The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination | Gary Lachman

Gary Lachman, a historian of Western esotericism and former bassist in Blondie, gives a talk hosted by Daniel Pinchbeck drawn from his 2017 book The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Lachman credits the phrase to the poet and Blake scholar Kathleen Raine, who founded the Temenos Academy in London to sustain a Neoplatonic tradition she believed English Romantic poetry had inherited and modern secular culture discarded. He argues imagination is not make-believe but a faculty of making real, closer to what happens when a person realizes something already known than to fantasy or daydreaming, and compares its resistance to definition with Augustine on time. He discusses Blake as a literal visionary and the line Aldous Huxley borrowed for The Doors of Perception. The closing turns to Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.

Guest: Gary Lachman

In brief

• Lachman argues that imagination is a capacity for making things real rather than a faculty of fantasy and make-believe.
• The phrase lost knowledge of the imagination comes from Kathleen Raine, who read English Romanticism as heir to a Neoplatonic tradition that academic materialism had pushed aside.
• Raine founded the Temenos Academy in London to carry that tradition forward through talks and publications, and did her major work only after she reached her sixties.
• Lachman notes that Blake's phrase about the doors of perception gave Aldous Huxley the title of his mescaline book and gave the Doors their name.
• He compares imagination to Augustine's account of time: intuitively understood until someone demands a literal definition, at which point it becomes obscure.
• In the closing he observes that Gurdjieff presented his teaching differently to different audiences, and that Ouspensky's systematizing mind gave it its neat, scientific-looking form.

Full text

All right. Well, um, thank you, Daniel, for inviting me to participate in this event. And thank you everyone out there. I can't see everyone. I can see a few. I have to say up front, I'm really glad I can see some people because I do some of these Zoom talks and you don't have the little, you know, box there where you can see folk and invariably in the middle of one, I have I have a attack of panic. I have a panic attack because I think there's no one out there and I'm just talking into the void. And in some way we are all talking into the void.

But this was like you sort of it's very very strange. It's it's a strange experience. So I'm glad I'm I'm I'm glad you're there. And um what I'm going to talk about is uh it's based on a book of mine uh called Lost Knowledge of the Imagination that came out around 2017. And uh just in advance I I have to say there's going to be quite a lot of white males in this talk. uh dead ones uh dead white European males and I don't know if that that the Dwam is if that's still a phrase. I remember when I was back in university as the mature student in the late 80s and early 90s.

Uh yeah, the dead white European males. That's a good name for a band. But uh they they were like uh they were the target for everybody, you know, the deconstructionists, the feminists, postcolonialists, postmodernists, the Frankfurt School of Critical Thinking and all that. And I I I kind of like him. So uh this is going to there's one living white uh European male in here. if any luck will get to him. And uh this is one dead white European woman. And um this is Kathleen Rain. And the reason she's here is uh she coined the phrase lost knowledge of the imagination. And Kathleen Ray is a poet uh but also a Blake scholar, a scholar also of WBates and uh Cage and Rom the English romantic poetry in general which she believed had inherited um a lost tradition in European culture in culture in the west the platonic or the neoplatonic tradition and we'll get around to how how that how that sort of happened.

Uh but uh Kathleen Rain um remarkable woman. She didn't come into her own until I ran her 60s. So uh not only a woman you know making a mark for herself in in the academic world going against the the the tide or the current of the academic world at the time is moral materialism uh secularism uh modern poetry pretty much truncated sentences um and having to do with everyday life you know the kitchen sink or uh if you know TS Elliott and proof rock and uh this sort of thing and she came into her own in uh in the 1960s an immense study of uh the visionary poet William Blake and um I assume you know Blake but it's from him the term doors perception comes from that Aldis Oxley used for his uh little book about his experience at miscellin that he published in the early 19 1950s and it's also from him that the rock band in the 60s the doors uh got their got their name from and Blake was a visionary poet um a visionary in sense that he actually had visions of these mythological figures that he wrote these immense immense poems about. But u Kathleen Rain uh also um was the the heart and soul and the motive force behind uh what was known as the Teos Society. It's still active here in London.

Teos is a Greek word for the space before the temple, the sacred space in front of the temple. And this was a society where she tried to carry on uh what you would call the learning of the of of the imagination uh to carry on this tradition uh through talks and publications and things of that sort. So um that's the background uh uh to the book and um we talked about imagination. we tend to think it well it's one of those things we think we know what it is and in one sense we do intuitively but I think once we start asking questions about it it's like time um St. Augustine famously said when he was asked what is time he said um if you don't ask me the question I know the answer but once he tried to answer the question in some explicit literal way it you know everything became loose and he couldn't do it so imagination I think is one of these things it's it ties in with memory self-consciousness other modes of our our our conscious our awareness uh so it's I I think if we try to get a very very explicit definition of it would make it even more obscure pure, but we do have a general sense that it has to do with make believe um you know uh non-reality having to do with fantasy magic in in the kind of popular kind of sense and when I was growing up and you know wonderful world of Disney which is you huge world now but then it was a television show on Sunday nights but you know it's all about magic make believe or you have uh the kind of utilitarian um appropriation or use of magic on the cutting edge edge, you know, you're you're you're ahead of your competitors with new ideas in technology in a variety of other ways and things of that sort.

And there's also, you know, it's an activity that we kind of participate in um when we turn off the critical mind and just looking out the window, you know, on a on a train journey. So, you daydream in in in a certain sense. And of course, imagination has um a home uh in the arts. So, we have Beetho Music. We've got Picasso um painting uh Michelangelo's David and this is Vaslav Najinski uh the incredible ballet dancer in the early 20th century who it was believed was able to defy gravity. It was thought that when he did his leaps he was able to be stationary in in the air you know a foot or two above above the uh the stage.

So that that was whether it's true or not but that's what he was known for. So we have the imagination, you know, in this kind of way and we we we accept it. It's part of life. It's something that, you know, we would miss it if we didn't have it, even though many people don't have much imagination. And I think looking at a lot of contemporary culture, there's not particularly a heck of a lot of it uh on tap at the moment as well. But, you know, we sort of find a place for it, but we it's it's something that's extra. It's kind of on the side.

Um, and I said in the early one to talk about m make believe, but I actually think imagination is about make real. Um, and if you if you meditate and and contemplate um what we mean when we say we realize something. Um, generally it's something you know already. Oh, I knew that, but I didn't realize it. Well, think about what does that mean? I didn't realize it. You had made something that you knew factually into a reality. It didn't appear in front of you. You didn't realize it like you know hocus pocus but you actually you you turned something that was just you knew factually it's just kind of a flat two dimensional.

We have we the only way we can talk about these things is is metaphorically. So it's like flat two dimensional. Oh yeah. Yes. Uh but then oh no I realized that you you you you made it you brought it into being. And one of the signs of that is actually has an effect on you. the when you realize something, you act in a certain way based on that. So that's just a sort of background to how I I see imagination is not necessarily about fantasy, even though it's involved in that and make believe and getting away from reality. I think it's actually a way that we can engage with reality on on a on a deeper and uh more existential in the sense that you know we we this a felt effect of our engagement is is part of it but do we ever think of imagination as a way of knowledge as a way of knowing things?

Well, this is what Kathleen Rain investigated um in uh for many years um in her uh writings about Blake and the other poets and in tracing the remnants of what we would call a tradition of rejected knowledge. This is a phrase coming from the early historian of the occult James Webb um who wrote in the 1970s and um he he coined the phrase rejected knowledge. Rejected knowledge is this body of knowledge that was rejected at a certain time on history and it uh in includes sort of the hermetic tradition or this neoplatonic tradition or the tradition ofnosticism uh what we would call the esoteric kind of traditions but also you know parasychology and psychic phenomenon and variety of other things like that. All of that was rejected um at one point and continues to be rejected uh by um the dominant mode of knowing that we'll get on to. And when I say imagination, the way of knowledge, I don't mean knowledge about the imagination.

There's lots of that if you go online, if you Google imagination or or as I do and I um do my research, I go to the British Library here in London, which uh advertises itself as home of the world's knowledge, which is actually a misnomer because it's home of the world's information. Knowledge exists here and in yours. Knowledge does not exist in the books and in the papers and all that sort of stuff. That's the information. That's the material that we can know. We can absorb this material, this stuff called information. Then it becomes knowledge. With any luck and this happens less and less these days, if you work at it, we we can arrive at wisdom, which is knowing what to do with the knowledge.

um which is always a tough one these days uh and always has been because having knowledge as Bacon said Francis Bacon said ages ago knowledge is power and it is particular kind of power and that's associated with a way of knowing that u we're going to get on to imagination as a way of knowledge just think about you know we can it has a noetic character to it noetic means has has a some knowledgeable content some some information information some aspect some dimension of reality is revealed to you made available to you through through imagination. So once again it's rather than making up lots of things you know uh interesting fun novelty kinds of things now it's actually using this faculty we're calling imagination as I said earlier it bleeds into everything else about our consciousness too. So uh it's not like okay yeah that part of my mind over there that's imagination of it. This is a way we talk about it in that way in order to understand it and to get a handle on it. But they they all kind of blend in blend in together.

But in some way this faculty that we call imagination gives us knowledge of the world outside in the same way that what we usually think of as knowledge. You know the intellect the reason. Uh the ancient Greeks they had two different words for knowledge. We don't. We have one. We have one. There two different words for knowledge. There was epistemma which means um knowledge you could get from empirical you know the senses uh or study or reading or from logic and and reason which the kind of logic that you know taught in schools. But then there is nosis which is a kind of smack immediate unmediated direct knowing of things.

And it's as direct as uh you know when it's a very hot day and you take a you know cool drink and you don't think oh hm let me see has that quenched my thirst and I you know I add up different factors and I yeah oh yes it kind that all figures out that it yes no you just smack you in the face and you're you're not thirsty anymore that it's that it's that kind of knowing and there were a group the early Christians in in the early the very early Christian period um were known as the Gnostics because they pursued this experience this kind of esoteric knowledge or experiential knowledge. That's what you can say. So Nosis is a kind of experiential knowledge. It's not only knowledge that you you get in some way here's some knowledge you you experience what you're getting. Okay.

So, but there was a time when imagination, even though we it wasn't spoken of in this way because we don't talk about imagination in this kind of explicit way until later on historically earlier, but it was we we look back now and we can see that it's the case. But the people living at that time, they didn't go around saying, "Oh, I'm using my imagination now to to do this X, Y, and Z." They lived in it. it was the entire world for them at the time. Um, this was the mythological age. I mean, we mentioned Jean Ger's name uh came up as one of the, you know, people talking about, you know, evolution.

Although he doesn't use the word evolution, he uses the word mutation. He doesn't like the word evolution because it's associated with Darwinian and and actually notions of progress. So for him, mutations of consciousness aren't necessarily aligned or identical with this idea of progress, a kind of linear kind of progress. That that's that idea itself, a linear kind of progress is a product of a particular structure of consciousness that we're in at the moment. Um what he he called the mental rational structure of consciousness. But he also believed that it was in the process of uh dissolving, deconstructing itself, breaking down. He died in the early 70s, 1973.

But he did believe that we were experiencing the beginning of the breakdown of the mental, rational, conscious structure. And had he lived longer, I think he would have seen quite a bit of evidence for corroboration of of of his belief. But to get an idea, that was where we are now. But how did we get here? Well, we have to go back in history a bit. Let me just get a drink of water. Hold on a sec. Okay. And we're going to go back to a period uh that the um ex existence philosophia Carl Yasper's uh called the axial age. And this is a period 500 BC kind of smack in the middle.

So a century either side. And here's kind of a map uh laying out um what happened in the axial age and what um why it's called that. axial in the sense of axioms, you know, um kind of formulas or sayings or uh edicts to live by or like the axle, you know, it's it's that which around everything else kind of turns. And what Yasperas saw was that around this period got the 800 400 so it's a big you know it's a time there was a sudden flowering uh in different parts of the known world of basically the what the views of the world that we we still inhabit today and still um guide us in in some ways if we're lucky. So in China at the same time you had Lasu and Confucious um you know Daoism and Confucianism.

In India you had uh the writing of the Upanishads and uh the Buddha appearing in Persia. You had the rise of Zorastrianism, Zaratustra, Zoraster, and this notion that the world is the uh field of battle of two cosmic forces, good and evil. I tend to think it's stupidity and intelligence. You know my the way I look at it and think about that is in the great cosmic battle between stupidity and intelligence. Intelligence is at a disadvantage because it has only one weapon, truth. And stupidity can do whatever it wants. It can do any it wants. There's no rules for stupidity. It can do anything it wants.

So truth is always having a hard time. And you're right. Life is not for the faint-hearted. Um it's a it's a tough road to hoe here. And uh but somebody's got to do it. So, but what happened in Oh, I was going to say in the Holy Land um you have the rise of the the Hebrew patriarchs and you know um and the rise of Judaism. Yeah. So, you had this flowering sort of religious spiritual sensibility and you know today there millions of Buddhists there people that study Dowoism there's Confucism you know we know we know these things are still living around us. uh uh these days.

Um but something happened in Greece as well, but it was different that what was happening in in these other places and over here in uh Greece or what uh Asia Minor, which was Turkey now, but it was, you know, it was called Asia Minor then. You had a flowering kind of, you know, a kind of upbrush of spiritual energy, you know, rising up uh and starting to express itself. But it wasn't in a religious sense. It was the beginning of what the uh German philosopher Edmund Husel uh called a theoretical man. It was the beginning of uh it was the switch from the mythological age of the gods to rational inquiry.

And this fellow here uh Thales, he's considered the first philosopher um in the way we understand the term philosopher these days, although the term wasn't around yet. Um that happened a bit later on. We'll get on to the Pythagoras, the fellow who coined coined that phrase. But the thing what what makes Thales um important uh is that he he wanted he he didn't want to he didn't want he what it's not so much that he didn't accept but he he asked a different kind of question. So if you asked any kind of question about the world, you would get a story. You know, why does the sun come up every morning?

Oh, well that's Helios on his chariot. And you know, whatever it is, there's some some some mythological narrative, some mythopoetic story would be the answer to your question, right? But he said, "Well, I I Yeah, that's fine. That's that's okay. But I'm really interested in like what's this made out of? And he points to a rock or something like that or a cloud or something like what what's the stuff? What's the stuff that everything else is made out of? No. No. I don't want to know why the gods did that. That's perfectly fine. That's a good story. That's that's okay. I just want to know what that stuff is.

So, this is the beginning of rational inquiry. This is the beginning of asking questions. This is the beginning of curiosity. This is beginning of being interested in something for its own enigmatic sake, not for utilitarian purposes. He didn't want to know what it was in order to use it in some way. So this is this is this strange odd thing that comes out of what we later was called Europe is this curiosity about why what's that made out of? What's that's what makes it tick? That's that's an anacronism that it would be ticking several centuries later on. But the whole idea of what makes it tick.

So you get from sort of the mythopoetic, the the mythical singer of stories and narratives an imaginative way of at least explaining the world, right? We would think, well, they didn't really know it. They just they made oh, oh god, there's some thunder. So the gods are whatever doing something up there. Um, but it's it's a way of knowing the world in terms of this kind of poetic story in in in an imaginative sort of way. And it's the shift from that to the thinker who I think is I my my screen is blocked by all of you and I'm so glad I can see you so I can keep talking.

Um but uh there's the thinker that's the rhdan statue. Um so is thinking like okay what's what's this? What's it made out of? So the thought it was water and there's a fellow anaxes who was it was air and Heraclitus who's known as the dark philosopher because he had these very gnomic sayings. I mean we only have a couple few sheets of of something that's heracitis and he said nothing would delight us like a page of heritis because we don't have we don't have a page of ericitis we have like a few oneliners and these gnomeic kind of apherism sorts of things. So he was known as the dark philosopher but he he he thought it was all fire you know and other people thought it was all something so there was one kind of thing that through different transmutations became everything else but this is the beginning of rational inquiry and it's the shift away from a mythological way of understanding things an imaginative way to to to a rational sort of way but I mentioned Pythagoras uh he actually coined the term philosopher which means lover of wisdom but he also coined many terms that we still use cosmos theory uh which actually comes from a Greek word theoros which means to see.

So when you speculate about something my speculations um these are my specs but I have speculations about things but the two different two ways of seeing sorts of things and think Pythagoras was that he had one foot in each of the traditions. um he was very keen on this new way of knowing things through rational inquiry and he became obsessed with numbers and he's the first one to say argue that number is behind everything. So where the other ones are looking for some kind of stuff, some kind of matter, you know, which again matter is a concept, we never see matter. We see we see things that we say are made of matter, but you never see matter. You see something's made of wood, something's made of iron, something's water, it's gas.

You never just see just show me some matter. That's not like any of that. You never see it. Matter is a concept. Um that so materialism is is a kind of concept uh about about you know what what the world is like. Um so it's an idea really even though so it's it's funny it's an idea but they say it's materialism but any case but Pythagoras he's the one who first want to say this there's numbers behind everything and but it wasn't number in the way that we understand number and we'll get on to that. It was number in it kind of essence. So there is a a oneness so qualitative character to numbers and there's like tweness or threeness or something like that and um he developed this figure and again when we say I'll figure it out and you write out you know some mathematic that that was actually in the sand back then they made figures in the sand when they were working out different geometric you know arithmetical ideas.

uh this is something called the tetraus and it's basically 10 and it's a way in which from the one we get the all I I won't go through all the steps but there was a way in which from from one there's two and then they necessitate each one to you finally get to nine and then it's the whole and it's 10 and all that. Um so he was totally into number in that sense and totally into trying to understand the universe in terms of of number in terms of these qualities and we know we struggled at least I did in school to you know grasp the Pythagorean theorem. So he knew his geometry and then Pythagoras is also the one um we say discovered the the octave the western octave in music. So the the story is that he was walking past the the smithy and he noticed that when he was hammering the anvil a certain size it made a certain note and then another and another and so he figured out the you know the octave the relation of of the the length of a string to to the sound. So you know pretty spot-on mathematics you know you had to have a rational mind to think about I'll figure it all out.

But at the same time he believed that you know um not so much in the gods but in the sense that it wasn't just matter. It wasn't just some kind of physical stuff at work in the world. There was some some higher ideal and his the Pythagorean brotherhood. they were the first sort of esoteric school um in the west because he he he he certainly you know saw philosophy as as a method of rational inquiry but he also saw it as a kind of mystical path and it was a way in which the philosopher through following um the the sort of rigors uh of that he would lay out for his students they would come to hear the harmony of the spheres and this is this notion that as they believed um the earth was the center And then you know the planets moved around the earth and as the planets moved they made a they made a kind of sound. They made a certain harmony and the philosopher could hear that.

And Pythagoras himself he came out of the earlier Dionian and Orphic schools which were completely in the mythic tradition. the Dianesian, you know, transgressive rebels where people would get get out of it basically get out of their conscious mind like a like a good rave uh out of their conscious mind and um feel this connection to the all and to themselves and have a you know trans uh formative uh transpersonal experience uh that way. Um the orphics really went the other way. They were aesthetics um through you know certain um aesthetic practices uh they would quiet the body and this would also lead to this participation in the all but Pythagoras he thought no there's a way we can do that without having to go you know to the Dunesian excesses or to the austerities of the orphic school if we can learn how to hear the you know the the harmony of the spheres if we can practice this all this philosophical uh pursuit. And so this is he's got, you know, a foot in both camps.

Plato century or so later on, he too has his foot in both camps. I mean, we know Socrates um is the, you know, the arctipal figure of of of the rational philosopher who's always asking questions. I mean I I I taught philosophy for a while many many years ago and there's a very early platonic um dialogue called the euthifro and Socrates really you really see him as the gadfly in it you really see him as this pain in the ass uh because he wants to understand the nature of piety and so someone says well you should go talk to this fellow youthro because he knows all about piety you know he's some kind of priest or something like that and he goes and through a series of questions and answer and dialogue he reduces youthro to tears because Euththero in the end realizes I have the slightest idea what piety is. I don't I don't I don't I don't know anymore. Get me away from this this monster.

Um so that's when Plato wants to make a rational point. He wants to employ his critical mind. He he does it in that way. But the other side was when he tells a story, right? So the myth of Atlantis, you have the myth of the cave. If you know the myth of the cave, human beings are chained uh uh in a cave and they can only see what's in front of them and behind them there's a kind of fire and then there's people carrying so the statues you know the uh and the shadows from the fire get cast on the wall and the philosopher is the one who can somehow turn around and actually see what's happening and then get out of the cave and he the the sunlight is so bright it dazzles him and he goes back in the cave and he tries to tell the others, you know, and they what what are you talking about?

Well, there's reality right there in front of us like that. So, that's a myth. That's a myth. There's many other myths. So, when he wants to make a positive point, he tells a story. So, Plato too is in both. And he's one of the readable philosophers. It's dialogue. It's like it's like a play. But the next guy, Plato's um student Aristotle, he gets rid of all the myth. And this is the beginning of it being sort of purely kind of rational inquiry. And he's sort of the first research scientist uh because his pupil Alexander the Great, you know, for all the horrible things he did and the conquering he did, he spread it was through his conquest that Greek culture spread.

Um but he um Alexander sent back all these specimens and and different stuff from all the different lands he went to to Aristotle. Aristotle had this collection of sort of you know research material but this becomes this this tradition of it just it's rational inquiry no more myth no more story and this is a famous painting by Raphael um where you have Plato on one side and he he's he has his hand going up you know to the to the to the stars uh because Plato's basic idea is that the earth the world we live in now is much like you know the the myth of of the cave in the shadows this is sort of a copy of the higher higher world the ideals. So in a simple sense you know there's we all know what a chair is. That's because in the world of forms in the high higher ideal world is the ideal chair that all chairs participate in in some way. We we we don't see that not that's not sensible.

We can't see that chair. We can only see the the many many chairs around us. We can know that we can raise our mind to that level and understand ah this is this is a kind of pale copy of this higher realm the realm of the forms. So that's why Plato's pointing up but Aristotle is pointing down. He's saying no it's here. It's the earth here now. You know we have to we have to pay attention to what's on the here and now. And that more or less becomes the western tradition of way of knowing. So at this point the mythological way of knowing, the poetic way of knowing, the imagininal way of knowing has has kind of lost its its pride of place.

And if we jump, you know, several centuries ahead, what we get is the rise and the dominance of just one way of knowing. This is this way of rational inquiry. Um, and we we can say where we find ourselves now in the cosmos. you know, it's kind of starts with the perernicus who's the one who he didn't even he all these books science history is like the we they talk about these guys as being these fantastic heroes and all this kind of stuff. He didn't even want to publish the the the book that explains, you know, how how the planets go around the sun. It was only at the very end at his deathbed that he he he he agreed to do it and all that.

He was a very finicky kind of neurotic kind of character, Capernicus, but that's the beginning. So no more harmony of the spheres, right? It's not earth at the bottom or earth at the center of this nested concentric circles that you know beautifully move around us and create this kind of hum that the philosopher can hear. Oh no, the sun's at the center and the planets go around the sun and suddenly every everything is different. The whole way people understood the world was completely different. It took a while. I mean it's just first the intellectual elite that know about this and gradually there's all the resistance of the church and all that.

But then you get Galileo um he you know he he he g all these men are geniuses and they made remarkable contributions but in this particular story I'm trying to tell here Galileo he's the one who separates um what what he calls primary qualities from secondary qualities. Secondary qualities are everything that we like about the world. Color, smells, tastes, all all sensation. everything that we we we see a blue sky or a beautiful you know sunset that's just happening here that's just subjective what's really out there when I look at a sunset and feel a like well there's just different it's just refraction of electromagnetic waves through the atmosphere and my eyes and your eyes just happen to pick up one frequency is red and another frequency is whatever color color but really really out there out there in the sense that if we aren't there seeing it, there wouldn't be any color. It wouldn't be anything like that.

It would just be, you know, these electromagnetic waves and stuff. So, you get that. Then you have Kepler, the laws of planetary motion. Daycart, uh, Daycart trying to find that one nugget of certainty, the one nugget of certainty from which he could build this new body of knowledge. And it's the fact that he said, "Well, I can I can imagine a demon tricking me into everything I see around me. So if I put a pot on the boil and it boils, he's just making me see it boil. Maybe it doesn't boil at all. Maybe it's really freezing. How how do I know? How do I know I'm not dreaming is basically, you know, Daycart's thing.

How do I know that anything around me is not a dream? What what what can I base the beginning of any kind of certainty on?" And famously it was kito erosum I think therefore I am which I have to say I don't think descart meant the cause of my arising is my thinking. I think he meant the one indubitable thing that I can't doubt is the fact that I think that I exist because even if a demon tricked me out everything I I had to exist in order for him to trick me. Right? He can't he can't trick me if I don't exist. So the one nugget of he he found was that his own his own mind my my kito and that's the beginning of the mind body separation that we're we're still lumbering under philosophers are still trying to figure out how did the mind and the body come together well it must be all mind no it must be all body well it isn't it's the two of them but we don't have the conceptual apparatus or the language in order to first of all go back and understand the mistake daycart made and then to although many people have tried and then you know and then to go go go a different route and then you know Newton is the one who brings it all together um enabling us to you know shoot rockets out into space but you might not know Newton himself I mean he considered discovering gravity and and all the sort of mathematical sort of stuff that he did kind of like side work his main thing was that he was he was an alchemist um he was in search of the philosopher stone um and he he was very he was very keen on biblical chronology he was trying to predict when the end of the world come and he said early 21st century.

So he was right about gravity. So I don't know. So but this is the beginning of this this dominance of this whole other way of knowing things which is not the imaginative way of know. But was something lost along the way? Yes, there was. And someone who noticed that what was lost was someone who was just as logical, just as mathematical, just as scientific as these fellows. That was a fellow named Bla1 Pascal who was a logician. He when he was a young boy he sat in on math classes with Daycart and they were friends used to swap you know algorithms or stuff like that but he was also a theologian or a kind of religious philosopher.

Uh one of the things he did he invented one of the earliest computers it's called the pascalene and he was put it together for his father. His father was a tax collector so he's helping his father you know do his sums and that sort of thing. Um but along with doing that he was in a way you could say he was an early existentialist. because he was one of the first ones to recognize like the the what what it really meant realizes earlier what it really meant that this new Capernac world is like and in a collection of notes that were left after his death that we called public as his pens he has one where he says um the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me so he's one of the first ones peering up in into the sky. And again, it's not electrified.

So when they looked up at the night sky back then, they saw all the stars. I live in London. I I I see barely a handful, you know, on a good night here. So he he's in the midst of that, you know, that sense of awe and all that. So he's aware of these existential worries, but what's happening, you know, with we've left the cozy world and we're into into this world now where we don't really know what's going on. It's it's very big. It's very dark. But he also wrote about something that he called the spirits of geometry and the spirits of finesse. And um you know I've talked about geometry already thing about geometry is that or anything like that is that it deals it's a way of knowing that deals with things that have a clear definition.

Nobody argues of like the definition of a right you know right angle or the hypotenuse or whatever it is anything like that. It's there and you can show you can walk somebody through doing a quadratic equation. Step one, step two, step three, step four, and there. And if you do it right, it'll always turn out that way. And it'll turn out whether you're doing it in Minnesota, whether you're doing it in Shanghai, whether you're doing it on the moon. It'll always be like that. That's how it is. But the spirit of finesse and living here in London, although I'm not interested in footy, when I looked up finesse on Google images, that that's what came up.

You know, guys playing guess soccer for the states with footy. It's something that it's a way of knowing, but it isn't a you can't teach finesse to somebody. They could learn it from you watching you maybe, but you can't say you do this, then you do that, then you do that. No, it's something it's just something that you do. It's a way of knowing that the um philosopher Michael Poleani called tacet knowing or implicit knowing. It's a knowing more than you can say, right? So, think about how when like when you ride a bike, you learn how to ride a bike, right? You you didn't say, "Okay, I have to turn handlebar that many step on the pedal that many degrees and do this." No, you just got on, you fell off.

You got on, you fell off. And one day, you could do it. And before you could do that, you had to spend all of your attention, your consciousness on those specific, you know, actions. Or the same thing if you're typing or learning how to play a musical instrument. It's when I first learned how to play guitar, it was a pain in the ass because I had to like make sure my hand was in the right place at the same time and all that kind of thing. And then one day, wow, you could do it. And it takes over. That's knowing in this tacid way you've passed over what you had to focus your concentration on to another part of yourself that does it kind of automat it knows it implicitly.

Now the virtue in that is that now you could think about oh what do I want to type where do I want to ride the bike what do I want to play in the guitar so it allows you to do meta level thinking about the thing you don't have to think every time you go type something you have to remember where the keys are so this is but the problem with that is like I said with the other way of knowing you can lead somebody else through it but you can't do this with this imaginative way of knowing and this was someone something that someone many many years later than Pascal and there was many people along the way in between the two um realized and this was the German writer Ernst Junger who was also an entomologist I'm I'm I'm haven't made this point but a lot of people I'm talking about they were they had their foot in the imaginary realm but they were also in in some form of the scientific kind of well so you could say they had their foot in nosis and a foot in epistemic and people in the psychedelic world might remember that uh Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, uh wrote about um accounts uh he had he and younger tripped um in in the 50s uh in Germany in 60s like that. And um Junger remarkable German mind, he's not that well known in the English in the English speaking world. Uh but a book he wrote called The Adventurous Heart was a book that um inspired Huffman and um uh he he he was a fan and he he wrote to him about it. But in that book, the adventurous heart, Junger talks about what he calls uh the circumference, the center, and the master key. And this is he said when we know something, there's two ways we can approach it.

You can approach it from the circumference from the outside and for that you need antlike industry. This is the step one, step two, step three. Slowly slowly slowly getting to the heart of the thing, right? And so it's a slogging kind of way of doing it, but it's it's sure, but you get there eventually, but it's it's takes a lot of time. But he says there's another way where we can know stuff directly bullseye directly to the midpoint. This is this is this kind of immediate kind of way of knowing. And it's um he uses the metaphor it's like having the master key to all the rooms in a hotel, right?

each of the specialists in their particular, you know, air patch or niche of of knowledge these days. And my god, there the the niches are increasing exponentially. Everybody's a specialist. Something these days, um, they have the key to their room, right? And and they doggedly protect their room. They don't want anybody else getting in there because that's their patch and all that. But if you have the master key, you can get into any room. But again, you can't explain to them how you did it. You can't explain. You can't say, "I did this, I did that, and then then you know, it just it just came to you.

The knowledge came to you. It comes all at once." The the industrious way of approaching it, it's one thing at a time, bit by bit. But this other way, it comes all at once. And we all experience things like that. I mean we experience it in um you get the meaning of a joke, you get the meaning of a poem or something like that or a dream something. So it hits you the aha moment um sort of thing. So I mean it's something that it's not necessarily mystical. something that we do we experience already and although in some other cases there are very very extreme cases of this the idiot savants um who uh can't tie their shoes or brush their teeth but they can tell you whether a 20digit number is is a prime or not.

A prime is a number that can't be divided by any other number other than itself or one. And there's no there's no rule to figure out whether a large number is a prime. you just have to divide every other number into it. But um no, there's cases of brothers who just they could that's what they did. They entertained each other saying, "How about that one? No, you can divide it right on 16digit sort of numbers." They just bang off the top of their heads. Uh there's a case of one one young boy late 19th century who asked his father um you know exactly you know how long ago was he born and then his father said it's oh so in that case I've been alive for whatever billions of seconds and his father said no no no you're wrong and if whatever they figured out said no you you forgot the leap key so you know that's it nothing else he didn't go on to be fantastic mathematician or anything so it's just this strange way of knowing things that you can't explain, but we we jumped the gun and were able to do it.

So, here's here here's here's the living white European male. Um, this is uh Ian Mc Illchrist, who you might know from his very important book, The Master and His Emissary came out about 10 years ago, maybe a bit more. And what he did was he rebooted the whole left brain, right brain discussion. Uh that was sort of taken off the table um in the early 90s because neuroscientists didn't like that all the split brain stuff had been associated with pop psychology and and new age sorts of things. Um and then also they had come to the conclusion that actually even though initially we thought the two sides you know did very very different things they actually they really do lots of the same things.

I mean one one is more the left is more geared to language and the right to image and spatial sorts of things but more or less. So, and there are cases if you know with with a stroke where one one is you know knocked out of commission and the other one starts to pick up you know the the work that the the one that was affected what wasn't doing so but what Mc Gill said was like that may be the case but what the point is is not what they do it's how they do it it's how they do it the left brain is dedicated to the step by step one thing at a time slogging mathematical rational way of doing things. It that that's the shorefire thing. And what it does, it reduces everything to that. And it does that for good reason because it's through that way that we are able to live in the world.

We're able to survive in the world. It's what I I call survival consciousness. Um the um French philosopher Ani Berkson in the early 20th century he said the brain um serves an eliminative function and it's the it's the organ dedicated to dealing with life in the sense that it cuts out 90 90% of the reality around us and only gives us a small bit just what we need in order to deal with things to get by. Right? So the left brain reduces everything to something it knows already. It classifies everything. And Mc Gillra said is that actually the left brain was brought into being by the right brain which is earlier and it just presences things.

It gives the immediate nowess of thing. What I call the isness or the meister echart the um uh mystic uh called istikite. This is German for is business. It's um so you could say the left brain takes care of business and the right brain takes care of isness. And it's funny that I did it that way because the right hand is controlled by the left brain and the left hand is controlled by the right brain. So there's a it splits over some way. Um and the difference he said is that the right brain has this kind of laserike accuracy, pinpoint accuracy. So it looks at the forest, then it sees the tree, then it sees the branch, then it sees the leaf, then it sees the cells, then it sees the molecules, then it sees and closer and closer and closer fine fine-tuning.

Just absolute accuracy of stuff, but it does that at the expense of losing the context. The right brain gives you everything at once and it's there and it's indubitable when you have when we have these moments when you know you see a leaf for the first time or something like that. You're you're the left for a moment has gone off duty and you're just seeing the leaf and it's that leaf. It's not abstract leaf which is what we usually do. Oh, tree car person you know just to get by. We can't we can't deal with everything in its own immediate uniqueness. We we we'd be stopped on our tracks, you know.

Um we we we we develop these kinds of symbols way to deal with just to deal with the world. But every now and then, oh, you see the leaf, you see the sunset, you see the cloud or some or the person. And they're not you're not seeing them utilitarianly. You're not seeing them. What do I have to do? How do I deal with them? you're just seeing them. And this is what the right brain does. And interestingly enough, about a hundred years earlier than Miguel Chris's book, there was um a classicist at Cambridge and he wrote a book called from religion to philosophy is FM Cornford.

It's precisely about that shift earlier I talked about from the mythological age to the to the mental age, the thinking age, the the axial time. and he said yes that happened but actually it wasn't quite the immediate you know cut off from one to the other as I've tried to show as well the the the rational thinking the theoretical man emerged from this past mythological background but he said the danger has been that even then he was saying 100 years ago and even earlier people like Blake were saying it in in the previous century that it's become dominant it's become dominant because it's effective It's practical. It's utilitarian. It works. You know, it works by cutting everything else out, but it works.

And he said that there there's two permanent needs of human nature, two modes of the two traditions. And he calls the vague and the precise. Now, we immediately see like we don't want to be vague. We want everything to be simple, clear, and direct. Yes, there's tremendous uh profit in that, and it's virtuous. But sometimes if things are too clear, too bright, they obscure other things. The sun obscures the stars. You know, stars don't go away. They're out there, but you can't see them not because of the smog. You can't see them because of the sun. So, something very bright, immediate, you know, daylight consciousness blocks out all this other stuff.

What Mc Gill has said is that what's happened is that the left has become increasingly increasingly dominant. And because it in order to deal with the world, the best way you can deal with the world is to turn into something it knows already. So the right it's when the right brain just looks out on the world what it's seeing these days is a world that's completely created by the left. There's very little of unless you go out with nature and even that is kind of like you have to go and you have to you know book book your time there in advance and it's all you know slotted into this you know best best time to do it and all that kind of thing. right brain sees less and less of just the immediate world, the natural world.

It only sees the left. And so in a way, it becomes increasingly inhibited, but there's nothing for it to do. It's there's nothing left for it to So, and this is what's happening. Um, this is one of the contributing things to what I said earlier about Gibbs talking about the breakdown of the mental rational consciousness structure. It's starting to take itself apart. um because there's nothing left for it to do. So what happens when you get this dominance of the left brain is you get scientism. Uh this is the great American historian Jacques Barzen who died trying exactly when but he live the early 2000s but he lived to be about 107.

So uh he was born very early um 20th century and he lived into you know the very early um 21st century. And if you ever get a chance is one one of the last things he wrote is this huge doors stopper book called from dawn to decadence and it's a history of the west from the renaissance up to like rap gangster rap or something like that uh he talks about in the very end. So it's sort of like all the virtues, the goods. See the problem today it's not it's not good versus ego it's competing goods competing goods. Um my personal freedom which is a good my obligation to society which is a good.

So those two they've always it's always very that's what politics is about. It's all about you know equating those finding a balance between those two things. But now now they clash completely all the time. It's it's it's not even in the sense that it's difficult to bring them together. They they sort of don't even get anywhere close together. And it's a variety of other things, too. You know, uh uh you want to respect other cultures, tolerance, but um you're against female, you know, genital mutilation. Well, that's part of the culture. Oh, no. It's horrible, you know. So, which is the good there? respecting the the the other culture or you know imposing your western ideas about you know um human rights and so on and so on.

So I mean that's just top of my head. I'm I have nothing intelligent to say about any of that sort of stuff. I'm just using it as you know simple kind of contrast between things. So you have scientism is the belief that the scientific method can answer everything. It's the only way to answer anything. There is no other way to answer anything. But that is not science itself. Scientism is a belief. It's the new religion. It's not science. Science is study of nature and behavior of things and knowledge obtained to them. Pursuit and application of knowledge, understanding natural phenomena. Science is the view that only science can render truth about the world in reality.

Those are very different. And we've seen people already who scientists but also inhabited the imaginative world. So it doesn't have to be like that. It's just become very dominant. It's become dominant because it's effective. In the 1950s, there was a famous book called The Two Cultures by a fellow named CP Snow was a novelist, but he himself was a scientist too. So, somebody else um and he argued that this is the beginning of when science was becoming very very popular. So the 50s sci-fi movies, the mad scientist, the whole idea, you know, better better life through chemicals and all this kind of stuff and all the all the all the um pipe smoking, corduroy jacket, you know, with the patch on the elbows, humanists, the poets and all that.

They were getting left behind. They were all arguing like, well, you know, we we don't we don't like science. It's all too logical and that kind of stuff. Snow was saying, "Well, look, you you you just got to get your skates on and get up to speed with us because this is the way things are." But Barson said, "It's not two cultures." As we said, there are pe we've shown people already who occupy these two spheres. There's one mind, but it works in two different modes. It works in two different ways. And bars said there's no reason why you can't have someone who could, you know, be like Uklid and also like Walt Whitman, you know, a poet but also, you know, mathematician.

And over here we have somebody who's like that, the German poet Gerta. Uh we know for Faustst Faustst is one of the first works in Western literature to recognize this problem. Faust has sought all knowledge and he's still not happy. That's why he winds up making a deal with the devil. uh and you know uh because I've had knowledge I you know I've studied this I've studied philosophy I've studied science and and I'm I'm I'm not happier than I I am now. Um so and Gerch also wrote two two souls you know dwell within my my breast. Well, he got his anatomy wrong because it's up here.

The the two souls dwell up there and they don't get along and he he spells that out. But Greta himself is a poet, playwright, novelist, great lover, but he also was a statesman and a scientist. Um he wrote about the metamorphosis of plants. He was an early evolutionist. He actually he actually discovered it's called the mex maxillary bone. It's a tiny tiny bone in the human jaw that um was known to exist in in animals, you know, prior to us in the notion of evolutionary progress, but human beings didn't seem to have it. And this was an argument that there we you know, we're a special creation.

We're a special dispensation by God. And um Gretcha said, "No, we're not. We're part of nature." Although he wasn't Darwinian, it wasn't blind mechanical chance. There was a living force. There was a living spirit, a living soul within nature that was emerging and growing and expressing itself and we're part of that with the cutting edge as it were said earlier. But he discovered the bone. So he's a scientist but he's a poet as well. So it's not impossible. You can have the two things work. And I what I what I name what I call when the two things work together, I call it the Goldilocks effect.

So, if you know the old, you know, fairy tale about Goldilocks and uh, you know, she goes to the house of three bears and this porridge is too hot, this porridge is too cold. Oh, this porridge is just right. Or this bed is too hard, this bed is too soft, this bed is just right. I I that this I think there's some deep esoteric significance in the Goldilocks fairy tale. It's all about threes because nothing really happens. She sneaks into the place. She has the pars. She sleeps in the bed. The bears come home. She jumps out the window. So, but something in there, some law of three or something like that.

But it's that not left or right, but just right. It's just right. When you have the two of them working together, and this is something the esoteric tradition has known from day one. I talked about that, say, in the axial age, the Dao and the yin-yang. And they each have a little bit of the other. And that's like, you know, the left brain dealing with the right side of the body and the right brain dealing with the left side of the body. So if if it was one brain, one brain that you might fight each other. And this actually happens with people who have had um there's something called the corpus colosum.

That's it's like a a knot of fibers that connects the two sides of the brain. And during an epileptic fit, there's like an electrical storm that goes back and forth across the hemispheres. And one way to stop that was to cut this thing. So this electrical charges wouldn't they wouldn't have a way to get over to the other side of the brain. And this seemed to work. But one of the side effects of this they discovered is that people would one they'd get in a position where someone would be getting something at the supermarket and the other hand would say no. or somebody would like be taking some clothes out of the closet and they no we don't want that you literally we literally are two people I mean the one we identify with is the one who speaks as language I but there's an ally a neighbor a couple millimeters away from us doesn't use language speaks in images hunches you know that phenomena when you have a name on the tip of your tongue you know you know it the right brain knows it but it doesn't speak and it's it's trying to get it over to you and it's like I know you don't know it or you did know it you forgot it but your friend over here over here knows it he's trying to get it across to you and it's the nun I mean this is may have been what Socrates called the don Shanti is talking about you know when you do the right thing you know it you're doing the the wrong thing you you feel you know icky or whatever and it could be this other, you know, and we all know the old, you know, the angel and the devil on the other side and when talking all that kind of stuff, but maybe it could it could very well be that that's all of that kind of stuff comes out of this confrontation or the conflict between the two sides.

So, in the end, can lost knowledge, imagination be regained? Is it truly lost? What if it weren't? Imagine that. And I just have these figures here because there's some of the people I talk about in the book. Um this is the poet Cage San Taylor Cage. If you remember Kublacon in Xanadu de Kublan a stately pleasure dome decree and he also wrote the rhyme of the ancient mariner. Well he wrote about the imagination and um he said there's there's what he calls true imagination and then what he calls fancy or fantasy. And he said what fancier or fantasy does it takes what's already available and puts it together in strange combination.

So a flying pig or a unicorn or the surrealist said you know uh the unlikely appearance of an umbrella on an operating table. So it's an initial shock in some kind of way, but it's not forcology wasn't truly creative because it doesn't go down deep into the true origins of the imagination and creates something that's uh in a way new, but not novel. Not novel. It's new in the sense that it it renews and brings back up from the depths the the knowledge of the imagination. Uh this is fellow named Owen Barfield who uh wrote a book about college. He was also one of the inklings.

This was a group in Oxford in the early 20th century that included CS Lewis and uh Tolken and they used to meet at a pub in Oxford and talk about poetry and mythology and um so he was in on Tolken talking about Lord of the Rings and CS Lewis talking about you know Narnia and stuff like that. Uh he he he he did write some fiction early on but didn't carry on but he wrote a lot about the history of language. He wrote a fascinating book of history in English words. And he said you if you trace language further and further back, the odd thing is is that the further you back you go, the more poetic it becomes, the more imaginative. And this seemed to go against all standard notions of how evolution Dorian works.

something really simple first then it gradually gets more complex. So at the time he wrote this book 1920s the standard idea was there was called the ug theory of there was ug theory and the woo woo theory of of language where ug you pointed something ugg and two ugs was the three the tree four ugs was something else you know what I mean and then gradually that became but how do they know you're what does it mean to point at something you know what I mean like you sort of have to know that someone's Doing that means you have to look at in the first place. So we we we do that automatically. You have to imagine a time when there was no communication whatsoever. And you have to think language.

It couldn't have been just one person who got it and taught everybody else. It had to be something that was communal, something that emerged, you know, in a group at the same time. But he he said actually you know what it was was that the reason that the ancient languages um had this kind of imaginative character and it was the same sort of thing that he experienced in reading reading poetry was the the metaphors in it was that they actually saw the world that way. They saw the world in that mythological way I talked about in the beginning of the talk. They saw the world in this way that it was embodied with gods and spirits and forces in some way.

We see it now as pros, completely factual. It's stuff. This there has no insides. Garfield said back in the day, we were able to somehow perceive that nature's inside. The only inside now is ours. So it's this gradual evolution of consciousness that he talked about. It's been withdrawn from the world and it inhabits us now. And this is like an intermediary stage for another stage where we will regain this participation but know it have it consciously. Our ancient ancestors were embedded in it. They didn't know they didn't feel the separation from the world that we feel. They were in the world like like figures on a tapestry.

We're in the world like something like we're in a box. We're like we're all in a container. That's how we see the world. They saw themselves as somehow the world was like a tapestry. And one of the things you you can chart the the the the shift from that way of seeing is what GBer talks about the rise of perspective in painting because until the rise of perspective everything's flat and suddenly you get distance and and things in earlier paintings the size of things depended on their importance and gen generally their religious importance right so you might have picture of a saint it might be a mountain and the mountain's really small but the saint is big or something just something like that because the saint is the most important thing with the right perspective is like no it's natural it's a natural world so again it's another shift away from the mythological world into this world of of of of perspective so somebody else that's in it is uh Jung you know Jung um when he went went through the breakup with Freud and uh depending on your point of view he had a psychotic episode or you know the night sea journey into his unconscious they that he recorded in the red book, but he had these experience.

Well, we were talking earlier about about entities, you know, uh before uh you know, the main event got going. And um Jung believed that he in in in in these what he called active imagination where he would allow kind of dreams and fantasies to rise up but try to retain his consciousness at the same time. not not completely go into the dream because then you lose you lose your critical sense and you know you're completely taken over by the dream but to allow it happen and stay with it and then you would get into a dialogue with these figures and Salom you know there's one file if if you know the image it's he's like he has he's he's a gentleman bald and white beard he's looks like Freud a bit and he's got he's got these wings sticking out and he's like a king fisher which is the sort of bird and all that so you would these conversations with these figures and he said I came to see that there was what he called the objective psyche which I think is a more useful term than the collective unconscious because it avoids the notion of kind of one mind sort of thing the meant thing there are things in the psyche that have nothing to do with me I share that space with them I'm this is what Philimon said you you you you think what you're experiencing here is all you but this is like a forest you go into the forest And there's trees and there's flowers and there's animals. They don't belong to you. You're sharing that space with them.

So I mean this is what crazy people would say you know and this is you know young one reason why he didn't talk very openly about these experiences for quite some time because he was talking to people in his head and that's what people came to see him for. You know people doctor I'm talking figures in my head. He was doing that but this is what this is the encounter that he he had. So he he got knowledge of the imagination through the imagination even entered this other completely other imagininal world. And I'll just end with this fellow here on anri Corbin um who uh started out as a phenomenologist branch of uh philosophy.

Then he became um a scholar of uh Persian mysticism and he coined the term the imaginal which is different than the imaginary. So the imaginal, the imaginal would be the realm in which Yung was having his conversations um with these figures in his head. And it's a world that has its own ontology. It has it has its own kind of structure and geography. It has its own inhabitants, but it requires the precision instrument of a trained imagination. And he talks about the Persian um mystic Shu Rodi um in in the 10th century who went on these journeys uh to Mount Calf and these inner inner inner inner kind of travalogues.

Um and Sarati was a student of of neoplatanism and hermetic tradition and all that had had left Alexandria and had had um was living in the Arabic world at the time. So it's another case in which it's like knowledge of the imagination but also complete participation in this other realm that's there metaphorically. You know if I broke it up my head you know like Daniel did with his first book he broke open his head. I I said in my review of the book he had broken open his head so many times you would think he would have installed hinges. Uh but um I you know if I go into my head I'm not going to see any of this sorts of stuff.

It happens in some realm that it's not physical. It's not sensory. Although within it, we can experience physical. We we we feel like we're touching something. We might feel like we're tasting. We see certainly see things in the dream, but we don't or that imaginal space, but we don't see them with our senses. So, I think I've talked quite a bit here. So, thank you very much for enduring this and uh I hope we got something out of it. Thank you. you're such an incredible wealth of uh info. Um what are you what are you working on now actually? Um well let's see two things. Um one thing that's with my published one uh inner traditions is a memoir I wrote uh wrote it last year um just to keep myself occupied.

So it's basically it starts, you know, I'm often asked, how did I go from playing in rock bands to, you know, doing the stuff I do now. So I I wrote a book to answer that question. Um, but strangely enough, what oddly enough, um, the most recent thing I've I've just um got commissioned from another publisher to had an idea for a book. I I mentioned is or isikite in in the talk in a book about about that and that comes out of an experience I had a few years back here when they had the first lockdown you know from COVID and um actually I I I know it was a horrible time. Uh but I have to say I very selfishly have sort of first lockdown nostalgia uh because it was you know the air was clean you could hear the birds there's no traffic you know it was so but one day one morning um I have a garden here and the back door opens out to the garden I went out had a cup of coffee in hand and I suddenly said what's that and it was the sun and I was surprised by the sun and for a couple seconds I couldn't place it.

It was what the and then everything kicked in. Yeah, that's a sign. But it was so and and I tried to figure out I think the reason that happened or or or the antecedent sort of actions that that led to it was that because there was the lockdown. Um I I changed my schedule. I changed my routine quite a bit. And you know, you really had to stay indoors. And so I I in order to just get some kind of exercise to do something different, I I instead of going to the usual markets I would go to and they didn't have anything anyway, you know, the the shelves were all kind of, you know, stripped.

The only thing only thing left one day and I went to local market was all the moatzah crackers. So, you know, but it was we'll get to that. We'll we'll survive on matzas. But um no, I was going to all these other little markets around and I was kind of in sort of crisis mode. Not exactly, but sort of I was putting a little bit more into everything I did. Just a little bit a little bit more effort, little bit just tiny little bit of stuff and attention. And you know, I'm I'm very keen on the the British writer Colin Wilson, and I've written a book about him.

And he has this concept called the robot. And it's very simple. It's kind of an automatic pilot we have that um it takes over repetitious duties. So we don't we don't have to, you know, deal with them ourselves. So, it's the robot that finally learns how to speak French. It's the robot that finally knows how to type. It's the robot that finally knows how to ride your bike, stuff like that. Absolutely indispensable. We couldn't get by without him. But like the left brain, he does his job too well. He's too zealous and he starts doing things that you'd rather do yourself. I mean, I was a kid on TV.

There was an old commercial. was I think it was for Eedron or Anderson where a mother is trying to do everything for the daughter and the daughter turns mother I really want to do it myself and that's what we want to do with the robot and the robot's not a villain he's basically oh sit back chill I I'll take care of everything but what happens is he starts living and we're not living so he's listening to the music he sees the sunset or she you know he's eating the food he's making love to your partner or whatever and you realize you're not living and there's a line from TS Elliott um one of his poems he says where is the life we have lost in living and Wilson said it's in the hands of the robot but Wilson discovered that where pleasant something pleasant won't get you out of it but an inconvenience some kind of obstacle a crisis you know will somehow jar you out of it And momentarily you're you you were in control. And um you know Gurgev you know the the enigmatic esoteric teacher he was a master of creating inconvenience. He was a master of creating artificial crisis. He was a master of pushing people to the extremes.

Sometimes it was brutal and it wasn't for everybody but he would push them to extremes and that's when they would wake up. there's this story about um he had this um his his prairie his institute of harmonious development of man which is outside Paris in font and um there's a story where a arage was a very famous editor literary editor in in London at the time again 100 years ago he became very interested in Gerjuff's work and he he wanted to go he went to the he wanted to go to the institute so he went there and as soon as he got there he was forbidden to smoke he was like a two pack a day guy and he was given a shovel and he was told to dig. So he dug a big hole and they said, "Okay, fill it in." And he did that the next day and the next day and the next day. And it's suddenly like after a week or two, he's like, "What the hell have I got myself into?" And and you know, the nicotine withdrawal is starting to kick in as well. And so he he was crying himself to sleep.

And then he kept saying, "I can't do it. I can't. Okay. Okay. I'll make myself one more." He goes, "One more day." And starts doing it. And suddenly he's enjoying the digging and he's digging like he never dug before and he's just like throwing it and he just suddenly felt this influx of energy and um William James you know famously said we live subject to degrees of fatigue which we come only by habit to obey and so what Gerv did was induce well he induced second wind if you know um you know athletes I can't make it anymore. Okay, one more and bang you on an extra tank of gas.

Um, he was able to do that. He was able to somehow create these situations and that happened. So, in a mild sort of way, I think that's what happened when I walked out the door on that morning and I looked up and I was surprised by the sun. So, that was kind of what So, so what what happened then? You know, what happened then? So, that that was sort of the idea behind behind the book. So, I haven't started writing it yet. So, they've just agreed to to do it. though my title is taking care of isness, but they don't like they don't like that title.

So I think it's a good title. I'm trying to say if I saw that on the book on the stand, I'd pick that up. I said, "Oh, nobody knows what business is." Well, that's the whole idea. I But I'm going to write it. You know how it is. The title, everything wraps around the title. So, I'm going to write it with that. My mind is the title anyway. I think they'll see at the end that it's a good title. Don't tell them. I hope they don't watch this. You call You can call it the business of business. Well, that's that's in there is Yeah, that comes in.

Um, so I want to, you know, have a little time for people to ask questions. Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. Sure. Uh, I guess, yeah, kind of, um, from all of your, you know, studies in this area, which is also applicable to the, you know, the course thesis and like um, what are you, what is your kind of like perspective now? Do you think that we are ever going to recapture the, uh, the lost knowledge of the imagination? Are we going through just a, you know, caluga-esque renegan-esque decline and degeneration or, you know, do, you know, do you think that Steiner, you know, Gerff, these guys are pointing towards something that we're going to maybe access uh as as as a I think it's something that it's potentially, you know, available to us, but we have to do the work.

It's not something that's going to happen automatically. I mean even GPS said yeah the break Ger said you participate with these things consciously right and if if you do that you the transition can be less chaotic he said it's not going to be a picnic anyway but it can be less chaotic but if you don't participate it'll certainly be absolutely chaotic and and catastrophic and all that so um and Gerv sort of saw his mission in a way as a failure in the end right he felt that he tried to it's like oh he was given this task to um you know create an initiatory process for the for the sort of deviant modern western psyche and maybe in the end he felt that he wasn't really able to accomplish that sort of um uh yeah well I mean I I think well there's I there's a sense that in his last days he was there was a sadness around him um and I think perhaps you know maybe he felt that he hadn't well you know you only get the material that comes to you I think that's one of the things too when you set yourself up as a guru. Um, you only get what comes to you. So, I mean, if you just if you write your books, you don't have that immediate, you know, the exchange between you and and the student and all that, but you write your books and anybody can can get them, you know. Um, whereas like when you actually have people, you only deal with who comes to you.

And I mean not to denigrate, you know, he had like a handful of people like Uspensky and JG Bennett and Oage and the ones like the early first generation who kind of you know they they knew what was going on about it. Uh and they all went in different directions. I mean um uh but I I you know I he he think Gerv he had he had a great sense of sorrow, great sense of like pain and suffering of the world. Uh, and I think he knew what was wrong with human beings, but he seemed to have less of a grasp on on what, you know, the good. Ashanti was saying, "We're not all evil." Yeah, we're not we're not all evil.

And I I that's the thing I was going to say. I I don't think we're born evil. I think we're born stupid and lazy. Uh and and and then and then gradually, you know, with any luck, we we we work and work and and and and develop some kind of discipline um you know, in order to make something out of ourselves. Uh so I mean Russo is wrong when he said you know we're all born free uh you know but you know we live in chains or something like that. No, we're not born free at all. We're born with so many restrictions and limitations on us.

But free will is possible. Consciousness is possible but it takes takes effort. And I think that's precise that's the whole thing effort too. My my argument for free will is effort. No machine can make an effort. Right. But that's very No machine can try harder. Yeah. But Gary that's very geffian right. talked about how a soul is not something we simply are given. have to work through conscious labor and intentional suffering to well I mean but he also at sometimes there's there's a story where JG Bennett um uh was somehow concerned about his mother who just passed away and uh he asked Gerjaf for some help and um he he gave him this meditative practice in order to imagine his his mother and imagine Gerv's mother who who was already dead and getting the two together but JG Bennett's mother didn't work to create the soul.

So Geriff some some ways he bent that and he accepted that there was some kind of you know immortality. So but again that that that's the that's the carrot or the stick. I mean the whole idea is is the effort and the effort is one thing where you can feel alive. you you you can you you know that's what I was saying I no machine can make an effort no machine can decide to try harder I can decide to try harder and with second win I can suddenly find energy that I didn't even know I had so um so I'm I'm the I forget that recently there was a you know a big book was in the news that some philosopher you know to prove that there is no free will or something like that I the whole idea of doing that to me just like what What? What?

What a what an absurd waste of time. But in any case, I'm going on question for you. Question. So, let's say somebody was like, "Okay, Gary, love your books. Love your ideas. We're reading all your books. Here's like, I want you to put your ideas into practice and create like an institution, a school. I want you to like train people so they can have this like mutational break or access the active imagination or move into the next octave of consciousness or whatever. And here's like I'm not a guru. I'm not I'm not a guru though. I'm not You don't have to be a guru. What What What would you do?

What would you have? I mean, I just I just said it. Put I mean, look look, the next time you have to clean your flat or the next time there's something you really hate doing. The next time there's something you really hate doing, love doing it. Put everything you got into doing it. Remember digging and digging and crying himself to sleep, thinking, "What the hell have I got?" I used to tell HG Wells he didn't know what he was talking about, and here I am digging a ditch with this nutty guy from Armenia. What am I doing? And then the next day he's like he's discovered that he's, you know, he's he's a millionaire.

So put more in the robot. The robot does everything for us most of the time. Do something. Don't let the robot do it. And again, the robot's not a not a bad guy or a bad girl. We need them. If you don't have the robot, you can't tie your shoes. That was also process. As as one gets older, I think the robot tends to take over more and more, right? People just go into this very automatic Yeah. Well, that's that's the thing, you know, we have to we have to fight against that, too. I mean, but we earlier this this idea that evolution of consciousness is is colonial.

And I would say it is, but not in this political sense. I would say it's spirit trying to colonize matter. It's the force of life coming into this world of ma, what we call matter here, and gaining a greater foothold on it and increasing freedom. This is what Bergson said. So um a rock doesn't have any freedom at all. You know a plant has a little bit more freedom. It can take advantage of its you know uh surroundings in some way and absorb stuff from it and it can grow. An animal is even more freedom. It doesn't have to stay in one space. It can go move around in different spaces to do things.

Human beings have even more freedom because we we not only inhabit the physical world and we we inhabit an inner world that more or less we think animals don't have although I'm not against pans psychism at all but a rock doesn't have like Bergson said the unconsciousness of a falling rock is different from the unconsciousness of a growing cabbage so um there might be some kind of pan consciousness over but it's not you know the tree isn't thinking what am I going to do today you know um uh but and and not only do we inhabit this physical world and this we also inhabit this world of ideas this world of culture which is something that didn't come into the world until we existed it did not come into the world until we were here and we started building this you know it's what the new it's the new sphere in some way or what papa called world three you know the first world is physical world the second world is sort of the internal world. World three is the world of ideas. So if there was a catastrophe, you know, and all the libraries were destroyed, it would take an immense amount of time for us to rebuild anything. But the libraries weren't destroyed and there was still we had access to that. We could I'm not I I don't think it's I'm not a dystopian.

I I don't think we necessarily are really going to go, you know, smack into a wall. But I but I I I I think things are going to get a even bit more dicey than they they have been now. Gary, question for you. When you what you brought up before about um the laws that we're subjected to, it also reminded me of Gerjap for some reason. Doesn't he have this whole thing about how we're at our human state, we're subject to a certain number of laws like cosmic law? Yeah. Yeah. 12. Well, he well that this is what he called the ray of creation. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a take on the neoplatonic ladder of being or the cabala or the hermetic planets.

So, you have I mean the neo neoplatinist this is plutinus in in 200 AD in in Alexandria uh in Greek Egypt, Roman Egypt by then. And you have um so you have the one or the absolute or you have something that's non-manifest. So it's it's not in the physical world. It's non-manifest. It's the non-manifest source of the physical world and its energy or its being descends. It comes down and um it necess like the sun necessarily shines. If it did not shine, it would not be a sun. So it it doesn't decide to shine. It can't not shine. It by definition it being a sun, it shines.

and and and the the the shining in the neoplatonic sense is this more becoming more dense of being and so you get uh then the there's the world of forms the platonic world of forms the ideas and then you get uh the animi which is the soul of the world and it's this kind of in inner inner side of nature inner side of the world that connects everything to everything else and then finally you get the physical kind of world. So I mean so Gerv said in his system um the worst place the worst place to be is the moon because the moon is subject to 96 laws right the second worst place is the earth is subject to 48 laws right but if you through the efforts the teaching the fourth way you know his system you could raise yourself up to the next level which would be the level of the sun and that would be 12 laws and then there's one more six but nobody ever gets up to that one. That kind of thing. So, so it's a certain sense, you know, there's certain restrictions on our actions and you can see the same thing with the gnostics. There's all the archons, the these kind of evil spirits that you have to fight um or the the hermetic journey through the planets.

Uh around the same time as the Gnostics, there were groups called hermits, but we don't know who they are. They they they were all anonymous. We don't have any names for them. We have some names of the early gnostics like Basil, Valentinis, and people like that, but we don't know the Hermitus. But they had this idea that creation once again was descent. And um great noose hired out. Noose does the the one the mind doesn't do any of the hands-on stuff. He hires out. He gets somebody to do it. So he hires out. He gets the master craftsman, the demi urge. This is in Plato as well.

And he's the one who makes the world, right? And he makes the earth and he makes all the different planets. And um uh what happened is that um man who originally it's human man originally in a spiritual realm with news looked at the handiwork and became so in love with the earth so enraptured with the earth that it reached out and and want wanted to embrace it. In doing that it fell through the planets the spheres of the planets and each of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Moon, each of them have certain characteristics, certain kind of qualities that tend to be a bit negative in the sense that they're more and more dense and solidified. So what what the hermitists did when they went out into the desert in Alexandria, they did these kind of rituals um where they tried to evoke or induce what they what subsequently called cosmic consciousness.

Gorus me was the one who and that that you know that got picked up in the 60s with all that kind of thing but it was a notion of rising up through the plains rising up through the different planets the journey back back to the one. So this that's a motif that you find through all of pretty much all of esotericism. This descent from the one and then the journey back. Um you know the gnostics thought matter was completely evil and there was no redeeming this world at all. Whereas um hermitists weren't didn't have quite as pessimistic a view. They said no. Yes, we find ourselves here subject to all these laws and restrictions, but there's ways for us to uh relieve ourselves of them and and you know um regain our true heritage and so on and so on.

So yeah, I mean in a way I mean for I mean I I was involved in the curric many many years ago in in New York in Los Angeles in the 80s but in a way it's how should I say it I came to feel was all kind it's like scaffolding it's kind of there's some things you can see I'm not saying it's not real but it's kind of a scaffolding within basically this the super effort is is the practice so it's a context in which you're given a kind of story where it makes sense that you're doing this. So in in a way to get from one level of laws to another there's a whole system of what Gerv calls kind of hydrogens and there's different kind of ways in which we can transform energies inside ourselves and they go from denser to lighter and all this kind of stuff and it's all it's all put together in a very scientific looking way because that was the that was the that's who he was pitching the idea to to put it as simply as that. So at different times he presented his system in different ways to different people because That was the andspensky is the one who you know codified all it and he had a very logical um kind of scientific mind. So he's the one who put it together in this kind of nice neat sort of package. Uh but then Geriff would do something very I mean the last days you know you know about the the dinners where he he crammed 50 or 60 people into a tiny tiny tiny little flat in Paris and he would make this huge sumptious meal and before it everybody had to knock back half a dozen shots of vodka.

Um and then he would look at everybody and see them and you know pierce their persona, their personality and see who they really were and he gave them nicknames and stuff like that. And then they had to eat this sumptious dinner and we'll go on for hours and hours. So that was very different than you know the early stuff. All right, I think uh I think we're going to wrap up for today. Uh thank you everybody for for being here. Thank you for Ashanti and Gary for joining us and um yeah, really looking forward to next time. And um Gary, yeah, look forward to more opportunities to drill in.

I wanted to talk about the the Trump and the and the right-wing occultism, but we'll have to save that for another time. Yeah, we'll do we'll do another time. We'll do something else. All right. Was thank you so much. It was absolute pleasure um to hear Ashanti and also to have my chance to do do my bit. Yeah, that was awesome. Thanks everybody. We'll see you on Wednesday.

Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.