like this and and the goddamn platforms they want you to do every day or every week and I don’t want to do that because it takes me out of that quality of attention that I’m giving to the work so then you have to do what these things like stack up a big load of of uh of posts or videos and schedule release them and come up with these tactics and try and do it in an um an intelligent way that it doesn’t use too much time um in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s going to give you burnout that sustains you you know how how to do that is a huge like people are so disenfranchised and pissed off with it you know this sort of attention economy and like um how insidious it is getting into people asking their friends to oh can you share this can you like this yes you know like the market forces um into mixing with with with deep friendships that’s uh some dangerous stuff yeah and all the parasocial relationships that are forming I’m I’m trying I’m trying I mean trying essay right essay I’m trying very hard to play with this medium uh and innovate in it in order to try and I don’t know uh well I’ll use play-doh I want to tame the monster I want to find I want to I want I want to find the lion by which I can tame the monster uh so that um there’s a proper disposition of its power towards back towards the good at least in this little corner of the internet as savilla king has named it um because I take very serious I I feel the responsibility to the challenge you’ve posed and not just to talk about it but to try to do what I can in terms of manner and format and content and project uh to thwart uh the AI demons um and disclose possibilities perhaps even being exemplified right now of this medium uh for um affording people’s aspiration to the good that is what I I’m trying to and as you know I keep trying all different things the next series after Socrates I’m playing with the format part of its lecture part of its points for discussion everyone also has a practicum here’s an actual practice I’ll teach you how to do it in the middle of the of the monologue we’ll see a monological series I have a dialogical series with Christopher Mastapietro on Socrates and Kierkegaard then I also have a couple episodes where there’s uh four of us from these emerging communities and we’re we’re just I’m trying to mix and match and play and cross boundaries uh with the medium as much as I can to try and disclose uh well I’m trying to interact with the medium imaginarily so that I can perceive real possibilities within it and disclose it to those people who want to connect to each other in in a vibrant and vital manner like you’ve been talking about and I don’t know if I’m succeeding or failing uh all I can say is I’m I’m giving it all of my um innovative best uh trying yeah I see that I really appreciate what you’re doing and it’s inspiring um and the way that you’re engaging with actual communities yes well you’re not a sequestered academic no no no the ground I did those things yeah and I’m doing another one I’m going to go I’m going to uh I’m going to partake in Iris Stenberger’s uh uh wisdom project I’m actually going to go through the courses with her I’m going to do in in the new year I’m going to do Steve uh March’s Alethea coaching yeah I’m participating in as much of these communities interacting with them I did return to the source with Rafe Kelly uh which was talk about being on the horizon of horror but also thereby opened up to the depths of the numinous that did that for me in a profound way and I cannot recommend more strongly uh what he has to offer in his return to the source um yeah yeah you’re right I this wow someone who talks about prospectival and participatory knowing can’t sit on the outside and only just only point at things with propositions yeah you have to go in you have to undertake you have to undergo you have to do what the anthropologist does you have to go and get those lenses ripped off your face and so that when you put them back on you see them anew yeah very much very much uh I’m trying I aspire to do that which with as much integrity and honesty as I possibly can yeah it reminds me of um Hayao Miyazaki you know the Japanese animator I mean he’s a fantasist really Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, you know My Neighbor Totoro these are indelible experiences for a whole lot of people um that restore the flame of things a little bit when they walk around the world and and he’s a great advocate and um protector of of of the forests you know I think uh he does he does work to to guard Japan’s old forests yes and so that is political engaged action from from a fantasist from an animator yes um from an animistic animator and there are other people like that this is a this is a great clue for for um people who write fantasy I think to to be politically engaged in a way that makes sense that echoes the spirit of their work um I do similar things I started a community interest company called Living Woods Northeast about seven years ago to try and bring back some of the old woodland to the northeast of England because there’s not a whole lot of it here um just the the the vision of being able to journey through an old forest for several days and you can’t find the end of it and you’re meeting people along the way and yeah all kinds of animals that exist in it this is a 400 year vision you know um but you can get glimpses of this like Yakushima Island in Japan that inspired Princess Manonoke that is such a place or going off come to Algonquin Park in Ontario Canada and you’ll get that you’ll get yes you’ve got it in Canada yeah we don’t have it so much here now in the British Isles it’s really sad it is well well Ben I want to bring this to a close but I always like to give my guests the last word it doesn’t have to be summative or cumulative it can just be inspirational or it could be something provocative but I always like to to to give the what what what’s the final thing you want to leave the viewers with before we we end it today well it’s just to sort of playfully challenge you John on this idea that you are asking about what does fantasy do it needs to do it’s good if it creates wisdom wisdom is the best thing and wisdom has to do with avoiding self-deception yes and and um encouraging meaning yes people’s lives this makes me think of our approach to dreams and dreams get translated into this this is Hillman’s whole idea of they get translated straight away into concepts you’re given this sometimes gift by whatever the animal Mundi is of a of a dream that um you an encounter with a figure a person or an animal or a presence and you wake up you feel changed you feel different you have a sense that that was a that was a troubling dream and that trouble might be good or you have a sense that that was a good dream and you just inexplicably feel great for that day um we translate the dream into meaning and Hillman asks well maybe it’s not a meaning service or or a an information service maybe it’s an imagination service yes that the image itself has intrinsic value and this this I know you’ve got a whole lot to say on this well I think we’re going to do another one of these so this could be an interesting place for us to jump off yeah I I think that’s totally right um and I’m doing a lot on the like especially the work I’m doing more more recently on ritual the non-reducibility of ritual even to myth let alone to philosophy or theology um and um and trying to get out what are the relationships between these things that are interwoven but not reducible or replaceable by each other um and exactly um let’s definitely talk about that I think that’s an excellent provocation to end on um I look forward to talking to you again then and if you’d like I can come on your channel um if if that would be something that you think would be a value to to your work for sure man I love talking to you yeah I love talking to you too thank you so much right on have a great day too