46: Rory Spowers on his book ‘Thinking Like A Mountain: Seeking the Source Code for a Regenerative Culture’

Rory Spowers – Email
Thinking Like A Mountain – GoFundMe

Samakanda
Tawai
Tyringham Initiative
The Re-Generation
Aldo Leopold
Rachel Carson
Chaos Theory
Hegel’s Dialectics
The Collapse of Complex Societies
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Ken Wilber
Idealogical Subversion
Scientism
Darwinism
Imperialism
Edward Bernays
MINDSPACE – UK gov paper
Project Mockingbird
H.L. Mencken
Rising Tides – Rory Spowers
Louis Pasteur
Reiner Fuellmich
Germ & terrain theory
James Lovelock
Flexner Report
Aldous Huxley
1984 – George Orwell
Marshall McLuhan
Daniel Pinchbeck – TEDx
Chris Smaje –  A Small Farm Future
Akashic Records
Rupert Sheldrake
Stan Grof
Ken Wilber – No Boundary
Eckhart Tolle
Paul Levy – Wetiko
Aldous Huxley 1958 interview

Giancarlo: [00:00:00] Hello. Hi, welcome to this new episode of the Mango TV podcast. Today we have my dear friend Rory Spowers. Rory Spowers is a writer, researcher, and broadcaster focused on ecological and consciousness issues. His book includes Rising Tides, Critical Acclaimed History of Ecological Thought, and A Year in Green Tea and Turk Turks, the Story of Samarkanda, an ecological sanctuary founded in Sri Lanka in 2004.

In 2012, [00:01:00] Rory relocated to Ibiza in Spain to work with ex BBC presenter Bruce Perry on the feature length documentary film Tawaii, which you can find on Mango TV, by the way, exploring humanity’s conceptual separation from nature. He’s currently the creative director of the Tearingham Initiative, a world class think tank for new paradigm thinking.

Which he co founded in 2015 and in 2018 he launched The Regeneration, a new media platform for regenerative systems change solutions. Rory is currently working on his next book, Thinking Like a Mountain, seeking the source code for a regenerative culture. Welcome Rory. Thank you Giancarlo. So Rory is a dear friend of mine, one of my teachers, he taught me so much about, about consciousness, about, you know, this idea that psychedelic really makes consciousness primary.

You know, it’s It’s not an epiphenomenon from the brain. It’s a primordial source that regulates everything. Um, so today we’re gonna try [00:02:00] something different on this podcast. We usually go through the biography of the speakers and, you know, we’re usually interested in the cathartic moment for transformation and regeneration.

Um, you know, we’re interested in, uh, in how we’re gonna get to mass awakening. Mango TV has done. This documentary on the Mayan calendar, we talk about the Hopi prophecy, the Kala Yuga, this moment in time as a moment of regeneration. But what we never really did is like, okay, let’s assume that it’s really happening.

Let’s assume that there is a mass awakening, that there is a critical mass of consciousness expansion. But then how would this new world look like? You know, when, when, when you say, you know, the, the new paradigm thinking. Um, Rory is really a system theorist, so, um, today we’re gonna basically, he’s gonna explain this, we’re gonna go through the chapters of his new book, Thinking Like a Mountain, and uh, and we’re [00:03:00] gonna try to make some sense of this, of this new paradigm, how did we got here, what is the problems, and what are the solutions.

So let’s get cracking. Thank you, Giancarlo. 

Rory: So, well, the title Thinking Like a Mountain. Was, uh, a phrase coined by a man called Aldo Leopold, who was a conservationist and published a book called A Sand County Almanac, I think in 1946, but in the late 1940s, and he’s often credited as being the forefather or one of the forefathers of the American environmental movement.

So this is before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and, uh, he. He famously wrote this book and this phrase thinking like a mountain was really has become a kind of a sort of almost a sort of ecological term to denote or point towards this [00:04:00] more systemic way of looking at the world that once you study something in isolation from its context.

or divorce it from its context, it can take on very different qualities and characteristics. And I suppose this is well represented in this reductionist materialist scientific paradigm, which has become the sort of the mainstream scientific view over the last 150 plus years. And what general systems theory or all these other terms that relate to it, like chaos and complexity theory, What they’re all pointing to, I believe is this much more ecological way of looking at the world and that the way we understand how systems operate is by looking more at the interconnections and flows and reciprocities that occur between different elements within the system.

So once we divorce a living organism from its context and [00:05:00] start to study it in isolation, we can end up with some very different conclusions and assumptions. Which, if we reframe that in, embedded into the interconnections of the ecosystem, for example, we start to see very, very different things. So, I think one of the great sort of insight, or one of the extraordinary things that’s happened in the last few years, is the sort of, this notion of a consensus reality that most of us subscribe to, at least to some degree, pre 2020, has been through a massive upheaval.

And we can no longer make sense of the world looking through this kind of sort of rather unipolar, one pole, one, one sort of lens, people talk a lot about a multipolar world at the moment. But what I’m suggesting in the book is that we need to develop a kind of multipolar lens to be able to understand the complexities and nuances of what is going on.[00:06:00] 

And this phrase cognitive dissonance that’s been really. Trotted out a lot in the last few years. I think what’s behind a lot of that is we’re looking at the same phenomena through different lenses Ignoring the fact that they are different lenses And so you can look at the same thing through two different lenses come to very different conclusions But you’re looking at the same phenomena so what the book is trying to do is in a very accessible way is map out the way that we can start to deconstruct The, the complexities of what’s going on around us through developing a more systemic way of looking at things.

Um, 

Giancarlo: I hope that makes some sense. That’s a great synopsis. That’s a great summary. But let’s try to get into a little bit into the weeds of it, right? So I think you structure it in three chapters. So, uh, remind me the titles? 

Rory: Well, at the moment, uh, people talk a lot about this, what’s called the Hegelian dialectic [00:07:00] of problem reaction solution.

Uh, so I’ve actually kind of structured the book around that in the sense that the first part is going to try and give some context to, uh, this meta crisis that’s unfolding. Then, the second or middle part of the book is really to try and deconstruct what I call a sort of ideological snowball that has been gathering momentum arguably over thousands of years, but, uh, particularly in the last sort of 200 years, particularly, say, since the mid 19th century.

Uh, with the work of Charles Darwin, kicking off a sort of new understanding around evolution. Um, but also then, you know, the whole sort of reductionist paradigm that has unfolded ever since. 

Giancarlo: And three? 

Rory: And then three is looking at the solutions. 

Giancarlo: And So, so, so, sorry to be so I would like to try to be a little bit, um Organize for the, for the audience to follow because you’re going to go in some quite deep [00:08:00] and complicated topic.

So it’s one is the context, two is the cause and three is the solution. Exactly. Okay. Let’s take 15 minutes each. Look at the watch. Yes. Yeah. No, I’m with you. And, and, and let’s start with the context. 

Rory: Exactly. So we’ll. Somebody said to me not so long ago, text without context is pretext. So, if we look at it like that, if you think how you can remove some language from its embedded context and then give it a completely different, uh, slant in the same way if we remove, uh, an organism from the ecosystem, I think you can sort of see, see where that will go.

Right. So. It, the book opens really with a sort of an overview of what people are calling the meta crisis. We look at things like the role of exponential technologies, this confluence of AI with nanotechnology and biotechnology, um, the [00:09:00] existential risks associated with all of that, but also, uh, this notion of cognitive dissonance and the sense that.

The modern media landscape has become a very, very complicated space. 

Giancarlo: But maybe let’s, let’s, because you mentioned the acceleration of technology and the integration with, you know, neurobiology and AI, but so why is that worrisome? 

Rory: Well, I think fundamentally if we have a culture that is constructed on principles which could be seen as psychopathic or at least sociopathic or, you know, definitely out of step with the parameters of the biosphere or the way ecology works.

Giancarlo: Like a limited growth system in a limited planet. 

Rory: Exactly. So it also incentivized by these dynamics whereby [00:10:00] It’s all about, supposedly, survival of the fittest and, uh, competitive, uh, dynamics. And maximizing Sheralda’s values. Exactly. So, and again, that’s informed, I believe, by a whole sort of value system and a belief system.

And if we sort of pull back even further from that, ultimately, I’d say it is this sort of metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual So, if you’re, if you look at any phenomenon from the position that you believe consciousness is something peculiar to your, the interior of your skull, then you’ll make certain, come to certain conclusions.

If you look at the same phenomena with a deeply intuitive acknowledgement that consciousness is something that you are within, then you can end up with some very different conclusions. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Rory: And so If we have AI that is developed and programmed by a culture that is incentivized by [00:11:00] psychopathic values, then inevitably we will create an AI that is the product or manifestation of this sort of psychopathic system.

So, if we were to actually sort our shit out, as it were, and then develop an AI, I’m not saying that AI is inherently bad, but It’s inevitable at the moment, I would say, that the AI is being developed by people who really shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, and they know that, and lots of them have called for a stop to it, but the Pandora’s box is open, I think, and it’s very, 

Giancarlo: very worrisome.

Yeah, it’s like magnified lenses. But so, let’s, we’re gonna go into why we got here in the second chapter, right? Yes. So, just to finish on the context, one, it’s The, the situation with AI and technology, which might amplify a corrupt value system. Two, you were saying the cognitive dissonance. [00:12:00] So can you talk a little bit about it?

What does it mean? 

Rory: Well, I think the, what is, what’s, what’s being pointed to there is people failing to make sense of what’s going on. So this, I don’t like this very sense making very much, but I think making sense of sense making is absolutely critical. And. If we can’t, if we can’t get to a reasonably informed position about the trajectory we are on, then we can’t make informed decisions about the trajectory we want to, to, to get onto.

So, we can’t do anything differently until we start to think different. And I think what I’ve, yeah, and I’ve been involved as we all have, I think in probably some deep, quite passionate discussions about what’s going on in the world over the last few years. And I’ve often come out of those discussions to see that actually people who might appear to be at loggerheads with [00:13:00] each other are just looking at the same thing, coming to perfectly valid conclusions, but they’re just looking at these phenomena through different lenses, whether that’s an esoteric sort of a lens or a deeply philosophical lens or a scientific lens that is couched in this mainstream materialistic reductionist view of the world.

So, um, I don’t know. The irony is that, as Niels Bohr, the physicist, I think, said, the opposite of one great truth is often another great truth. And with the sort of algorithmic enhancement of the sort of media landscape, we’ve got into this atomized place where Nobody is able to sort of work, you know, people find it very, very hard to see, to recognize what’s going on.

What’s true? 

Giancarlo: What’s 

Rory: true? Well, and even that gets sort of quite muddy, doesn’t it? I think we can sort of get bogged down in the granular detail about things, but what I’m really interested in the book is [00:14:00] not to get stuck into all of that, but more to paint a kind of picture of the trajectory that we’re on.

Because I think we can, yes, we can get bogged down in, in, in the nitty gritty, but I think we can. Probably we’ll start to see that the, regardless of what we think is causing it or what’s behind it or what is driving it, that there is a trajectory that we’re on that is a sort of confluence of these exponential technologies and an economic and political paradigm that is redundant or obsolete or not fit for purpose, but is now being sort of optimized into you.

This sort of dystopic, digital sort of dic dictatorship, a sort of technocratic tyranny, and there’s a sort of inexorable sort of momentum within those systems. So techno 

Giancarlo: tyranny, because of the, of the censorship between, because it’s not a, there’s not a real true [00:15:00] access to media. 

Rory: Yes. And so we, because the digital landscape works in ones and zeros and in a binary polarized kind of way.

And yes, some things are binary, but most things aren’t. And well, lots of things aren’t and lots of things that can’t be understood in a binary way are being reduced. into a binary dialectic. And that’s 

Giancarlo: also because the binary approach to sensemaking, polarizing people, attract eyeballs. Exactly. And advertisers.

Exactly. 

Rory: And obviously, historically, it’s been a very effective way at managing and controlling populations. And even the sort of infiltration say, but 

Giancarlo: why, why the polarization 

Rory: divide, divide and rule the 

Giancarlo: conqueror. 

Rory: Yeah. So it’s, [00:16:00] and even what there’s a lot of accounts now of how the sort of alternative media landscape gets disrupted by the infiltration of, uh, of, of people or forces that are clearly they’re designed.

to keep people stuck in these little kind of whirlpools arguing with each other, rather than actually making any progress towards, you know, a progressive solution. So, I think there’s a, you know, I think what has to be recognized is there is a, there’s an inherent energy and momentum within the ideologies, politically and philosophically, but there’s also an inherent energy in the technology itself.

Uh, which is moving so fast and is far outstripping our ability to keep up with it in the kind of evolutionary, uh, uh, you know, political sort of social sense. And that is, is essentially sort of taking us to a potentially very dangerous place. I mean, one of the [00:17:00] great books about sort of the collapse of, of, of what’s called the collapse of complex societies, I think, by Professor Joseph Tainter, mid 1970s, and he really did a huge study.

It influenced Jared Diamond’s book about collapse, uh, that came a bit later. And he comes to this conclusion towards the end of the book, having studied everybody from the Sumerians, to the Mayans, to the Romans, to British colonialism, that the collapse of these complex societies is always preceded by an accelerated cultural homogenization in conjunction with rapid polarization.

And I think we see that going on at the moment. And, and the technologies and the way that they’re being. Applied are just enhancing and accentuating that process. 

Giancarlo: Yeah. So just to stay on our schedule, um, AI and, [00:18:00] and, and, and, um, and, and biology, cognitive dissonance, then what are the other problems in terms of the context?

The loss of biodiversity is a big one. 

Rory: Well, I think those, uh, are sort of manifest, sort of end of pipe manifestations of this sort of, you know, ideological sort of corruption, which I suppose gets deconstructed in the, in the second part. So the first part, which is, you know, which probably be shorter than the following two parts is really just trying to kind of, Paint a picture to recognize the, the, the, the, the factors behind what people call that, that this meta crisis.

Uh, and try and explain some of these terms that have, have, have been sort of trotted out a, a great deal, like cognitive dissonance and really just sort of tee up some kind of a, a sort of critical thinking kind of lens. Three weeks to then approach it, the, the, the, the, the next stage of, of the book where we were really at the sort of [00:19:00] ideologies that have of, of, have basically come, you know, come together to, to, to bring us to where 

Giancarlo: we are now.

Yes. But, so just to be more specific about the meta crisis, which, what are the different point of the meta crisis? Well, you mentioned technology, you mentioned cognitive dissonance. Then what else? 

Rory: Well, I suppose, I mean, my. My professional interest for 25 years has really been around the ecological crisis.

And that in turn, through the sort of research and writing books and campaigning and the rest of it, uh, ultimately took me upstream to the point of, well, why is there an ecological crisis in the first place? In a way, that takes you to the sort of economic system, but then you have to sort of peel that back even further, and I think it then takes you to, to this much more kind of, uh, profound sort of metaphysical question.

And so the crisis now is not just an ecological [00:20:00] crisis, it’s a technological crisis, it’s a, it’s a spiritual crisis, it’s, it’s an everything crisis, because the, the dynamics that underpin all of those systems are essentially linear. And not cyclical and nothing in nature, nature is linear. And so it’s, so it’s trying to sort of pull the veil off all of those things, whether, you know, it’s a linear extractive economy or the, the limitations of reductionist science in, in full recognition that all of these things have given us tremendous insights.

And so it’s important we don’t throw everything out. And I think this gets particularly kind of personal when we look at something like. Uh, the modern medical science, uh, uh, area where of course, uh, people are saved every second of every day by antibiotics and the intervention, miraculous intervention of modern medicine.[00:21:00] 

But I think it’s also important to recognize that when we’re dealing with chronic systemic issues, be it cancer. or autoimmune diseases or what, then we’re woefully ill equipped through the pharmaceutical armory to deal with those things. And so we need to kind of have a kind of much more of a, I think, a wider understanding of what’s appropriate in what context.

Giancarlo: Okay. Forgive me, Rory, because, you know, our listener needs to be a little bit more, um, You know, educated on, on. And I know, I know the example of the, of the, um, of the health industry and the reductionist approach. And that is a very good, um, explanation of why we got in the pickle we are today. But just to stay a little bit longer on why do we think we have a problem?

Because, you know, when you hear Steven Pinker or there’s, or you hear, Um, Matt, what’s the name of the [00:22:00] singularity guy? They seem to believe that we’ve never been better, right? So, I agree with you that there is, you know, the fabric of society is crumbling. You know, I’ve been 25 years in New York. And, and, you know, when you see these riots in the street, the black live matter and, and, and Oregon and New York, and to be honest with you, I wasn’t that surprised because I see to what extent the inequality that this system has brought has really put so much pressure on people that need to work three jobs to make and meet and, and, and the mortgage and the debt and, you know, in the, in the, In the fifties in America, people had, you know, there was a big middle class, people could have one job in the family, the wife was at home, there was a dignity, there was time for the barbecue with the neighbors.

And then now, you know, we, we, the inequality really has grown so much. You know, just spend another two [00:23:00] minutes if you can on, on, on, on part one, which is why do we believe there is a problem because of loss of biodiversity, because inequality, because people are suffering, because people are unhappy, because we’re losing the top soil, because we believe that maybe we have, someone said, 60 harvest left.

Jack Bush says that we have 60 harvest left before the depletion of the top soil is irreversible. Just spend a couple of minutes why, why, you know, like the, how do you, how do you say, the 10, 000 miles view on this planet? Why this planet is in crisis? 

Rory: Well, I suppose all of the things you just mentioned, the mental health epidemic, The mental health.

I’d say is a particularly pertinent one. Suicide, 

Giancarlo: teenager suicide. 

Rory: I mean, these are just sort of horrifying statistics, and these are all just symptoms of a deeply, uh, uh, sick society. I’d say Abhijay Krishnamurti always said to be well adjusted to a sick [00:24:00] society is no indicator of health. And so, things are, I, look, the technologists will always believe in the positive benefits of technology.

And I think that one of the, there are interesting discussions to be had around that which I want to delve into in the book too, that technology isn’t fundamentally neutral. And I think, you know, we’re often sort of told, or we often lap that up, of course, you know, technology is neutral, it just depends how you use it, but no, it’s not, you know, uh, uh, uh, uh, Daniel Schwartzberger refers to Ken Wilber’s book, uh, Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, where he does a bit of a deep dive into Into this area and highlights the fact that the advent of the plow changed our sort of ontology our perception of, of who we were in relation to the universe.

So the, the cow that was previously, uh, worshipped within an animistic kind [00:25:00] of relationship. Once it was tethered and, uh, whipped to pull, and yoked to pull a plough up and down the field through the domestication of plants and animals and the advent of the agricultural revolution, then also our worldview, our sort of ontology had to shift to, uh, accept that.

So the, the animistic connection with that animal was lost. was lost. And I think that’s a really interesting example. So the notion that all of these technologies are fundamentally neutral, I think, is very, very disputable. There are, there are plenty of, there’s a lot to unpack there. And I think it’s really hard at times.

Yeah, we’re never gonna have a utopia. We’re never gonna have, not, yeah, that, we live in a sort of dualistic universe. But at the moment, it’s hard to see how the confluence of these factors is ever going to take us to anything other than a rather dark place, because [00:26:00] it’s not, and I think there’s also an awful lot of people who are deeply immersed at the top of this kind of hierarchy, who really genuinely believe in a sort of post biological future, they genuinely don’t think that biology is necessary, and I think they also believe that, uh, immortality’s in their grasp.

You read some of these claims coming out now that people think that really within a decade or so, we’re gonna, that the people at the top of this pile will have access to technologies, which really does sort of lead to massive life extension. 

Giancarlo: And why is that? Why is that a problem, you think? 

Rory: Well, I, again, I don’t think it’s not inherently a problem in itself, but the chances are Us seeing those technologies be democratized or be delivered to the people en masse is hard to envisage.

This is going to stay rarefied in elitist kind of circles. So more and more, more and more dis equality [00:27:00] and access to Exactly. So, I mean, what, where this logically goes is, you know, is the absence of a middle class entirely and a sort of What people call the sort of techno overlord elite at the top of the pyramid and then it’s almost like a sort of neo serfdom where the rest of the populations are really kind of so controlled and so enslaved through this combination of programmable money central bank digital currency social credit digital ID Vaccination schedules, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So, and again, I think, you know, this is one thing I want to sort of, uh, pick it to go into in the book, is that there is a, as a kid, I remember thinking that it was only logical that ultimately we would progress towards kind of a one world system. It seemed just like the inexorable, inevitable, you know, progression.

What do you mean one word, like no frontier? So yes, so exactly that the notion that sort of, so there’s this big attack on, on [00:28:00] sovereignty at the moment, not just sort of our own individual sovereignty, but sort of national sovereignty. And I think to truly try and understand some of the sort of cultural drivers at the moment, we have to look at this notion of what’s called ideological subversion.

And there are all sorts of strange things going on. Which can be traced back decades and have been sort of exposed through all sorts of, uh, researchers and investigative journalists and the rest of it. How do you call it? Ideological? Ideological subversion. And it was a term that really kind of crept in through the KGB defectors like Yuri Bezmenov in the 60s, 70s.

And The ultimate roots of this supposedly go back to Lenin and Lenin’s notions of how communism could challenge the West and take over the world, that it couldn’t do it militarily, so it had to do it by infiltrating and subverting the ideological [00:29:00] pillars of its opponents. 

Giancarlo: But so this is a welcome movement, ideological subversion movement?

Well, no, 

Rory: not at all because, uh, it’s, uh, it is often compressed into, say, a 20 year period. And that’s how Besmenov represented it and then others since have validated this, you know, other KGB defectors, but other, you know, there’s a book in the 80s, uh, that was really sort of deconstructing the whole sort of EU project.

And, and if you condense it into a, say, a 20 year period, the first 15 years is a demoralization process. So it’s trying to demoralize. Uh, a society through the infiltration of the sort of key pillars of the society and, and creating sort of disruptive kind of influence. This is then followed by a sort of three year destabilization period, which you could see 20, the last three years as being that sort of destabilization.

Followed [00:30:00] by a year or two of sort of chaos, really, where things really start to fall apart, with a view to then this final fourth phase, where the solutions are presented. And by that stage, the society is so torn apart and so atomized and so polarized, and things are in such a mess that the majority of people will turn to anything that gives them some sort of new level of structure and order.

And so that’s That’s the kind of four stage process that this nation, uh, is supposed 

Giancarlo: to deliver. So this is, this is the, um, the technocratic overlord agenda, if you want. 

Rory: Well, I suppose that’s, uh, an aspect of it. And again, I think this is what gets really complicated because we’re so educated into the notion of the nation state and the sort of battles of the superpowers that our [00:31:00] generation have sort of grown up in.

But what I’ve, you know, what I’ve begun to understand over the last three years, and of course, this is way more complicated and complex than we ever imagined, and that there’s been very active collaboration in these sort of deep state sort of zones between say, America and China that started with Kissinger meeting with Mao in the early 70s and then was perpetuated by Brzezinski in the 70s who laid the foundations for some of these sort of technology transfers and, and the rest of it, and it was Kissinger’s idea to really try and, uh, separate China and Russia, uh, put America sort of into a sort of a new position between these other superpowers.

So, Brzezinski’s stated, openly stated aim was to drive everything towards the, the imposition of one, uh, global technocratic state. 

Giancarlo: Okay. 

Rory: So, 

Giancarlo: um, [00:32:00] I think we’re like already moved in part, in part two, which is the cause. So just to summarize part one, the context, we have a dire situation according to Rory because there’s a mental health epidemic, there is a growing inequality.

There is a loss of biodiversity. There is an ecological problem that it’s under everybody’s eyes. There is, um, you know, really a generation of young kids that are a little bit disenfranchised by the current system. There’s people we don’t know what to trust now from the media, from the politician. So we are in a dire situation.

So you already started to try to explain Why did we get here? You said that’s a process that started maybe 200 years ago So let’s go into the more into the how did we get here part, which is part two. 

Rory: Great Yes And I think we can go back people go back tens of thousands of years to the agricultural [00:33:00] revolution or what we are transitioned from nomadic hunter gatherers as you well know through the work we do with Bruce, but That’s a massive arc to undertake.

So I’ve, I, I planned to start around sort of 18, 52 years after the publication of Darwin’s Origin, the Species. And I think Darwin’s work is a fantastic example of how science can get, uh, co-opted or diluted or, uh, uh, by a, a, a political and economic agenda. If you run Darwin’s collected works through a word search, you’ll find references to cooperation and collaboration in nature more than references to competition.

And, but of course, the competitive element of Darwinian thinking was very handy for the sort of colonialist, imperialist, expansionist economics of the mid 19th century, which was facilitated by the Industrial Revolution. So [00:34:00] suddenly, The advent of fossil fuels massively expanded our reach, population started going crazy.

And we had an economic system that was sort of embedded in the notion of infinite resource abundance, masses of labor. And it obviously served a lot of people very, very well. And I suppose you could arguably say that sort of peaked in the 50s with the sort of age of affluence in the U. S. particularly and the West.

And, but, so, This term scientism, uh, which has been sort of popularized in the last few years, I think is a very handy word to make this distinction between genuine science and the science that’s being co opted by a political agenda. So, we start by looking at Darwinism, imperialism, and the, the foundations of the, of scientism.

And which had really sort of been [00:35:00] evolving for, for hundreds of years already, particularly since the enlightenment. But essentially this This reductionist way of looking at the world, i. e. that the way to understand how things work is to take them apart to their smallest possible components. Now of course this gives us incredible insights and I’m not disputing that for one second.

But anything that doesn’t fit within that lens or cannot be quantified empirically through that lens is considered to be worthless. It’s, so all phenomena, whether it’s the sense of love and compassion that people feel between each other or a whole host of anomalous or psychic phenomena, that, that this, this paradigm just simply won’t take a look at, and it’s now got to a very dangerous place because this sort of scientific priesthood, and again we’ll sort of then look at that, [00:36:00] Edward Bernays, he’s, he’s, he’s Who is, I think, Freud’s nephew, was he, and he was credited with sort of kick starting the PR industry, or public relations industry, so, which was essentially, so, basically turning the word propaganda into something that was sort of much more palatable.

And then the, the, the rise of sort of all of these sort of behavioral sort of sciences and our understanding of human psychology. So I was here, I think I was listening to somebody yesterday, how so called sort of subliminal advertising was meant to have been made illegal back in, I can’t remember, it was in the 80s or something like that.

But there’s no doubt that subliminal Advertising subliminal sort of social engineering stuff is very much at work, and this is all very much in the public domain. I mean, you only have to look at some of these nudge units in the UK, and it’s really, I mean, the UK published, the UK government published a paper in 2012, I think, called Mindspace, which you can [00:37:00] go and read online, where they openly brag about the ability to affect and impact the opinions, uh, views of entire populations without people realizing it’s happening.

Giancarlo: Yeah, with the algorithm of social media and gently recognizing the people that Are at risk of extreme views, target them and slowly feed them material that would increase and exacerbate their views. 

Rory: Exactly. So I, uh, I think when having sort of charted that, that, that a bit of that landscape around the sort of scientism paradigm, I will say, and the advent of the PR industry, and then that the conjunction of that with sort of mass media and, uh, say something like project mockingbird, which was this CIA program.

I think it started in the late forties or certainly in the fifties and basically became the subject, I think, of congressional hearings in the early seventies where Do you want to 

Giancarlo: mention what it [00:38:00] was, the most 

Rory: Well, it was, they, they basically admitted it, it, it, at the U. S. Senate, senior, I think, I can’t remember if it was Allen Dulles then or whatever it was called, Cosby, but, but he had to admit to the U.

1. Senate, yes, we’ve got something like five to eight hundred senior CIA operatives in senior positions within the U. S. media. And that the stated aim of Project Mockingbird was that when, by the, when every American is so confused, totally confused about what’s going on, our mission will be complete. Now you could sort of expand that to incorporate the entire globe now.

So I think part of the stagnation and inertia that’s going on at the moment is we’re finding it very difficult to work out what the way forward is because we don’t really know where we are. And we’re in this sort of untethered. space where everything has been very disrupted and destabilized over the last few years.

And we could, you know, it doesn’t matter whether that’s been [00:39:00] intentional or, or not. But people are lost. People are, you know, in a difficult place trying to work out what’s going on and trying to work out what the best thing to do is. And within that, you weaponization of the ecological crisis, which again is creating tremendous dissonance and polarization.

So, lots of commentators or investigative journalist researchers who I might agree with on a whole raft of things, I don’t agree with necessarily on other things. I can, I totally accept that the, that the climate change issue has been massively weaponized and there’s all sorts of evidence to support that, that that’s just ramping up.

But I think the notion that Yeah. Dismissing the ecological crisis in its entirety is, is woefully naive. We just have to look at what’s going on in the world’s oceans, which are just so acidified by the excess [00:40:00] carbon. And it is a pollution issue. It is. We are the only species to have created waste because of our linear systems.

And so climate change is, is an extension of that. Now, we could argue until the end of time about how much of that is anthropogenic, how much of that is due to humans fossil fuel use. But it’s never going to take us very far because we’ll never get to the hub of that. And yes, I can accept that there is evidence that other planets in the solar system are also heating at the same time, that there are massive Cosmological, geophysical factors here, massive sort of natural variations within the, within, uh, you know, changes the constants of the universe.

But the notion that we can take what nature has spent a billion years secreting into the Earth’s crust and in one year stick all of that up in the sky and not expect there to be some repercussions [00:41:00] seems really, really naive. Now, except that CO2 is necessary for photosynthesis, but the fundamental fact is We’re not supposed to be taking it out of the ground at this kind of speed and sticking it up in the atmosphere, because natural geophysical timescales do not work on those principles.

So we’ve, our amplified existence and our amplified, you know, and fossil fuels have allowed us to have this amplified existence. 

Giancarlo: But so, okay. It seems to me that, um, you know, the, the heart of What you think is the problem, the cause to this current state of affair is this, um, approach that we have to have linear solution to complex problem.

So I interrupted earlier when you were talking about the health system, but I, you know, maybe we can go back there and use [00:42:00] the way we address, uh, cancer and autoimmune disease, for example, to explain our. Audience, what does it mean, linear solution? Why, why is not really working out and, you know, maybe give some, some example.

Rory: Yeah. So I think that the original quote is something like for every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. And so I think that, and that really goes, I think to the nub of it. And so funny enough, when I read my second book, rising tides. This was published in 2002 and it was a history of ecological thought and this, how, how do we manage to separate ourselves from the natural world, at least conceptually, you know, ultimately we, how can we be set, but we have conceptually separated ourselves.

And my ex wife was from Barbados. We were living in Barbados, waiting the [00:43:00] birth of our second son, Tan. And I started working with, uh, a UK scientist, uh, called Dr. Colin Hudson, who was a soil physicist. He’d car Barbados in the late forties and stayed ever since. And he was a remarkable man. And he had copies of the Ecologist Magazine going back to issue one, which I think was 1970 or something.

And I sat down and I read every issue of the ecologist from 1970 to 2001 or something, and he wanted to gimme a tee-shirt, said I’ve read every issue of the ecologist and survived. And one of the great revelations of that research, for me, was understanding the origins of the pharmaceutical industry and the limitations of it and the way that it all arisen.

And I’d never really appreciated, until then, that the pharmaceutical industry was a product of the oil industry, of the hydrocarbon industry. So, uh, uh, that a very [00:44:00] clever Uh, Rockefeller, who started, uh, Eastern Oil, later the All Standard Oil, and was he John D. Rockefeller? Anyway, he was obviously a very, very astute guy, because in conjunction with this explosion of the, of, of, of the petroleum industry, or petrochemical industry, and the advent of creating synthetic drugs, at the same time, you had Louis Pasteur developing germ theory.

Which, of course, he retracted on his deathbed, but nobody really knows that. And, and then we could argue till the end of time again about, you know, germ theory versus terrain theory, and I don’t think it’s altogether one or other. There’s clearly, germ theory is valid in some cases, but we have applied it to a whole raft of pathogens and supposed transmission, which between people doesn’t really seem to be validated by the science.

[00:45:00] And I find it fascinating now that even quite mainstream virologists who spent their entire lives, uh, rising to the top of their profession, some of them are really starting to question the existence of viruses altogether, or at least the notion that lots of things that have been ascribed to viruses really ought to be scrutinized.

And we now know that things like asymptomatic transmission were a complete, uh, fabrication. And I was just listening last night to, to Dr. Ryder Feulmich, the, the, the German lawyer who’s really been sort of unpacking all of this, and he famously took Deutsche Bank and VW to task. And he was pointing out that in September 2020, the CDC actually put out a paper underneath the radar just when nobody was really paying any attention.

Admitting that the PCR test can never be used in asymptomatic cases. And effectively discrediting the whole notion of asymptomatic transmission upon which the [00:46:00] entire global lockdown policy had been based. So essentially we, there’s a fantastic example of how flawed science has been used to support a political agenda.

Um, and very, very sort of tactical, clever releases of information at the right time. And this is how this game is played. It’s really, really very fascinating. 

Giancarlo: Okay, um, explain a little bit what is the Terrain Theory versus the German Theory. 

Rory: Okay, so the, so German Theory is essentially that the disease is carried by pathogenic vectors, whether it’s a virus, a bacteria, or a parasite, essentially.

And Terrain Theory ultimately turns out on its head that actually what dictates what happens when that pathogen interacts with an organism is dependent upon the [00:47:00] terrain in which that pathogen lands. The body, you mean? Yeah, exactly. So in the case of the human body, if, if the body is massively compromised, the immune system is massively compromised, the pathogen will take hold.

And this, why is it that people cohabiting, one person goes down with something the other person doesn’t? And so what the terrain theory is suggesting is that ultimately it’s all about the, the, the state of health of the organism. So this, this ecological term homeostasis, which is the perfect balanced conditions that life requires to, to thrive.

And that’s a fundamental part of Jim Lovelock’s, uh, Gaia thesis. So all of these self regulating mechanisms within the biosphere that have created a stable, Atmosphere and the rest of it for us to, to, to, to thrive in if those get disrupted by, [00:48:00] uh, uh, all sorts of, by sort of destabilizing factors that then things go right.

Similarly, there are lots of natural past now and a lot of science to support it, that if the acid alkaline balance of the body is optimized, I think it’s 7. 4 to 7. 6, then. This homeostasis is there, and the pathogens cannot take hold. And this is, but most of us live in a deeply acidified environment. Very acidic diet is even evidence that sort of negative toxic thoughts, uh, are acidifying.

All of the pollutants, most intoxicants. I don’t think, I think it’s pretty impossible. to have a sort of perfect acid alkaline balance and still have alcohol in your diet, for instance. So, yeah, I don’t think it really, those things can really coexist. So, uh, I think they, I, but at the [00:49:00] same time, when people talk about the fact that no viruses get isolated and purified, uh, to, as, so you can’t actually, nobody can actually produce any evidence of KSARS CoV 2.

What they can produce is a sort of genomic sequence, which is really a sort of a, a pattern which they, but there’s no, there’s no thing there that is it, where something like, uh, I think, you know, the herpes simplex virus, I think has purified. And it’s quite clear that there is a, a, the germ theory does work to my, you know, seems to work.

And maybe in most cases, it’s a bit of both and again, it’s not this sort of black and white thing, but the notion that it’s all about the germ was all, was very useful to support the pharmaceutical industry’s, [00:50:00] uh, rollout. And so you can then, lots of people, lots of researchers have deconstructed this. So over the last 150 years or so, this kind of Rockefeller medicine paradigm has gradually.

Diminished or outlawed all naturopathic medicine. So there was the Flexner Report, I think, that was published with the Rockefellers and Carnegies in, I think, 1913, that effectively kind of institutionalized this particular medical paradigm. You can then see how this then infiltrated all of the medical schools, uh, across the U.

1. and then sort of around the wider world. And so you’ve got this sort of completely kind of interlocked industry that is determining what is taught in medical school, is supported by a raft of pharmaceutical drugs, and is also at the same time doing everything possible to diminish or subvert [00:51:00] or, uh, criticize healing modalities that have been around for millennia, and were obviously efficacious.

Now, I, I recognize, I, I’ve got friends who’s, who’s Kids with ADHD have been recorrected by Ritalin. I’ve got a dear friend with Parkinson’s who’s leading a normal life now because of the drugs and the rest of it. I completely, I’m not saying that all of this is bad, but what I am saying is that when it comes to a lot of, of chronic issues that we’re currently dealing with, the cancer epidemic, mental health issues, autoimmune issues, uh, generally, What all the pharmaceuticals are doing is dealing with the symptoms rather than the causes.

And if we really wanted to address the root causes of these things, we have to look a lot deeper and we have to go upstream and into a much more sort of preventative space. So, so by optimizing our immune systems by, [00:52:00] uh, so that the biggest organ in the body is how people say is what’s called the interstitial fluid.

So the. the, the liquid in your body, uh, between all the different organs of the body. If that’s acidified, you’re going to have a compromised immune system and therefore the external pathogens are going to have a greater likelihood of creating disease. 

Giancarlo: Yes. Okay. So this, you know, the, um, the health example, it’s very clear for me, the most obvious thing is, um, This, um, serotonin inhibitor is SSRI for depression intuitively, um, of course not a doctor, but I can see how a medicine that artificially, um, you know, um, inhibits this, the synapses from the serotonin to be, to be.

To, to stay, to stay. Basically, this [00:53:00] idea that, okay, what’s create well being and happiness is serotonin in the brain. So we’re gonna just, you know, inhibit the synapses so the serotonin can keep bathing the brain. And so we’re gonna address depression like that. It’s obviously a shortcut which doesn’t seem to be sustainable and, as a matter of fact, it creates a lot of side effects.

Like, you know, some, you know, uh, people put on weight and they get, they feel sedated, they lost their libido, it’s, uh. Even if sometimes, of course, in suicidal case, it’s, it’s, it’s better than nothing. But, if I can try to summarize the part two, which is, um, which is the cause. Basically, in a, in a, in a, in a global model of, of neoliberal capitalism, where the system is driven by commerce and profit, it is very easy for interest group to weaponize politics, health, environment, ecology [00:54:00] into something which not necessarily, um, address the wellbeing of the population.

Okay. So. Am I correct? 

Rory: Yes, absolutely. 

Giancarlo: I, 

Rory: yeah, so I think the, the one, one of the other things that I think is important within this whole discussion in which again, I, I’ll dig into in this part of the book, is that we’re really so conditioned into the belief that we need centralized state controlled infrastructure and institutions now.

I don’t necessarily advocate that all of these institutions and systems need to go. I think most of them are so inherently corrupted that they’re no longer fit for purpose. But, well, the reason why we are so disempowered and are continuing to lose our sovereignty is because we’ve abdicated our control over our [00:55:00] essential needs to all of these.

disembodied, uh, centralized systems. So what we see unfolding now, and through Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, and this kind of response to the ecological crisis, or the way it’s being sold to us, of course, is the extension or logical continuation of this flawed political and economic paradigm. And it is actually ultimately about, you know, ultimate centralization.

So every single asset on the planet becomes digitized. And if you’re not prepared to sign up to the dictates of this system, you simply don’t get a look in. You, you know, some of the, what’s coming out now is impossible. You won’t even be able to get online, or have a bank account, or insure your car. Uh, unless you conform to, to all of these dictates, and with programmable money in the equation.

Now, the, the [00:56:00] opposite of that, of course, is, is, is decentralization and distributed networks. And so the notion of these genuinely decentralized peer to peer platforms are absolute anathema to the, the, the, the, the technocrats, because they operate entirely independently and entirely parallel. To these, uh, uh, conventional mainstream systems and are very, very, or basically impossible to, to control or manipulate or interfere with.

And so this is genuinely very threatening. And I think the, it’s interesting to note that two of the characters who get sort of trotted out a lot in, in, in recent years are Aldous Huxley and George Orwell for obvious reasons. Huxley’s Brave New World in 1936, which kind of sort of predicts the whole sort of.

Biotechnology revolution and, and, and social engineering and all of this stuff. And, and, and 1984, which I think was published in 1948. But I only recently realized that Orwell, [00:57:00] uh, Huxley wrote his riposte to Brave New World in his final novel Island, which way he, you know, you know, creates this fictional utopia called parlor.

And there’s the administration of this moksha medicine, which is a sort of psychedelic sacrament that is used judiciously to sort of keep society. stable, but Orwell said that, you know, that, that 984 was the, the logical endgame of the rollout of this kind of, of, of this, this trajectory. And the only way out of that was this totally decentralized grass roots bottom up kind of shift.

So this is really the nub of the problem, I think, because you cannot incrementally optimize or shift these current, institutions and systems into the decentralized distributed networks that we want to create. With, uh, 

Giancarlo: with blockchain. 

Rory: Exactly. So blockchain can be used [00:58:00] in a centralized way as well as in a, in a decentralized way.

And so I think the What’s difficult at the moment, part of the dissonance and problem we have grappling with all of this, is that sadly, I think, and I came to this conclusion 20 years ago with writing Rising Tides, that the only way these parallel systems can actually take hold, you know, is almost dependent upon the collapse of the prevailing one, and this takes us back to sort of Buckminster Fuller’s famous quote, you can’t create change by fighting the existing reality.

You have to build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. And so these new models, whether it’s regenerative agriculture, preventative biological medicine, real sort of, uh, these decentralized autonomous organizations, DAOs, you know, the really kind of cutting edge, I think, of the blockchain sort of crypto space.[00:59:00] 

All of these systems share some common principles, in the sense that they are operating in, in this much more sort of interconnected, systemic, you know, holistic way. And they’re coming from the bottom up. And, and again, a lovely quote I came across yesterday from Marshall McLuhan, um, that builds on Buckminster Fuller’s Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth.

Uh, and I suppose in a way what I’m attempting to do with this book is a sort of a contemporary version of that, you know, what, if we are to have a genuinely regenerative culture and society, what are the parameters that we would have to conform to for that to happen? And, and that’s, those are the principles I really, really want to highlight.

But McLuhan said, you know, there are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We’re all crew. And again, Where, what I [01:00:00] would love to achieve through this book is to help people come out of what I see as this kind of five cycles of grief process, where the sort of existential crisis, the meta crisis is, is creating what’s normally associated with the grieving process with the loss of a loved one, anger, you know, denial, anger, bargaining, despair, acceptance, something like that.

Elizabeth Kubler Ross. 

Giancarlo: Interesting. 

Rory: And it The grieving process takes you through those five stages and it doesn’t necessarily go sequentially. You can bounce from anger and despair and back to denial, to a level of acceptance, and then it all starts again. And I think, collectively as a species, we’re in this, you know, our mutual friend Daniel Pitchbeck, you know, coined this term, the planetary initiation, which I think is a really useful term at the moment.

And it is, and Charles Eisenstein talks about us moving into adulthood as a species. But I [01:01:00] think this gerbil wheel of these five cycles, you know, what I want to try and do is show some way of getting out of that spiral and into a point of mobilization, of recognizing that there isn’t any kind of external force or savior that’s, you know, Donald Trump isn’t going to save us.

You know, nor is the second, yeah, it’s going to come from us, and it’s, it’s a very difficult point for a lot of people to get to, because it’s momentous, but, I mean, Bill Bollinson, the founder of permaculture, said, you know, the reason I’m regarded as so seditious is because it’s very threatening To the centralized structures to have people who’ve got control over their resources because then you have no, uh, way of, of, of, of controlling them.

And so that level of self reliance and empowerment at a grassroots community level is the most threatening thing and the most powerful thing that we [01:02:00] can do. So if we, the, the communities that have the maximum control over their food, water, energy communications. Uh, housing, you know, these fundamental things that, that, that, you know, that are important for our society to function.

The communities that have the most control over those things are the communities that I believe have the greatest chance of emerging out of this period we’re in now. And as these, these centralized infrastructure and systems fail, the, the, the things that will work will be the things that people turn to.

So, I think the, again, I don’t want to diminish the importance of people taking to the streets and the rest of it, but quite often, if you look at the amount of energy that’s gone into kind of combating the prevailing paradigm, if that energy was redirected into actually constructing and building the new paradigm that is necessary, Uh, then we can see, [01:03:00] I hope, a sort of critical mass of people jumping ship, because at the moment all of these parallel systems have been discarded as, oh, well, that doesn’t work.

Oh, organic agriculture is not economic. Well, it’s not economic when seen through the lens of the current economic system. But as we know, every 10 units of energy expended in industrial agriculture only produces one unit of energy of food. So it’s woefully inefficient, and actually only produces 30 percent of the food in the global marketplace.

So like 65 70 percent of the food consumed in the world is still produced by rural peasant farmers. But these are all the things that we’re not You know, taught about, and I suppose, you know, one of the most important books for me in recent years was a book by a British academic called Chris Smage, S M A J E, called A Small Farm Future.

And he really very competently shows that given the current population and, you know, what’s being envisioned by the [01:04:00] sort of industrial agriculturalists, there is simply no way that you can feed the global population with industrial agriculture without completely destroying the planet. And that is self evident, and that the only way, if there is a way, to get out of this, it is through, uh, the replacement of industrial agriculture with networks of small and medium scale diversified farms, employing local communities, supplying local markets.

And here you have, you know, the most systemic solution available to us. You recorrect the mental health epidemic by bringing people back to the land. And, you know, serotonin and dopamine, which we were talking about earlier, thrive in living organic topsoil. So, nutrients, food Well, these neuromodulators that control our emotional moods, that are also produced in the gut, they’re also there in the soil.

And so healthy soil produces healthy food, which produces a healthy microbiome, which produces a healthy [01:05:00] mind and healthy psychology. You know, it’s So it really does come literally from the, the, the grass roots up. And then likewise, you then strengthen and build local food economies. You create a whole load of, of, of community consolidating dynamics.

Uh, you also then, uh, recorrect the carbon cycle and. So, some people suggest that you only need to raise the average organic soil content of a tiny percentage of the global agricultural land by about 1 percent to bring carbon back to pre industrial levels. So, I think this whole issue around soil carbon is fundamental and the notion that So, again, look at what we’re, the lies we’ve been told about sort of, uh, uh, veganism and meat and the rest of it, all sorts of dietary and nutritional guidelines.

Now the, the methane that’s coming out of farting or burp, it’s [01:06:00] actually burping cattle, is because they’re being fed on grain, which they’re not supposed to eat, which again has been grown on decimated rainforest in, in, in the Amazon. Now, if you feed cattle on grass that they’re supposed to eat, uh, you reduce the methane emissions by 99%.

And I think if you add seaweeds into their feed or something, you actually completely eradicate the methane emissions altogether. And at the same time, you rebuild the topsoil, and you, you, you, you Basically have a kind of animal husbandry system within the agricultural system that’s fundamental to, to, to, to keeping the whole thing going.

Giancarlo: Yes, fascinating. So let me see if I can try to recap a little bit. So, part one of the book explain, um, the current state of affair, which is a planet basically choked by corruption. Part two Um, the cause of the corruption, [01:07:00] it’s simply that a minority of people were able and are able to manipulate the system to maximize their interest at the expenses of a lot of people.

And, and, and part three, you explore this idea of we need a new paradigm that makes the old one obsolete. But so if corruption and greed. is rooted on, you know, it’s, it’s part of, you know, we, I can’t remember says that, you know, we have both genes. We don’t, we have the selfish genes and we have the altruistic genes.

You know, we came from a period of abundance in Indian 20, 000 years ago with 50 type of mango. And so it would, you know, we develop the collaborative, um, genes there, the altruistic gene. In the dry spell of Africa, in the moment of, of scarcity, we develop the selfish gene because the food was scarce, right?

So we have both. [01:08:00] And in the Navajo tale, the black wolf and the white wolf, you know, what wins? The selfish gene or the altruistic genes? And, you know, it’s the one you feed. So I guess in part three, as you said, Um, there’s going to be practical solution, like moving from an industrial agricultural world into a small farm world.

But then there is also badly needed change in consciousness. So what role do psychedelic and this explosion in self inquiry, inner exploration. What is, um, do you think this is enough to bring about the conscious expansion that will create the awareness that we need to feed the white wolf to basically change this paradigm?

How do you think that, that’s what you’re going to discuss in part three of the book, right? 

Rory: Yes, Dave, for sure. So. [01:09:00] The, the regeneration platform has these six silos starting with food, which is at the foundation of health, which is then sort of underpinning the sort of new economics, uh, uh, uh, ideology, and then the other three are community, culture, and consciousness.

Now, ultimately, of course, consciousness could become at the beginning, but it’s, in a way, it’s the one that’s sort of most difficult for most people, many people to grapple with, and again, going back to where we started slightly. If one looks at all of this through the lens of, and still from the belief that consciousness is peculiar to, you know, is a product of neuronal firing in the brain as opposed to seeing consciousness as the ground of all being, which all the mystical traditions have told us, and that we are just the most, the human brain is just a sophisticated instrument through which That functions, Huxley famously talked about the transmitter rather than, as opposed to the [01:10:00] receiver.

So if we are, so I would say the explosion of the interest in psychedelic medicine and self inquiry and all of these sort of mystical traditions and the rest of it is Again, a manifestation or a symptom of, of, of, of the despair that people feel with, because all of these, the notions about what constitutes sort of wealth or success or progress that we’ve been sort of conditioned or educated to believe in, most sort of critical thinkers get to a point where recognizing that these are all deeply sort of skewed and without redefining.

Those key drivers, we’re only ever going to keep repeating the same mistakes. And so how do we reprogram those drivers? And that’s what Schmackterberger called the Omni win win. So you have an alignment of interest between people, planet and profit, if you like, [01:11:00] so that you’ve actually got. A thriving biosphere, thriving, uh, uh, economics and, and a thriving society.

I mean, this is the ultimate goal, obviously. So, how, without a kind of deep sort of metaphysical, philosophical, spiritual shift in our understanding of who and what we are in relation to each other and the rest of the biosphere, then these other systems aren’t ever really going to have the, the, the proper support that they require.

Uh, so I think one of the fascinating areas around modern psychedelic research. They’ve coined this term, the default mode network, to describe these sort of anterior sections of the brain that seem to be correlating with the notion of the egoic entity. And that what happens in the mystical experience, in the psychedelic experience, is a suppression of the default mode network and Massive kind of connectivity [01:12:00] in the brain between the prefrontal lobes and the rest of it.

So there’s all sorts of things going on which normally don’t happen. And again, Huxley used to refer to the reducing valve, that the brain is like a reducing valve because we simply cannot, it can’t cope with the amount of information that’s available to it from the sort of consciousness sphere at large.

What psychedelics do is sort of basically switch that off or suppress it. So there’s then this sort of blood of new century information and new neuronal firing and new connections. One of the great, yeah, most of the focus has. Yeah. And I understand why is, is around these, these compounds is addressing things like addiction and mental health issues, and, and they’re phenomenally efficacious for that.

What’s not acknowledged so much is this notion of what E. O. Wilson called biophilia, this term of, of, of this innate knowledge of, of, of our interconnection to the planet. And, uh, which is probably in [01:13:00] a way arguably the most crucial thing of all. And so most people who’ve had a profound psychedelic experience, you know, have a new appreciation of the interconnection with, with the natural world.

And so I think they serve a phenomenal purpose, you know, and. But again, it’s, again, they’re not, the soul arts are in and of themselves, as Alan Watts said, you know, these are things like a boat you used to cross the river, once on the other side, the journey continues by foot. And so often we, and similarly with, with sort of the meditative traditions, you know, I’ve often, often the, the, the, the teaching, the, the, the, the technique, the, the, the body of thought or the concepts that have been so, powerful for one’s spiritual journey can often, over time, become the very obstacle to the completion of the journey, because all that’s happened is the replacement of one thing with another.

And [01:14:00] then the ultimate sort of, uh, revelation or the enlightenment or whatever one wants to call that is, is the absolute sort of dropping away of all of those concepts. And, uh, so I think you we’re in a Yeah, we’re in this fascinating time and, uh, there is clearly an acceleration of going on in these things and, uh, in these areas.

And I don’t believe ultimately that the world is destined to be led into this sort of one world technocratic dystopia. I think we’ll see parts of that manifesting around the globe, and we are seeing it now, and, but I think the chinks. In the armor of all of that are becoming increasingly clear and more and more people every day are recognizing that things are being steered in a direction that’s not necessarily what they want to subscribe to, um, but where we want to get to at the other side of all of this is probably [01:15:00] not going to happen without a fairly kind of grisly process in between.

And this is if we apply the sort of chaos complexity theory dynamics of it. to that, what’s called dissipative structure. So you, as the sort of polarized elements of a system get stretched to the maximum point of elasticity, and then there’s a jump, either a regression to a previous state or transcendence into a new state.

And let’s all hope and pray that that’s where it’s going because if it’s a regression, uh, then the future starts to look very dark indeed. 

Giancarlo: Yes. Yes, that’s extremely clear. Um, one thing I just wanted to add regarding, um, You know, psychedelic use for, um, you know, medical condition, like anxiety, depression, uh, uh, anxiety, depression, addiction.

[01:16:00] Um, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the, um, it’s the most used application of this compound. And you were saying that, uh, we don’t have yet a fully understanding of the change of ontology that these compounds are bringing, but that. I just want to be optimistic about this because, you know, what they call the integration industry, you know, there is, there is now a new industry of, of, of sitter, of, of, of psychedelic sitter of people sitting for people going through psychedelic experience, you know, some of them are becoming legal now, you know, Australia has legalized mushroom and MDMA.

MDMA should be legal next year in America, and then followed by Magic Mushroom, so there is a lot of course, you can see them on social media, on the internet, on, um, people teaching people to, you know, integrate their, their psychedelic experiences. But what is not completely there, which I think it’s [01:17:00] a good news because it means that it can grow, is to integrate the metaphysical aspect, the transcendental, this idea that, you know, when, when, when, when you see an entity, benevolent entity, and, you know, we, the integration people today still don’t go there.

When, when, in, in, in the school that I’ve been studying and following, when You know, people, the integration helps in addressing personal issue of blind spotting, of anxiety, of trigger, of childhood trauma. All that stuff is coming along quite nicely, but then the moment that someone brings in an entity from a different planet, then the integration specialist would say, Oh, this is shamanism.

You go speak with the shaman, you go and speak with the priests. But so until we’re going to have this dichotomy, I think that psychedelics are doing good. But for, for, you know, the [01:18:00] potential to really change consciousness, there should be a new generation of integration specialists that develop a language that makes understand that they are different dimension into the dimension of being.

That David Bohm called the implicate order or Schrodinger called the morphogenetic field. Daniel Pinkerberg called it like pattern or the Theosophist and Blavatsky would call it like the Akashic Record or the Cosmic Memory Bank. And, and, and what the Eastern philosophers have been saying forever, this idea of different dimension.

And when you have an understanding of that, then comes the mentality of We are not, there’s no passenger on this planet. We are all crew and, and with this understanding then there will be a different approach to life, a different approach to to society, to community, and then the white wolf could prevail.

Hmm. 

Rory: Hmm. [01:19:00] No, absolutely. I, I, I mean, there’s a lot there. I, I mean, I talk about Ken Wilbury Loss, and I’m sure many listeners are aware of his work, but if you’re not, he, he was sort of the forefront of the transpersonal psychology movement, or like Stanislav Grof, who did a lot of the pioneering work with LSD and the psychedelics back in the 50s and 60s.

And, but Wilbur started, I mean, he wrote his first book, I think, when he was sort of 20, 21, uh, he had a phenomenal intellect, and, and much of his work is, is quite dense and impenetrable. There is one book called No Boundary, which I always recommend to people as being very accessible and really a, a, Deeply transformative book, I think, for many people.

Who’s 

Giancarlo: the author of that? Ken Wilber. Yeah, yeah. We’ll put it on the show notes. 

Rory: So, uh, and Wilber, I mean, it’s his second book, I think it was called, uh, The Spectrum of Consciousness, where he first started to outline, I think, these nine different stages within the evolution of consciousness, starting [01:20:00] from this sort of, uh, oceanic, uroboric state.

So uroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Or the oceanic, pre egoic state of, of the infant before the ego has constellated itself. Uh, through a progression of different stages, and the final stage is this sort of transpersonal, non dual stage where I would like to believe we’re headed. And we’re sort of on the cusp of it now, and hence the rapid popularization of these non dual Teachings, you know, through people like Eckhart Tolle and, and the rest of it.

So, uh, I mean, 20 years ago when I was first getting interested in, in, in these areas, very few people knew about, um, those teachings. They are now, uh, uh, proliferated and being popularized by, uh, Deepak Chopra and others. Now, I think the, the, the important thing that Wilbur points out is that the, the, this transpersonal non dual [01:21:00] state has Many characteristics that are similar to the oceanic state of the infant, but the important difference is it’s been through this journey of all these other stages of consciousness to get there.

And along that journey, each evolution is dependent upon the integration and transcendence of the previous stage. So, I think when we look at the notion of the sage like state, or the dissolution of the ego, the, the egoic lens tends to project onto that and goes, Oh, well, what the sage is like a sort of was one of my teachers said, like an amorphous blob of tofu, that, that, that there is a complete absence of characteristic and personality when of course, that’s not really the case, the personality, the conditioning remains.

It’s just the identification within the organism with. the consciousness itself. [01:22:00] And so, the foreground goes into the background, the background goes into the foreground. There’s one way of looking at it. So, I think the, I agree that, yeah, this integration thing is crucial. I think it’s also important, I was listening to Paul Levy yesterday, or a couple of days ago, uh, the author of this phenomenal book, uh, Wetiko, around the problem of evil.

And, and how that Gets passed down generationally within cultures and how we disrupt those patterns and sort of eradicate them to move into another, I mean, absolutely fascinating stuff. And he was saying how his local bookstore where he lives won’t stock his books because they don’t want, it’s a spiritual bookshop, but they don’t want to look at the dark stuff and the evil stuff.

And it is all about, you know, fluffy white bunny rabbits and, you know. Angels and the rest of it. Now, so I think, you [01:23:00] know, we have to look at the shadow, we have to look at the dark stuff, you know, we have to, you know, the ancient Taoist yin yang symbol is so, you know, personal in so many cases at the moment, you know, as the light grows stronger, the shadows grow longer and all of this.

So one, so that the one thing is driving, you know, the darkness is driving the light in a way. So I think, but at the same time. We don’t want, it’s important, you know, a lot of people don’t want to look at the dark stuff for obvious reasons. I had to do a deep dive over the last three years to unpack a lot of this stuff and I ended up in some extremely dark places and information that I probably would rather I hadn’t come across.

But I kind of had to, to kind of get to a place with myself to reckon, okay, what I think is, what was going on is now sufficiently substantiated and validated by enough people. Credible people who are at the top of their game for me to feel sufficiently confident that, that, that I’m, I’m [01:24:00] okay with this.

But also recognizing what Nietzsche said, you know, be careful about how long you stare into the abyss because the abyss will stare back into you. So I, I, my work has always been about trying to kind of point towards the solution stuff and the positive stuff. But I also realized in the last few years that to really articulate.

The, the trajectory of where I think we need to go is also dependent upon us, a recognition of, of, of, of what, of the trajectory we’re on and the drivers behind that. And some of that is, is dark and we can argue till the end of time about how much of that is extra dimensional. Uh, you know, archaic energies, how much of that is sort of implicit sort of human nature, how much, but again, I, I, I think it’s much more useful to look at this through this ideological lens, rather than [01:25:00] trying to focus on a cabal of evil, dark people plotting nasty things behind.

Closed doors. Now, that sort of thing has always happened through history, but there’s a wonderful interview with Huxley and Mike Wallace, I think, from 1958, where he really kind of highlights this so beautifully. And he says, if you start to see the, these people as the ultimate sort of, uh, manifestations of this ideology, rather than the authors or generators of it.

So it’s perfectly possible that some of these people Like the Gateses of this world, he’s come from generations of eugenicists, he’s a confirmed technologist, he doesn’t really have any kind of ecological, biological, uh, thinking, sensibilities, and genuinely, may genuinely believe that, you know, what he’s doing is entirely [01:26:00] philanthropic and positive and in humanity’s greatest interests, despite the fact that, you know, he’s clearly responsible for.

You know, the deaths and sterilization of, of, of hundreds of thousands of women in Africa and India and the rest of it. And, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So, I think, you know, the value judgments that we ascribe from our sort of egoically identified position about, well, this guy’s really bad and evil, this guy’s really That, that doesn’t really take us anywhere.

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Rory: But if we can see how these ideologies have conflated over a period of time, Uh, and the people who’ve risen to these positions of influence because they are the most psychopathic and sociopathic and therefore they were capable, through their complete lack of empathy, have risen to these positions.

And I’m not saying that every successful person in the world is a psychopath or a sociopath. But, an awful lot of them appear to be, uh, there was this famous study done by Forbes magazine that reckoned [01:27:00] that at least 30 percent of the upper management of the Fortune 500 could be officially described as sociopathic or psychopathic.

So there’s no doubt that some of the most powerful people in the world at the moment exhibit some of those qualities, and, but they probably think that what they’re doing is the right thing. 

Giancarlo: Very good. Very good. On that basis, we spent an hour and a half. Um, you’re going to set up a GoFundMe campaign. So for people that are interested in this book and want to help with donation, they can.

We will put the GoFundMe link on the show notes. Uh, I will try to persuade Rory to have a very accessible selling price for this book. Maybe the digital version can be almost free. Yes. And then we can, maybe you can have some nice, um Um, you know, [01:28:00] paper edition or hard, hardback edition, which, uh, which will be maybe even maybe a limited series.

We’ll, we’ll think about it. Um, we’ll put all these books that you mentioned on the show notes. If people want to reach out with you, if they want. You know, to collaborate or, um, you know, interact with you. Are you open? Do you have a, you don’t have a social media presence, ? 

Rory: I don’t at the moment. I’ve, I, as you know, over the last three years, I, I sort of came off all of that, but I am about to sort of go back on it all.

I, I’ve had sort of boring health issues and the rest of it, but I’m about to sort of reengage with all of that. So at the moment, the best way to contact me is by email, and it’s either Rory [email protected]. Or Rory regen at PM dot, uh, Actually got Rory Spas at Proto College. The best one. 

Giancarlo: And we’ll put it and we’ll put it on the show notes.

Was a pleasure to have you, Rory, [01:29:00] and uh, looking forward to the next one. Thank you Ja, so much. Thank you. Thank you.