Hey! There’s sinners! It’s Adam Nox. And welcome to another episode of The Cult of You. And yet another interview with the devil. Now, my devil, quote unquote, is more of a scientist. And I think you’d agree with me that most religions and traditions out there make even consider that very much the art of the devil. But I think it’s an art that each and every one of us can appreciate.
And this is what prompted me to invite Doctor Stephan Harding, author of Gaia Alchemy, to join me in our session today. Stephan is both a doctor of deep ecology and co-founder of the Schumacher College, as well as a friend to James Lovelock, founder or creator of the Gaia theory. It is his deep personal relationship with James, as well as his own journey through psychoanalysis and behavior, where he explored the archetypes of his own unconscious in the union framework that allowed him to open up to more of these deeper possibilities, exploring the principles of alchemy, but not from the extreme esoteric sense actually looking at them from a grounded scientific point of view.
“We don’t create those images; nature gives them to us. The unconscious is nature—full of wisdom and life.”
“True individuation cannot happen in isolation. We must be in relationship with nature, as we are nature.”
“If humanity continues to disturb Gaia’s delicate balance, nature will respond with feedback loops we cannot ignore.”
“Alchemy isn’t just symbolic; it reveals how the Earth functions and how we, as individuals, can grow within it.”
This is allowed him with his deep knowledge of the Earth, of Gaia herself and its workings, to offer up a very rich framework on how we can understand these alchemical processes at play in the development of our planet, and give us a testimony or a language of understanding of this deep, important relationship we share with the earth as a living being.
This is a very interesting discussion today because instead of just exploring the deep alchemical symbols alone and looking at how that fits into the ideas of alchemy in the work of Jung and many other, you know, alchemist and thinkers in the process of psychiatry and personal development, he is able to bridge that into the scientific and break down the entire structure.
Shares of us rich stories about how psyche is spoken through various other well-known scientists, and shares very profound stories of their own relationship with this journey of the alchemical process and our discussion today. I think regardless of your background, whether you’re coming from this as an alchemist yourself or where you’re coming from, this is somebody that has a passion for Earth, for the planet, for Gaia.
Or you’re familiar with James Lovelock’s theories on the Gaia theory and many other related developments, or you’re just somebody that’s come to the awareness that our planet is in danger. Our society as a whole is struggling. Global warming and many of these other events cannot be ignored. And you’re looking for a narrative. You’re looking for some ideas or strategies by which you can get involved in creating that change.
I do think that the work of Stefan is fantastic, be suited for this age, and that’s why I wanted to bring him on the show today. So without any further ado, sit back, relax, and remember to live deliciously in.
I made up Love with you. 000.
Stefan. Welcome to the cult of You. It’s a pleasure to be able to sit down with you at last.
Thank you. Nice to be with you.
It’s it’s it’s really a gift. I must say. I went through this very interesting journey where I was exploring a lot of things about rediscovering plants and not discovering from the classic animism model alone, but actually discovering the, the, the chemical nature of them and just really looking at my garden from a different perspective. And, I started creating a very beautiful space for myself to go out into nature, to reconnect with nature.
But at the same time, my mind was constantly being drawn back to the books and back to my technology and everything like that. And I needed a way to kind of bridge. So you say the deeply rational, almost the deeply irrational of the imaginative mind. And that was when I discovered your work, and it was one of the first true, beautiful marriages, you know, of, of, shall I say, Gaia, in a way that I could deeply relate with.
And I believe you were actually a close friend of James Lockwood. That’s right.
I yes, I was, yes, I first met Jim, Jim Lovelock here at Shoemaker College in January 1991. He taught the first course at Heart College. Oh, wow. And it was at a time when very few biologists, particularly ecologists, were taking his work seriously on Gaia. They thought it was all rather woowoo, you know, and had no scientific basis to it, which, of course, completely wrong.
And so being a scientific ecologist of holistic bent of mind, we got on very, very well. We went for long walks, and I ended up working with him scientifically for about five years and doing some mathematical modeling of Guy and one of his kind ecosystems. And then we were friends ever since, you know, and his wonderful person mentor to have and really a real genius.
Did you originally have, an open mind towards that subject, or was it really his research that actually opened due to the entire possibilities?
You know, I had an open mind. But there was nothing to put in my open mind. I mean, I was very, very distrustful of the selfish gene perspective that, I was brought up in as a, as a young scientist. And I was at Oxford, with Richard Dawkins and co and I, you know, the whole zoology department where I was doing my PhD was saturated with selfish gene.
I can’t imagine I was yeah.
I don’t get it. Don’t misunderstand me. I have great respect for Richard Dawkins. I think he’s a brilliant lecturer and a brilliant writer. I just think his philosophy is really misguided. So I, I always, I’d always disliked that’s, that emphasis on selfishness, which was rammed through mainstream evolutionary biology at in those days. And so when I met Lovelock, it’s as if he gave me what I’ve been yearning for but couldn’t have found, in other words, a scientific understanding of the earth as a great living organism, a self-regulating organism, but based entirely on science.
It just seemed so right to me. And then later, I met Lynn Margulis, who helped him develop the Gaia theory. And she she was an evolutionary biologist specializing in microorganisms, bacteria, etc. and I met she and I became great friends as well. And through her, I learned an awful lot about symbiosis, and the importance of cooperation and evolution rather than selfishness.
That’s a very powerful journey, I think, in and of itself, to kind of be sitting around that environment of great minds yourself, a great mind in the same process, at least in my humble opinion. And getting to explore it is very exciting. I’m very I’m very curious that evolution of the kind of purely physical sciences and being something that literally was brought up in, again, the selfish Gene era, it was this very materialistic, kind of psychology, the entire concept of spirituality or alternate ways of thinking was obviously taboo in many ways of that.
So to make that grounding, that progressive step between of the relationship between the natural world, the individual and our roles inside of that is quite a jump. It’s quite a progressive jump. But again, what was the initial kind of scientific data that really opened you up to this possibility?
Well, I think it was, Lovelock’s Gaia theory because it was very convincing. You see how what he said about the relationships between the four components of the Earth as a living system or as a complex system, as we’d say in science, you know, the the biology, all the living beings. Then there’s the rocks, the atmosphere and the water.
So four components, and they interact with each other through complex feedbacks. And as a result of that, we get what we call in science an emergent property. So something we couldn’t have expected from just knowledge of the parts in isolation, those four parts in isolation, and the emergent property that Lovelock proposes is that the whole ensemble of these four aspects of the earth, when they interact together through complex feedbacks, produce this ability of the whole planet to to regulate its surface conditions within the narrow limits that life can tolerate.
And over vast periods of geological time, you know, the thousands of millions of years. And he had some I don’t like the word mechanisms. Any processes is better. He had he already knew of a few key processes that did that. For example, the biological assisted weathering of granite rock that helps to control the CO2 in the atmosphere and therefore the temperature of the planet.
And then they also the emission of cloud seeding chemicals by marine algae. And now we know the forests do the same. So there are some very good dynamics that, he, we already knew about in the 1990s or an ant in 91 when I first met Jim. That convinced me that this is something very interesting scientifically here.
But of course, there’s more to Gaia, because Gaia is a mythological concept. You know, and I think it was to his immense credit that he accepted the word Gaia for his theory of a self-regulating Earth from his friend William Golding, who was an, novelist and a physicist, you know, Nobel Prize winning novelist. And I can tell you more of his story, if you like.
I mean, it just happened that they were by synchronicity. They happened to be neighbors in the same little village in Wiltshire and about about your very small, little village, I mean, extraordinary. These two geniuses, you know, were neighbors. And Lovelock had come back from NASA with this idea of a self-regulating Earth, but didn’t have a name for it.
He felt it was a really big idea. He wanted to call it the bio cybernetic universal System tendency, but it’s a good, good title. Bio cybernetic cybernetics is the science of feedback and control, which Lovelock was an expert in by cybernetic universal systems and tendency. But Golding said to him, no, got a big idea like that needs a big name.
Call it Gaia Lovelock. Never heard of Gaia. I didn’t know that myth at all. Okay. He misheard. He didn’t hear God. He had gyre. You know, these big swirling eddies of air and water, you know, and he said to Golding, I can’t call it the giant theory. It’s not comprehensive enough. Golding said, no, not giant Gaia, and told him the myth, you know, Gaia, First born, primordial chaos, etc., etc. until Lovelock’s immense credit, he he resonated with that myth.
You see, I think there was a sort of archetypal core in Lovelock, very intuitive, very he was very intuitive as well as being a brilliant science. And he realized this was the name he needed for his theory, or he had his own prophecies. So he called it the guy hypothesis.
That’s a it’s, a very brief step, I think, firstly, kind of assuming that kind of archetypal role on that, although at the same time it’s very classic. It represents that fundamental, as you mentioned, archetypal pattern that we have as a species come to identify with in different kind of formats and experiences. I think the the role of this relationship gets discussed and overburdened or over pressured from different philosophers, or especially in the modern world and modern ideas today, we we tend to attribute almost supernatural powers to the to the natural world in many kind of ways.
And I know some in the kind of psychedelic historian history of it, so to speak, describe, I think it’s Tom who wrote the, which is Sabbath and the historical aspects of that, and he was exploring the influences of the plants and the psychedelics and how this affected us. And he basically came up at one point with the argument that say that part of the reason we created a lot of these mythological creatures or manifestations is there’s a survival mechanism in order to kind of protect us against those experiences.
However, that then also looks at the correspondence of the fact that we see these singular ideas or reoccurring patterns of nature showing up in areas of society there where there is no physical appearing connection, but it kind of leads to the idea that there is almost a non-visible connection. In terms of that, what is your thoughts, if any, on this subject of of the shared collective unconscious or dimension of communication that’s outside of our normal localized range of awareness that nature seems to be quite adept at utilizing?
Yeah. Well, that’s an interesting question. I think my sense is that we don’t create those images. They’re given to us by nature. Nature creates them and gives them to us. And you can call this this domain that does the image making in nature the unconscious, because he he was a scientist and he wanted to have a sort of neutral term.
So he, he use the Freud’s term, the unconscious. But but actually it’s full of life. The unconscious is nature. It’s full of life, full of it’s an image maker. It’s full of wisdom, full of life. And it makes those images, we don’t create them. We receive them, I think. So I regard the unconscious as, our own lack of awareness of the deep sentience of the of the universe, of the world and the planet, which we’re not really aware of.
But of course, sometimes that deep intelligence of which we are unconscious, provides us with images, provides us with some help. It I think it wants us to know it more deeply. It wants a connection with us. Nature wants that connection with us. And it helps us by giving us images in our dreams, in our active imagination, in our fantasies, in our psychedelic journeys.
If you like. So for me, imagination is really the ability to receive images from nature and to write, to draw those images or produce as images and then offer them back to nature. So we develop a relationship with the image making with the imagination, which is Gaia, which is nature.
We’re kind of making known the unknown. We’re taking the, the, the unconscious communication that we’re getting at that fundamental level and bringing it into the conscious, bringing it into the light, so to speak. Yeah. That’s, that’s that’s a that leads me to the curious question is, how did you make that jump? I mean, there was the idea of of this possible relationship with nature and the idea of image in the image facility.
And I think Richard Dawkins once pointed out that a lot of I think it was called memes or mimetic ideas. I forget the correct terminology on how you describe them as the biologic, why we would take certain thought forms or bolt that up. Did that have any influence in this concept? Was it a separation or a step to kind of find a deeper maturity inside of it and your own expression?
How did that that idea take shape in your own mind?
No, I haven’t been that influenced by Richard Dawkins. Ideas on memes or selfish genes. I mean, memes are more interesting. Selfish genes. Definitely not, you know, but no, for me, it’s been my interest in young, which I’ve had since I was a teenager. I mean, I read memories, dreams and reflections when I was about 20, I suppose.
I carried around, I carried it around with me when I was living in Venezuela and Colombia, reading it an awful lot. No, no, no, So I’ve always been very interested in, you know, always a digging into Jung quite a lot. The way it happened with me was when I was working with my my younger an analyst, I suppose.
Julian David, a great English analyst who passed away recently, on my own social work with five for five years with him, you know, and you have this wonderful library full of books of young, some of them unpublished manuscripts, and mimeographed notes of talks he gave in the 30s and 40s. And I always used to go to the library, Julian’s library, and find some, some of these books, particularly the ones these are unpublished manuscripts by Jung.
And I’ve got one here. It’s one of them here they are now being published. This is, this is. And Julian said I could just have one of these. I should say the process of individuation, alchemy to, you know. Oh, wow. So this one, this one drew me a lot. And this is where I first started understanding alchemy is all about alchemy and individuation and what the alchemists are all about.
It’s a lovely, lovely book. I mean, look at this. And they’re going to they’re going to these are slowly being published, you know. But can you imagine just working with this book? Oh, that is such. It has a lovely smell, though.
I mean, like, I can think of a lot of people that would just love to kind of smell that or put their hands on that. I remember reading when you were in the library when when he said that you can go in and take one, that, that, that, that kind of intuitive impulse to just.
Yeah, that’s rad.
This.
Yeah. I mean, I write about that in Got Alchemy. This is this is it, you see. Oh 19, 1941. You know, he did this during the war, during the Second World War. So that really, it’s something spoke to me and sort of gelled. It sort of twigged, you know, so I started looking more into alchemy. And, and then, of course, the other person is very important.
There is my friend Jeffrey Keel, who I, who I have conversations with in the book. Jeffrey is one of the world’s top climate scientists, and he’s an outstanding climate scientist. He was a very important in the National Center for Atmospheric Research in America, and he retired recently, had a tremendously powerful scientific career. His his he has a scientific understanding of God, but is also a union analyst, a very, very, very skilled union artist and very interested in alchemy.
So, he came over to England. We we began to talk about alchemy in relation to, to Gaia, the guy and science. And we’ve been continuing that conversation ever since. And so those are the things that got me going about, linking, seeing if it was possible to, to use alchemical principles to understand the way the, planet, works, rather to understand the life of, of Gaia, of our planet.
Because, you know, for example, these seven operations that I talk about in the book, I said seven alchemical operations, sorry, that I talk about in the book. Once again, I don’t think we’ve created them, you see, I think we’ve received them. They’ve been given to us by nature. I think if one looks at it like that, then you realize that, this is something you have to respect very much.
This this, for example, is as of mandala, which I think you see, of course, in the book you probably find a picture of it and put it up, you know, with his seven key operations, nature has given us that image. We haven’t created if we’ve created it and it’s just something arbitrary and you might as well just dismiss it.
I mean, so we create so many arbitrary things that just come from our surface consciousness. But you could say this, this image and other alchemical images, we haven’t created them. They’ve been they’ve come from nature, from the unconscious, you could say from nature. And then it’s up to us whether we delve deeply into them and discover, something very profound about how nature works and about what nature wants us to understand about herself.
And that was my attitude.
So that’s that’s especially like why this really kind of captured my attention as well as it did. I’ve, I’ve obviously always had a very deep background in a lot of the esoteric areas, and a deep passion for me has been grounding a lot of that in psychology and neuroscience and really in the world of practical use. It had no real merit or value.
If they were these deeply esoteric hero’s journeys that weren’t guided in the individual’s personal heroic journey, and those stages weren’t understood in the symbolic fashion and then understood what the practical application was of it. And we look at these seven points, we look at the I mean, even our seven days of the week, the old planetary archetypes that have been common to all of the ancient cultures in one shape or form, there’s that consistent pattern.
Doctor Biden refers to it as the template of unconscious, where these fundamental templates, are built on top of each other and evolved specifically with the culture that in which it finds itself almost adding more attributes or paintbrushes, as it fleshes out that idea into further and further arenas and this is why this has been so interesting for me, because I was able to correlate the psychological manifestations or the social manifestations of these seven archetypal principles or functions of nature.
We could see even the artistic expressions of Venus. We could explore the the Jupiter Aryan leadership qualities inside of the individual, or even in companies and corporate structures. All of these patterns were there. Could you kind of again, like, this is why your material was so capturing for me, because it took what was in my mind very much in the psychological spectrum and social spectrum, and actually brought it to the physical world.
It made me look at things differently. Could you and I know it’s a very broad subject because you do go in quite a lot of detail, but could you give for the listener out there a little bit of a broad spectrum strokes on how those seven principles basically relate to to Gaia?
Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, let’s let’s say what they are, these seven operations, alchemical operations. So the first is calcination, which is burning, you know, so in the alchemical work or the psychological work, as far as I understand it, you take you take some of your obstacles, things that are a problem for you, and you have to sort of somehow burn them into a white ash.
Right? So this heat isn’t very intense, heat isn’t involved, which could be a kind of discomfort for a psychologically anyway. In terms of Gaia, we can ask, where is calcination? Where does that sort of intense heating happen? Well, various places, you know, if you start sort of exploring one is with plate tectonics, you know, because you get these huge, rafts of rock meeting each other, one gets pushed under the other at a subduction zone and down down below, that rock was being pushed down, melts and tremendous heat and pressure just underneath the crust of the rock melts.
That’s calcination. Another place where there might be calcination of a more subtle type is in their metabolism. You know, I mean, we generate our cells are generating heat as we speak. You know, you can feel the cheek, your cheeks. There’s a mitochondria in our cells that are generating heat. You could say that’s a kind of gentle calcination.
So the sun, of course, is going through calcination and nuclear fusion in the sun is producing the energy that’s running the whole of Gaia. So those are just some places where calcination is happening in nature. If you start meditating on it more, you can find more places. But so the next alchemical operation after calcination is dissolution dissolving.
So you take some of that white ash that’s left from the calcination and you dissolve it. I mean, psychologically understand that to be taking the residue of that calcination process and you let it dissolve into the unconscious, you relax, you just let it go, let it dissolve, let it. Then trying to achieve anything, just let it flow. Let dissolved.
In Gaia, of course, dissolution is everywhere as water. Water does dissolving. Yeah. So you could think of it as the if you think of it in terms of the history of the Earth. That’s when the water first arrived, either from the interior of the earth or from comets. Ice, comets from, the, the asteroid belt. And it’s also the way water dissolves rocks, which is incredibly important for the life of Gaia, you know, then the weathering of rocks, the dissolution of rocks.
Those are just two, two aspects of dissolution. And in the planet, you see, then the third operation is separation. Where psychologically you, you allow things to that have been dissolved to sort of become distinct and separate but connected. So you begin to realize, oh, these aspects of myself, I didn’t realize that actually they’re separate. I can see this part of myself, this part of it, but they’re all connected.
And in Gaia, what would that be? Well, I think that’s when, in the history of Gaia, when chemicals were dissolved out of the rocks. And these chemical beings, for me, chemicals are not objects. They’re subjects. You know, these chemical beings began to notice themselves as separate and then they began to relate to each other and relate to each other in such a way that it eventually they produced, the first living cell, the last Luca, the last universal common ancestor, the first proper biological cell that could, regulate its internal environment.
It could reproduce it had some kind of genetic code, and it could evolve according to the rules of natural selection, you know? So that’s that separation. I well, in fact, that’s also a conjunction. That’s the next operation. Conjunction psychologically, is when you have the first taste of real wholeness in yourself, you know, the, the planet for that is the sun.
So there’s this idea of enlightenment or enlightenment that happens. And I think that’s that in the history of God. That’s when the first living cell appears as a conjunction of these separate chemicals that come together, or chemical beings, rather come together to form the first living cell. Wow. I mean, that’s that’s a huge jump in consciousness. Yeah. Because these, these early cells, you know, the they’re sentient.
They’re not machines, as we’re told in mainstream, but they’re not machines. They’re full of sentience, full of intelligence, full of communication. They communicate with each other through chemical languages, you know, they soon become evolve into bacteria, and they start forming ecosystems and complex, networks. And that’s the next stage in the alchemical journey of fermentation. So psychologically, what you do is you take what’s been conjoined in yourself, and then you let it rot.
You sort of let you just let it with maybe a very gentle fire, let it rot. And that produces a kind of, spiritual essence. And in Gaia, I think that fermentation is fermentation is literal fermentation. In other words, some of the early bacteria were photosynthesis arising on the surface of the ocean. And when they died, their bodies sank to the bottom of the ocean and the bodies were eaten by fermenting bacteria.
Literally, that actually do chemical fermentation and that they release carbon, carbon dioxide and methane back to the atmosphere, which stop the Earth from freezing over. So you see, you get this feedback relationship between different bacterial communities, one producing, dead bodies which are fermented by the others at the bottom there. That’s fermentation. The creation of of ecological relationships and recycling loops, fermentation loops.
And that sort of happens inwardly and psychologically as well in oneself. Then the next alchemical operation is, excuse me, is distillation, where you take that spirit that’s, that’s been liberated from the fermentation and you cultivate, you cultivate, you cultivate in culture and in Gaia. I understand that to say, more and more complex ecosystems developing more and more complex relationships, for example, the land being, eventually only 500 or so million years ago, or less 400 million years ago, being colonized by the first land plants and then, you know, the ecosystems developing on the land becoming more complex.
That’s the whole of guys distilling her skill at, self-regulating. Surface conditions through these feedbacks between organisms, rocks, atmosphere and water is a distillation, distillation, distillation. And the final operation is coagulation. And I think that’s where human consciousness comes in, into Gaia and in, in the alchemical, view, coagulation is you could say it’s a kind of kind of coming home to Gaia kind of heaven, kind of, deep sense of belonging to Gaia.
I think coagulation really involves, consciousness. So for me, coagulation is where the alchemical operations and the sense of guy really come together or they come together in all of them. But in, in a coagulation, it’s, it’s when, my experience, when I really feel I’m deeply embedded in Gaia, you know, deeply part of Gaia because of all this meditation, I’ve been doing with the alchemical operations and joining them with the scientific guy that I’ve been trying to describe.
I’ve had their experiences. I have I’ve had where there’s a tremendous sense of, oh, this is where I really am. This is the living planet. I feel part of this living planet. I am this living planet. This living planet is me. That’s a marvelous feeling. I would call that coagulation. And then you go around again. Then you have to even calcined that, subjecting that to calcination.
You just keep mind what I’m doing is my own inner work, and life is just going round those seven alchemical operations with the science, with my own psychology and the science together, always the two together, hoping that there’ll be even more development of insight. And the last thing about coagulation I was all about the whole thing is that it’s not just to my benefit because it gives it gives me tremendous psychological, but I need to share it with people so that it’s not just confined to me.
I have to offer back something. That’s why I wrote this book. You say to give something back from the process that I’ve been through.
I’m exceptionally happy that you did. But they were there to the two points in there. There’s actually a couple that I want to just kind of dive in a little bit more deeply. I one, I think it’s always been the classic idea or interpretation in many, cultures of enlightenment is the moment where the internal and the external worlds meet, and that idea of Eckhart Tolle, his, presence.
Or.
Being truly present and not kind of caught in the other is when we’re able to do that. And I think that’s the big problem that a lot of spiritual and mystical systems have, and a lot of scientific systems in their way, even though both were necessary for the development. But it’s always been these kind of separated pathways of development.
And we are now at a stage, I think, in our development as a species, in the sense of we’ve now gone far enough so that we’ve cut enough details and broken far enough to the very core of structure of things that we are now finding the divine inside of the structure. And we’re also now almost finding the scientific inside of the divine.
We’re starting to notice the patterns in these overlaps, and that is the necessity in order to bring them forward. And the idea that really kind of struck me as well, just for that psychological correspondence, was this highlight that you made of chemical entities in the sense that we are even biological, even though we’re singular, we’re still biologically plural in the sense that we have several intelligence with their own operation and communication channels between us, very much as the unconscious has varied personalities, so to speak, or archetypal principles and functions, that unless they are brought into coherence or communication, we see a psychic breakdown inside of the individual, very much the same way that these physical
components are there. How how is your exploring and in bringing these two together, brought about a deeper healing, because you speak in the book about how it was almost an instruction from psyche, or an impulse from psyche. It overcame. It was a position of this archetypal force that led you to take this action or or pursue this.
What was your own kind of transformative journey? That, shall I say, established a deeper connection to the psyche within, to to Gaia, within and made you also because what I loved that very much about what you point out. And I’m sorry, I’m putting a lot of ideas together here, but, one of the things that was so beautiful, me, in your earlier part of that translation, was how you highlighted the manifestation of the process inside of your physiology, your physical body, inside of the Earth itself, inside of the greater solar system, the sun and the cosmos and every other area as well as now we’re seeing almost like a side.
Can you explore how that came together for yourself and your own psychological healing and bringing that about, or made you take it seriously?
Yeah. That’s great. Thank you. Very interesting. You see, because I’ve been trained, I was trained as a scientist from a very early age, you know, I mean, I did science at school and specialized in science. So, I was very strongly indoctrinated in the mechanistic world view, and it repulsed me. I mean, I didn’t know why. You know, I always felt deeply uncomfortable.
I was only young, and I feel very uncomfortable with it. And I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why I did the science because I love the science. But there was something missing for me. So what happened when I started studying alchemy? I it’s as if I went back in my, in my imagination to this to the 17th century when alchemy was at its height.
And it’s as if I was with the alchemists in those days doing their experiments, you know, helped along, of course, by lashings of young and discussions with Julian and other other friends. And I realized that if it hadn’t been for the various religious wars in the West around that time, they said 30 Years War 1618, 1648, 30 years of terrible war in Central Europe and other problems that happened in the West, that led to the demise of alchemy.
It might have been possible for us to have developed a truly holistic science from alchemical roots, but unfortunately, that all got not all got, derailed and interrupted. And we ended up with Descartes and his mechanistic view and Galileo and his his mathematical view and, you know, all the others. Bacon with his idea of using science to dominate the whole universe.
And we went off on entirely the wrong track. I mean, we developed a powerful science which gave us tremendous control of nature, and it’s now led us into this very dangerous situation. But it needn’t have been like that. And when I was working with that alchemy in its imaginative way and the science, I realized that if that development, that mechanistic, trajectory of science hadn’t happened, slowly, slowly, alchemy could have developed into a into a science, into holistic sites in which psyche, soul and what we now call science, you know, words, a sort of understanding, mathematical understanding of the universe could have developed together.
And that started happening in me. It’s almost as if in me, that trajectory that wasn’t taken by the culture started to happen in me. And I retraced all my scientific training, all the chemistry I had done, all the physics or particularly the ecology and the biology, and it as if the alchemy was just waiting to jump into that universe.
At last, at last you found what you are, what have been waiting for you to find. And so it’s as if I reprise all that development in myself that could have happened in the culture, but didn’t and now needs to happen in the culture if we’ve got any chance, any hope of surviving the career, the mess, that mechanistic science was created because we ditched the alchemy, very early on.
So that was the experience for me. And of course, it was incredibly healing because I would have these moments of I mean, these are very difficult to describe. I know you you’ll even our listeners know what I’m talking about. There’s these moments of insight, you could call it insight, which you can’t describe. I mean, there’s just moments of tremendous it’s like a descent of wholeness or descent of understanding, like a falling away of linkers.
And, I’ve had very, very many moments like that with working with alchemy.
It’s very it’s very interesting. I love that correlation because I remember reading in your book, when you’re speaking of Descartes and you’re talking about his dream and the series of dreams. And it almost when I was reading that, it was almost as if psyche was trying to speak through his own unconscious about the.
Need.
For the unification, which he wasn’t able to resolve. And again, whether it was the cause of the polarization because of the social structure at the time, or what kind of led him to that. But the struggle that we had to go through as a species in order to get to that space, and I, I, I kind of just want to highlight, like a little interesting idea based upon what was just said about this almost intuitive kind of fall over.
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the easy. He was a young guy, an analyst himself. Robert Johnson, and.
I know Robert. I know the provisions. Yeah.
And I believe he also wrote the the book on, you know, active, active imagination or inner work and inner work. He also describes almost there’s three stages of active imagination where the first is almost the horse trading, where we’re negotiating with these different aspects and they’re very I think for anyone that experiences, they’re that it’s very purely imaginative in the classical way that we think of it.
But the deeper we go past that, and the more associated we become to the imagination, certain experiences almost have full blown hallucinatory effects upon us and can be transcended out of. And I forget who the author was, but she wrote a book called My Stroke of Genius, and, it was basically someone who the the one portion of the brain or the left portion of the brain was, was, was affected by the stroke.
And suddenly she was open to the what was described as the so that other component of the self that by default seems to have this deep network of connection. It’s as if our own bodies themselves have this language that’s always going forward, and we’re not conscious of that. How how did you prevent yourself from being did the scientific structure help?
Because it almost seems as nature itself was saying, okay, you had the tools. Now, now we can help articulate that together. Or were there times in which you were yourself going, this is too much. I need to kind of ground myself back in the the, the inner work is overwhelming. The unconscious is taking over. How it was that management process for you?
Yeah. I think the main problem I had, was my scientific skepticism, you see, saying in my, some part of my mind, I think my, my rational mind, used to say, it would say to me, what are you doing all this nonsense for? What are you doing this for? What is this? You know, excuse me, but then, of course, I knew what that was.
And I was able to just put that part of myself in a very gentle way without repressing it. Just put it in its place, you know, say, okay, just. Okay, I hear you, but let’s just keep working with the alchemical, the images and the active imagination. We’re still doing science, remember? I would say to it, still doing science.
Always linked to Gaia. This is Gaia. Alchemy. So the thinking mind would say, all right, then. All right. And then I’d be able to say, go to one of my Gaia places, and I do a meditation on one of the operations or the whole mandala or whatever. And then of course, what happens is if you do the active imagination, you get to a point.
I think you mentioned something like this where, it’s no longer you doing it. It’s your again, it, your receiving it. It’s the, the, the the contents become objective. In other words, you realize they have objective validity. They’re not you. They’re beyond you. And that gives it, reality, which is as real as the physical world. In fact, it is.
It is the physical world. It’s the inner side of the physical world of Gaia. The of the trees, the plants, the animals and molecules they’re full of. They’re the ones that somehow don’t ask me how the images, the alchemical images are being generated by nature, by that whole psyche of nature, and in an act of imagination for me, you are you realize it’s it’s got objective validity.
I mean, Jung talked about this a lot. How the inner figures actually are not ours. We don’t create them. They come from nature. They are nature. And I had that experience quite, quite many times. And then, of course, the rational mind when it when it experiences, that’s okay. There’s a wonderful relaxation. I used to experience a wonderful accession of the rational mind.
The rational mindset comes as I want to be part of this. Why should I be stuck in my isolated skepticism? You know, telling, telling you all this is wrong. I can see it’s not rubbish. Of course it’s wonderful. It’s fantastic. It makes sense of all of life. It makes you better with your family and makes you a better teacher and makes you a better human being.
And I, the rational mind I want, I want this, I want to be part of it. And so that’s when the intellect gets integrated into the whole business. You see. Oh, and if if you want to have a more scientific understanding of this, you may have come across the book of my friend in MIT, Gilchrist. Have you heard of him?
The Gilchrist not off the top. Very important in the Gilchrist. He’s written a book. Two books, actually. The first one is called The Master and His Emissary, and he explains how, what we’ve been talking about relates to the two hemispheres of our of our brain. Yeah, but in a very subtle, complex way. Not in the sort of popular style of left brain, right brain, or although it is connected with that.
But it very subtle. And he says, we basically have these two, two neurological pathways in our brain. One is the holistic right brain, which sees relationships and, has feelings. You could say that’s the one that’s in tune with the unconscious. And then there’s the left brain, which is more rational. I’m putting this very crudely. Yeah. But, and and the problem is that the, the rational side, the left brain in our culture is dominated.
That’s the emissary. But it shouldn’t be the master. The master should be the right brain. I was, feeling for empathy, connection, deep imagination, active imagination. The soul, the right brain has the ability to perceive those objective qualities in nature. And the left brain, the rational mind should be the servant of the right brain. And I think what happens when when we get integrated, like as I’ve experienced with Gaia, Kim is there too, the to fall into, into the right relationship with each other.
And we feel so good. We feel so happy. You know, it feels it feels like we’ve we found that real inner treasure, which I suppose the alchemists might call the philosopher’s stone. You know, I’m not saying I found the Philosopher’s Stone. I mean, don’t get I’m not making claims like that, but, I mean, I think all of us are capable of finding or tasting it or develop or cultivating it, or it’s something we cultivate, something we aspire to.
And along the way, we have we’re given these wonderful experiences. If we if we do this sincerely and genuinely.
That’s that’s what I think is so, so interesting about it. Whether it’s the the kind of global or fully actualized philosopher’s stone or whether it’s the psychological, it’s still one degree or tier inside of that kind of direction. Even if we look at the alchemical representations of the feminine, the masculine and the the constant unification, if we look at the manifest, even the classical, the various ways by which these patterns reemerge through different religions, philosophical systems, alchemical systems, all the time coming back forward, the old idea of that, alchemical idea of a woman is power and man is peace.
And the woman here being almost the right brain, the man being the left brain, kind of coming into that experience, that unity, that thing gives the unity of itself. The old classical Tetragrammaton principle, which was the for later name of God, oftentimes attributed to earth, air, fire, water. The four alchemical principles which can be correspond to the four functions, as well as to the four union archetypes of king, magician, warrior, and lover.
And then one of the other kind of concepts that I think is, is good knowledge in active imagination as a as a therapeutic process. It’s defined the unity between all these varying parts or, or components so that they come into harmony. And that’s where we experience that connection, that peace that really glories, so to speak, the the original translation of religion, right to read, to bind together, to reconnect, to reunite.
And an alchemical image that you also highlight and reference around this is the the Eunice. Mundus, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, this this connective force between the physical, the material and the, psyche spectrum. Is that right? Yeah. How do you how do you explore that?
Well, that’s a good question. I mean, one thing I’ve written about in the book is this little device that came to me called the Gaia Scope. In which I have these, I have three core turners. I’ve got one here actually, I can show it to, made by my son. For me this is a Gaia scope.
Oh it’s, it’s nice to see it in video. I’m seeing it active.
Sorry about that. That’s so the inner quaternary of the four aspects of the scientific Gaia from Lovelock’s Gaia theory. So we’ve got the rocks, the atmosphere, the waters, all the waters and all of life. And then around that we have the four alchemical elements that you mentioned fire, earth, water, etc.. And you see, they can move around like that and around the outside, the outer ring are the four psychological functions of you.
So this means that we can we can, we can develop triplets, word triplets, like this. And we have 64 of them in this combination. For example, I can take I take this out into my Gaia places and I use it for meditation, for example, one of my favorite triplets is rocks Fire feeling on Earth. Well, rocks fire sensing.
Let’s have that one. Rocks fire sensing. Let’s configure it like that, you see. And then if you can see that rocks fire sensing got it. So I would just sit in my Gaia place out in nature into meditation, rocks, fire. Sensing what comes to my mind, I just keep my mind very open. And what comes to me is the way that the rocks, deep under the earth, you know, they feel the heat of the inner earth, which is coming out about because of radioactive decay generating the inner heat of the Earth.
It’s very hot. And that’s driving plate tectonics. Without plate tectonics, we can’t have Gaia. We need plate tectonics to recycle the carbon dioxide in and out of the atmosphere. Absolutely essential. And the rocks are actually sensing that fire. You see, it’s the calcination again. Yeah. And then because I’ve config configured it like this, I have three other triplets.
So I have rock, I have atmosphere water thinking so I have to I meditate on that atmosphere. It’s more difficult atmosphere water thinking what is that what comes up? I mean, I won’t go into the details, but if you, you know, you can use this as a kind of active imagination. I found this is one way I work with those Quaternary is through the Gaia scope and in the book I’ve given people, ideas of how they can make their own Gaia scope.
This one was made by my son Oscar. I’m using a laser cutter at school, but you can just make one out of cardboard. You know, my first one was made out of cardboard, and one day he came home with this. I couldn’t believe it. Lovely gift. And you can. People can just play with that if they want to.
And use that as a way of exploring the Quaternary. Some of the Quaternary as you mentioned.
I found even when I, when I, when I saw that you gave me so many new ideas, I, I have a nicely decorated creative temple that has all the old classic esoteric ideas. So the, the zodiac and how that corresponds to the deity names. And the second I saw that instead of having my classical utilization, I quickly ran and I said, what if I reconfigured the circle a little bit?
And what’s new correspond? And psychologically, does that open up? And what new possibilities of probability then become available? And my sense of connection or my sense of realization is, is just so rich. And I remember kind of reading somewhere and I, I stand in correction of how accurate statement is. But then one of the things that psychedelics do, when people do you take them in a therapeutic context, is that it almost connects different regions of the brain that aren’t normally connected.
And part of my theory is that that experience of the so-called other that is oftentimes experienced is that the conscious mind doesn’t have enough data necessarily to interpret it, that sudden rush of information. So the hallucinatory facilities of the imagination now takes over, and we see a similar experience that we do in active imagination, although now with the benefit of this additional chemical structure that further disconnects us from time and space and thus allows an altered state of consciousness to be produced as a result of it.
So that gives a very kind of I think, it’s a it’s a big it’s a big conversation to have with a scientist. So, it’s, it’s a very kind of overwhelming idea, I think, for a lot of people just to kind of get hold of at first because we find ourselves in a society today that on one hand, we still have that divide and we still have that very scientific kind of divide.
And anything of this nature is just a religious hoo ha. And then we have the other extreme religious kind of component of that or extreme esoteric component of it, where it just says, you know, the one doesn’t see what the other one sees. How when, when individuals think about that, when we think about the society as a whole in terms of where we need to go for some healing as a species, how can Gaia alchemy, you know, as an approach, as a strategy, as a methodology, help us towards perhaps at a society level, bringing us as people closer together?
That’s a good question. I don’t know, I think maybe guy alchemy is a bit a bit too extreme for most people. I mean, I know that here at Shoemaker College, where I’ve been teaching from the beginning of the college for 30 years or so, I’ve started introducing Gaia alchemy to some of my students. When I teach them the science of Gaia.
And it works very well, you know, was the sort of people who are willing to explore, who want to explore the unification of psyche and science, if you like. And so it works very well for them. And so, about the wider society. Well, I can only work with the context. I’ve got and the context I’ve been given, and I’m blessed with its Schumer College, and I have access to these wonderful students from all over the world who are very keen to come and learn with what I have to share and what other others like they have to share.
So I share with them, and then many of them go out into the world and they’ve had tremendous impact. You know, some of our students, for example, setting up the Paris Accord in 2015, you know, with Christiana Figueres and working with big businesses and education and perma all sort permaculture, all sorts of all sorts of things being done by thousands of our students all over the world.
And recently I’ve been I’ve been sharing guy alchemy with them. So to answer your question, I think it’s, I can’t deal with this is I mean, I’m only a small individual. I can’t transform the whole culture, but I can use my own life and my own context in the best way I can to share these ideas with the people who come to share my college.
So that’s what I’m doing. And that’s that’s the way I try to change the society, by sharing with, with our students. And then hopefully they well, I know they go out and they bring about changes. So that’s my approach, whether it’ll work, whether there’s enough time to bring about the massive changes we need. I don’t know, I try not to think about that.
I just do what I can, you know, with with my context here.
For, people listening, in terms of that context, in terms of that motivation of why they may want to kind of explore it, what is the cost from us? I mean, besides, the emotional disconnect, one of the other things that I believe it was actually, I do believe it was Robert Johnson as well, Robert Johnson had another book titled ecstasy, where he utilizes the archetype of Dionysus to explore the discovery of how we discover ecstasy and joy and happiness in that essence.
And he specifically, I believe, using ice as the archetype, because Dionysus was not like the Roman Berkus, which was pure debauchery. It was very much, in one way, a dance between the rational and the irrational and or the scientific in the imaginative and finding that kind of component inside that. So recognizing, I think that deeply the incentive for us to explore this is a genuine harmony inside of ourselves.
If we’re too far off. I find in the imaginative world we tend to lose contact with reality and we lose contact with society and other individuals. And, you know, we, we, we come under the superstition that only with our mind at the current level, that it is at, we can cure ourselves of every illness, where we might ignore science and say that, you know, sometimes the medicine or the therapy may help, especially if you’re not necessarily, you know, the Buddha, quote unquote, or anything like that.
What is, from your perspective in terms of the urgency of our development, if we don’t look at this integration within ourselves, what is the impact for our environment and the impact for our bodies?
Well, I mean, we know very well from the climate science that if we don’t change our ways, our civilization is very likely to get wiped out by by gotten feedbacks, you know, so from a purely scientific point of view, just purely from science, scientific point of view, Gaia can’t tolerate a species that disturbs her metabolism and her physiology as much as our civilization has done.
And, she’s kind to those who obey her rules, but she can’t help itself. She’s ruthless to those who don’t. And so we’re already seeing some major guy feedbacks kicking in. I mean, the virus that Covid is, one is a classic guy. And feedback, you know, species like us gets out of control, starts wrecking things. And we develop these big international transport networks, perfect for virus to come and knock down our numbers.
Yeah. War is another one. You know, these are horrible plagues. War. Then of course, climate change, fire, flood, all these things. They’re classic guy and feedbacks and we’re setting them in train because we’re not in tune with Gaia. If we were in tune with Gaia, we wouldn’t have had the virus, we wouldn’t have had climate change or anything like that.
So the prognosis is really bad if we carry on as we are. And as you probably know from the climate science, you know, we’re we’re reaching the point of no return where, tipping points kick in, for example, the loss of, of, of ice at the poles, the loss of the Amazon rainforest. And once these things have gone, the earth moves to a hot state for many hundreds, thousands of years, if not permanently.
And that’s the end of our civilization. You know, communication networks will be brought down or transport next networks we brought down. That’s what’s going to happen. And quite soon in the next 50, 40 years or so. So, the question is what can we do about it. Well we have to obviously we have to have a massive inner psychological change.
The problem is, as you pointed out, the problem is the human psyche. It’s both the blessing and the curse for for Gaia, at least the Western psyche. So we need to shift that. And you need to shift our psyche very fast on a big scale. How we do that? I’ve just no idea. I comes back to my earlier point.
I just do what I can in my life. And I think if everybody can can start this process of self-development towards Gaia and what can we call it, a sort of guy on individuation. You know, Jung has this idea of individuation. But you follow the psychological journey in order to become your own unique individual. I follow Mary Murphy, who wrote this beautiful PhD, which I examined on, how individuation cannot happen without Gaia.
You have two individual individual within. Individual within Gaia. Jung himself said, you can’t individuate on a mountaintop by yourself. Individuation. Becoming who you are requires you to be in relationship with other people, he would say. And also I would say, and he probably would say with nature as well. And I think this is where the alchemy can help us, because alchemy is about individuation.
It’s about the journey of becoming oneself, which is why Jung got so excited by alchemy. Once he realized what it was all about, he got realized it’s his own, psychology of the unconscious, which was happening in the 17th century and before. So alchemy is one way we can. And Jungian psychology, let’s say, is one route we can take towards individuation with Gaia.
And that will help to solve the problem. But we haven’t got much time. And to be quite honest with you, I can’t see how it’s going to happen really fast. But I try not to think about that. I follow the Bhagavad Gita. Don’t be attached to the outcome of your actions. Just do the actions because you feel that deeply in tune with the nature of the cosmos and your own deep in in nature, which is what I try to do.
That’s powerful. I’m reminded. I’m reminded of the I think the I forget again the author, but I believe the book was called The Language of Trees, or The Secret Language of Trees, where the author talks about trees and densely populated forests. Having this fungi network of communication between them. Yet if we go into cities, that network is almost non-existent.
Between the communication and it seems that we as human beings, through our obsession with science and technology, we live in social media that’s supposed to connect us, but makes us a toolset to be more numb, more disconnected, and our interpretation, I think, in many areas of spirituality is isolated and separate. And I was speaking to Mark Standish, who is the head of the Hermetic Institutes and, inside of the UC.
We pointed out something very interesting about these very esoteric or very spiritual groups, and that a lot of the New Age ones that are always popping up there seems to have these very short lived life cycles, and it’s because the pursuit is not actually for each other. They’re not actually for the community. They’re there for the end of their their concept of individuation is a little bit flawed.
It seems more to be a separation or ego inflation than it is of a unification. And again, without nature and without each other. That’s an that’s an impossible task to kind of achieve. Now, my question, one of my closing questions, you know, because I’ve already taken up so much of your time and it’s been an absolutely amazing conversation.
So your insight has been really valued. I’m curious for somebody that doesn’t have the scientific mind or background necessarily, if I go sit in my, my, my, my little spot in nature and I’m lacking the knowledge to fully connect, what are the steps besides obviously grabbing a copy of this amazing book and getting my kickstart and deeper work in that?
But what are some practical steps that I can take as an individual to merge the rational in the irrational, the scientific and nonscientific to bring about that unity a little bit more progressive? What is it strategy that I can start taking?
Okay, that’s a really good question. Well, one one see if this works. I mean, this may not work, but I mean, would you agree that everyone in the culture knows that atoms exist? For example. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone knows about atoms right. Yes. Although of course it was only Einstein who really prove the existence of atoms. But anyway, so we all know there are atoms.
Everyone knows. Right. Carbon atoms, nitrogen atoms. And we all know that we’re made of atoms and that trees are made of atoms, plants are made of atoms. Rocks are made. It’s all made of atoms, right? Yes. So, that’s the first step. You know, you go to your guy up the first step. Sorry, just backtrack is to is to have a Gaia place.
That’s the first step. So I would say find a place in nature, where you go back to again and again and again to start working with this kind of contemplative inquiry. And if you can’t go into nature, for example, I’ve had I work with people who’ve been in lockdown in Brazil, in their apartments. They just get some nice plants together in their apartment and make a Gaia place there.
Okay, I have one indoors with various plants for the winter in England, which is really not very nice, you know. So you have to have the indoor Gaia place doesn’t have to be out in nature, but if it can be okay, go out into nature not too far from your home, close by. So it’s not a hassle to get to.
And you visit again and again and again as often as you possibly can without getting too obsessive about it. And you sit there and you just say, here I am. I’ve shown up, and the first step is to show up and be in the presence of this greater personhood. So maybe the first step is to think, every time I go to my Gaia place, I’m getting more familiar with it.
I’m learning. I’m seeing this tree, that plant, this rock, and gradually allow the personhood of the Gaia place to to reach you. So you you’re in the presence of a greater person, which is your Gaia place, which are the plants in your on your table, in your apartment or your tree or your stream, or that you’re in the presence of a, of a greater person, but you always go back to the same place like you always go back to your, your your beloved.
You know, you go back to your friend, you go back. And then when you’re there, there are various things you can do. I was mentioning atoms so we could think using science. Okay, we know we’re made out of atoms. The atoms are like little mandalas. You know, they have a nucleus and they have electrons going around the outside, more or less.
They’re like a sort of mandala. So we’re all made out of mandalas, and every atom is a personality. Carbon has a personality. Sulfur has oxygen has a personality. I wrote about this in my first book, animal to Earth, for example. Carbon for me is that is the friendly suite of the chemical world. It loves to make relationships with other carbons, and that’s that’s the foundation of our physical being and the being of the plants.
And, you know, the other organisms, the hummingbirds, the butterflies you might be seeing. They’re all made of carbon is the basis of their life and is that basis of my life. So we’re connected just through carbon and then say nothing of the oxygen and the other’s oxygen is like, for example, the passionate Italian of the chemical world. For me.
So you can begin to meditate like that. You know, you’re sitting in your Gaia place and you’re contemplating it’s all made of atoms, atoms and mandalas. Atoms are not objects. They’re subjects. They’re sentient beings. Because the sentence that I have and the sentence that the trees have and the animals have, it’s all coming out of the atomic realm.
It’s in the atomic realm. And if you just meditate on that, breathing gently and enjoying the colors and the sounds and eventually you get into one, get into a very relaxed state in which the transcendent function can appear, you know, the sort of that marvelous moment of realization of healing which is so hard to describe, that moment of, now I feel now I’m now I’m really at home now, I understand, how can we describe it?
I tell you who’s very good at tit, not heart. You know, the Buddhist, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk. There’s a wonderful book of his called sun in my heart. The sun in my heart. Very good description of of this, this state of mind. So I think the Gaia place is absolutely essential, and I recommend everyone to have a Gaia place or several,
It’s been it’s been the classic practice, I think, in every ancient magical tradition, spiritual practice throughout history. But again, I think the problem that a lot of people have is, we constantly look and Joseph Campbell said this, I think, very well when he said that the problem is that we have a crisis of myth in our society where we’re constantly referencing the past and and trying to utilize those mythologies on our time today.
But we don’t we’re not marrying the two, you know, the way we should. And we need a kind of fresh language of symbolism that kind of richly interprets that. And you’ve conversationally decorated it so richly, you know, with these interesting characters that are the modern world, that are the modern landscape, the cells, the atoms, these different chemical personalities.
And seeing that kind of relationship of projection. Because again, I don’t I can’t speak on the science. I’m not a quantum physicist, you know, although I’m passionate about the subject matter, and the ideas of the observer and there’s many debates upon the concept, obviously, and different interpretations, and it can be taken very far and a little bit off ground.
But I think fundamentally, our interpretation of our reality is still a symbolic one. We we symbolically interpreted our experience, and that symbolic interpretation determines our emotional state or emotional standpoint, and that oftentimes determines what we’re able to access within ourselves. And if we’re constantly in a in a state of disconnection and dis relationship, we are going to behave in a state that’s inconsistent and unhealthy and reaffirms that.
But if we bring ourselves in the state of transcendence, the state of connection, where we go into nature, we go into our Gaia place, and we’re not just simply seeing see, seeing trees or things that can feed us, things that we can take from the way society tends to treat other human beings and relationships, even in of itself.
But we we see them as the rich possibilities, as other living entities that are made from the same atomic stuff that we all are. And I think when we return to the sacred, you know, and out of that sacred is where the greatest insight, the vision, the guidance may be that we need as a species for the next stage potentially lies.
So without giving the answer, I think you’ve, you’ve you’ve led a lot of people to a deeper answer for themselves if they’re willing to take the steps of this conversation. Stefan, this has been an exciting conversation. I can’t thank you enough for your time. I’ve been blown away by your your intelligence, your insight, your your background and how you weave science and in many ways, alchemy, mysticism together in such a kind of rich bit of subject matter.
If, if I may ask a closing question.
Of course. Yeah. Please.
In the idea of you mentioned that and this also was Young’s view, I believe, is that the unconscious and the archetypes themselves have a biological relationship. There is a biological component to ourselves in this portion of ourselves. Given your background, could you explain some insight into that, to to grounding the spirituality into the science? If I.
Will. Yes. Well I yeah that’s interesting question. First of all just backtracking a little bit. You mentioned we need a new myth. I think you’re right. We have that myth now. The myth is Gaia. That’s the myth we need. It’s a myth we’ve been waiting for. And it fits so beautifully because it’s Gaia is both science and depth psychology, spirituality.
So together we have to bring that. So it gives a great opportunity. And Lovelock was wonderful in realizing to some extent realizing that. But anyway, back to your last question. You see, the way I think of it is that what’s going on in my cells right now, all those complex relationships and interactions that are going on inside every single one of my cells, your cells, all of our cells, the cells of trees, the cells of plants and cells of back to you.
Just think of the whole biosphere right now with all of the the incredible biochemical reactions inside each cell that are required to make the biosphere, to make Gaia. What she is. Now, just think of all that each of those chemical reactions is following one of these archetypal patterns, those archetypal patterns that are happening right inside the metabolic life of every single living cell, every single one.
You could say they all have these archetypes, let’s say the seven alchemical operations going on all the time. So they are deeply, deeply part of nature. They’re not something separate from the physical world. It’s not happening in some separate spiritual world. There is no separate spiritual world. It’s all matter. It’s all happening in matter. Which of course, as you mentioned in quantum theory, it’s not it’s not what we think it is.
Matter itself is spirit or soul. They’re not separate. And I think the liberation comes when we realize there is no separation. And then what we have to do as a result of that realization is very simple. We consume less, we love more. We fall in love with Gaia. We fall in love with our partners, with our friends with, and we consume less.
It’s very simple. We support local economies. We become more localized, local food growing, local building, building with local materials, consuming less. We don’t travel, so it’s very simple. What we have to do, we need, we need I think who was it who said maybe it was on in? My friend. Simple in means rich in ends. You know, from deep ecology, we just live the simple lives.
Less consumption, more community, more friendship, more connection with nature, more happiness, more in a more inner world. I don’t like the word inner work, but more more distillation. Cultivate of of this understanding, you know, through, through meditation, through, through some kind of work with one’s, with one’s own psyche so that it can recombine with the psyche of Gaia and realize it was never separate to begin with.
That’s been that’s incredible. Even just the comments on that just opens up so many more points of conversation that I was just going to keep going. So it’s very it’s very difficult to let you go. Especially I remember recently, reading about the benefits of just eating your, your fruits and vegetables in-season in your area, and the health effect that actually has on our body versus us just, you know, having food out of season and how that actually throws our, our temperature and our balance out of sync and how this thing affects the risk.
So us leading, living in harmony with nature, with Gaia is fundamental to our survival. And at a physical level, at a planetary level, all the stuff that we’re pursuing socially right now in terms of longevity, I mean, it’s now a more of a drive socially than it’s ever been. And we’ve always kind of pursued immortality in one shape, form or another.
But now Jeff Bezos is, you know, booking company together to achieve immortality. You know, Elon Musk is investing money into ways for us to achieve the singularity. But, you know, we’re we’re it’s all good. It’s all important to, I think, take the science and the technology and recognize where it can lead us. We developed that. We went through that separation for a reason to to be able to break down and look at the dimensions and the parts of a thing.
But we need to be both separated and integrated in a whole. That’s a function inside of that. Stefan, before I, before I take another day of your conversation, I, thank you. It’s been such a rich and interesting discussion. I would hope that you would be willing to consider coming back on the show in the future, because I feel like we’ve just scratched the surface in terms of alchemy, debt, psychotherapy, psychology, and the science of really bringing these deep ideas in a grounded sense where they’re practical for people.
So would you would you visit me again in the future, please?
Oh, yeah. No, I I’ve really enjoyed talking our talk together. Oh, of course I will. Yeah.
Fantastic. Thank you so very much. And kind of in a closing, is there besides your work at the college and your books, is there any other way if somebody is interested in learning more, attending a lecture or anything like that, to the public, is there a way that they can do it, or is right now the books the only way?
No. Why not look on the Schumer College website? Okay. And we have short courses that you can do online. We’ve just done one, for example, on communicating or being with water bodies. Living waters, we’ve called it. Yeah. So we have people from all over the world spending time next to a river, a stream or the ocean.
And then we share our experiences and we realize that, these, these nature can speak to us, you know, it’s like it’s like, Shakespeare said, books in the running brooks, tongues in trees, sermons in stones. You know, he had that attitude. Shakespeare’s very interesting because he was he was at the cusp just before the scientific Revolution, you see.
So we have a do a lot of work like that at the college so people can look on on that. I would also recommend the my friend Helena Norberg Hodge. She has a wonderful organization called Economics of Happiness about localization, about what it can actually do to live more and lives locally, like you were mentioning, growing our own food and being embedded in our local community.
That’s a more practical thing we can spin off from what we’re talking about. There’s Helena Norberg, Hodge, economics of happiness. So you can look into that. And that’s those two things. If they look at humor, college economics and happiness, I think that’ll lead in all sorts of directions.
Possibility clearly. And it is in the conversation because now you already brought up some other subjects and I want to talk about the water molecule and doctor Motor’s work and how that relates. And Shakespeare, I have not not many know this, and there is some controversy or controversy around the subject, but was a student of the occult, and had.
Yes.
So it’s obvious. Obvious that he was that’s why I, I find Shakespeare more interesting. What’s his name? Yeah. Monkey motor or the water molecule thing. I know I’m more skeptical about that.
I’m sorry. May I ask why?
Yeah. I don’t think he was doing science properly. I think he was just really was projecting what he wanted to see into the molecules. I don’t think he did proper, there was no proper scientific procedure there, so I’m skeptical about that.
Oh, interesting. Interesting.
What.
What is what is your interpretation of the work, if I may ask?
Well, I think he saw what you wanted to see, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t easy. I’m very careful with these things. You have. To me, this is where a scientific attitude is very important. Otherwise, you can mislead yourself very easily. And I suspect, I mean, with all respect to him, you know, I mean, I think he was very genuine.
There’s no question he was genuine. He wasn’t wasn’t a fake or anything like that. Not at all very genuine. And he saw what he saw. It really saw what he saw. But he wasn’t critical enough, you see. And that was enough self-criticism. Well, I don’t like criticism. That’s too strong. But enough. I’m proud of you. Yeah, really.
Looking at stepping back, I had to do this with God. Alchemy, stepping back and really asking myself, is this genuine or am I making this up? You know, and in this kind of area that we’re dealing with, it’s very easy to make things up. He was working with Morton Wallach with snow flakes wasn’t he. So he could have been very scientific about it, but he wasn’t.
You could have developed a scientific procedure. We won’t go into how you could do it. But he he didn’t. And I think that’s the problem with his work. I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m just saying that I’m not convinced by his data, let’s put it like that.
But. But I think that’s also a very, very important reminder. Reminder. I find, and I’ve had this discussion on this now, obviously on the extreme esoteric component, when I see a lot of people getting caught up in esoteric and occult literature and material, and they have an experience where they say that this is a spiritual entity that is now inhabiting their life or their experience.
But the fact of the matter is, this could simply just be an archetype of the psyche, and the individual could be lacking some basic fundamental emotional, psychological needs. Another over inflating another archetype. And these things can possess as, as young. So one pointed out, and they can ruin our lives if we if we don’t, if we don’t kind of have healthy criticism, healthy skepticism, you know, inside of our own practice.
That’s the role of the rational mind, you know, I mean, just to finish, I mean, Jung, when he talks about individuation in one place as being a relationship between the unconscious and the conscious mind. So you have to give the unconscious its due, you know, it’s the craziness of the unconscious. I’m doing it very crazy, right. But.
And that’s when you can be taken over by an inner figure, let’s say. But you also need to have your conscious mind present and the individual and individual individuation happens, he says, when the two of them are in relationship, sometimes in conflict, but in relationship there’s always a relationship. It’s like banging a piece of metal and hammering it in an anvil.
You know? One side is the unconscious, the other side is the conscious mind, and the metal is your self, the individuation process. So we can’t throw away the rational mind. We need to have it there. But we can’t, we can’t also throw away the imagined imagination. The unconscious have to be in relationship.
Exactly, exactly. It’s the same argument where a lot of people go, the ego is quote unquote bad, and it should be abolished. And that’s a very unhealthy.
Mindset, very unhealthy, very unhealthy. That that is the. Yeah. Yeah. Because part of nature, we need it to survive.
It needs to facilitate between this vast ocean of the unconscious. Are we? We’d be in a catalytic state most of the time overwhelmed by these forces.
It is.
So important. So often this has been exciting and we just keep coming up with these subjects. So I’m going to say thank you so much for your time today.
A pleasure, a lovely, lovely to speak with you. Thank you very much.
I’ve always felt a little different, a little uneasy between regular, a bit of a dreamer lives comes a little non ordinary. So I’d say I think I’ve always just been this way. My mother said I was special. My father thought I should be fair. But I knew that witchcraft coursed through my veins the first time I tasted the lips of the goddess inside the rain.
Yes, I’m a witch, it’s true. And sure, we are the ones who believe in the beauty of nature, who believe in the things. Signs absent of art cannot explain. Who instead of religion, would have romance. And sure, you may think we have lost our way when in the world of predictable things, we have such unfamiliar things that we would like to say.
But maybe in a world so cold and alone, a little unfamiliar, is exactly what is needed to show us the way.
Stephan Harding, Ph.D., obtained his doctorate in behaviorial ecology from Oxford University and is one of the founders of Schumacher College, where he is Deep Ecology Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in holistic science.
A student of James Lovelock, he has taught Gaia theory, deep ecology, and holistic science all over the world. The author of several books, including Animate Earth, he lives in Dartington, Devon, England.
Sadly Stephan departed from this plane on 02 September 2024. his memory lives on in his body of work
“Gaia is both ruthless and kind. She rewards those who live in harmony and disciplines those who violate her laws.”
“To heal ourselves, we must heal Gaia. The Earth’s wellbeing and our own psychological health are deeply intertwined.”
“Our deepest insights, our profound realizations, are not ours alone; they are gifts from nature, calling us to reconnect.”
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