Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Mark Booth

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Mark Booth is an author, editor, and publisher who also writes under the pen name Jonathan Black. He studied philosophy and theology at Oxford and built a publishing career working with authors including Rupert Sheldrake, Graham Hancock, and Lorna Byrne. His bestselling The Secret History of the World explores history through esoteric and mystical traditions. His latest book, The Secret History of the Universe, examines the relationship between spiritual belief and modern science through the lives and ideas of pioneering scientists. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: AG1 ⁠⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/tetra⁠⁠ ------ LMNT Electrolytes ⁠⁠https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace ⁠⁠https://Squarespace.com/tetra⁠⁠ Use code 'TETRA' ------ Lectio 365 ⁠⁠https://Lectio365.com⁠⁠ ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions ⁠⁠https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter Follow Tetragrammaton: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/tetranow⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/tetragrammaton.now⁠⁠ Follow Rick: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/rickrubin⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/rickrubin

tetragrammatum. We have exaggerated ideas about how separate we are from everything, how cut off. We have exaggerated ideas about our own originality, perhaps. I think in all areas of life, we like to take credit for ideas we have, if they're brilliant or funny, but we don't know where they come from. They swim into our mental space. And if we were more aware, as ancient spiritual teachings asked us to be, we would realize that we are little semi-local extrusions of a universal intelligence. Was there a time when humans didn't think of themselves as separate from either each other or the things around them?

Yes, I believe there was. Christian Church is called the fall. According to Christianity, we are spiritual beings who fell into matter and became encased in material bodies. Generally, that is conceived of in terms of falling into a material realm which was already formed. The esoteric philosophy is slightly, slightly different, and that is that the material world only gradually hardened after we had sunk into it. And of course, all religions around the world have myths which describe forms morphing and changing, and one creature developing out of and the animals and plants that we're familiar with coming into being. The myths refer to a time when solid matter was not fixed as it is today.

And the human beings who remember that process and started the process of putting those myths into human language would have come. completely understood that we are part of a whole. Then if you go to the Siege of Troy, for example, Homer describes the armies fighting battles on the planes in front of Troy, being able to see and interact with the gods who are present, who are striding across the plains with them, and probably, prompting them to do stuff. In Homer's worldview, it's not that I get angry and decide to hit someone with my sword,

it's that Mars, the god of war, prompts me to do it. And so in Homer's time, they had very little sense of the interior life. Everything was happening out there. We were part of this hole which included the god. the gods. And then if you move on to the Odyssey, we see the seeds of change, because the great hero of the Iliad is Achilles, who is very large, very handsome, very strong, he's a pretty kind of straightforward guy. The hero of the Odyssey, Odysseus, is very different. He's smaller, he's a bit awkward looking, but he's clever.

And Odysseus, not Achilles, won the Trojan war, and he did it by means of the Trojan horse, which was perhaps the first trick in history. If it hadn't been the first trick, why on earth were the Trojans have been taken in by it? Yeah. And then as we follow his adventures, he is all the time using his cleverness and his trickery to defeat the monsters and the sorceresses and the other creatures he meets on his journey. And interestingly, one of the most famous episodes is when he is imprisoned in a cave by a giant.

with an eye in the middle of his forehead. And while the giant is sleeping, he gets a giant pole, sharpens it, and jams it in that eye. And I think that what Homer is describing there is human beings beginning to lose that third eye faculty of being able to see our connection

with all the different, gods and spirit. Do you think of them as fictional stories or something else? No, I think that they're factual accounts of things that happened before matter was fixed. Because as matter became harder and harder, it became more difficult for high-level spiritual beings to squeeze down into the material realm and interact with us. Do we know why this happened? Yes, we do.

I think esoteric philosophy gives a very good explanation. Our material bodies and our skulls are there to filter out spiritual influences. If we were like angels and had no material filter, we would be completely aware of all the other spiritual beings and of God, and we would have no free will because we would always do exactly what God wanted us to do. Angels do not have free will. We have sunk into matter into these material bodies in order to develop faculties such as free will and conceptual thought, which may not exist anywhere else in the universe, we may be in that way at the evolving tip of the universe.

On the question of conceptual thought, if you consider angelic communications as they come in visions in the Old Testament or in the book of Revelation, they are always messages told entirely in symbolic language. There are no concepts. I think probably angels and other spirits think entirely in symbolic terms, and they don't have the capacity for symbolic thought that we have, and that's one of the reasons why we're so important. Now, obviously, this faculty of free will means that sometimes we get it wrong. Is there a relationship between that angelic world of connection and what we refer to as the coming singularity. We discussed earlier how human beings are, in a sense, little local extrusions of a universal intelligence.

Science is saying pretty much the same thing these days. if the universe is intelligent, if intelligence is woven into the fabric of the universe, then we were always quite likely to evolve. According to classical science, the old Newtonian science, to scientism, we are a complete freak of nature.

It was always very, very unlikely. almost, it was vanishingly unlikely that something like human beings would ever evolve. Because so many different laws of nature, so many things had to come together that some scientists posit that there are infinite number of universes, we just happen to live in the one where it all comes together. If it did come together in the way that science says, that was a lot of would be a miracle. Yes, exactly, exactly. It's funny the idea that old science would prove a miracle. It is. It's an interesting idea. Yeah, well, Einstein's thought about this matter, and he said that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible

to us. How come we're so intelligent that we can think about these things? That is a miracle. It's very mysterious. If, on the other hand, intelligence is woven into the fabric of the universe and there is an intelligence behind it, we are always likely to happen. By the same token, so are other forms of intelligence. And there's a computer scientist and physicist called Stephen Wilfrum who would say that sitting here, you and I are probably surrounded in this room by many. different types of intelligence that we do not have the language, whether mathematical or in

physics or verbal or visual, to perceive or understand. Yeah, we perceive a narrow band of information. There could be some form of life in those other bands that we're not aware of. Yes. It's interesting to look at AI in the context of that. intelligence was of course originally invented on the model of human intelligence. And of course it has in some ways evolved beyond that and improved on that. When Demis Hussarvis, who created deep mind, asked the computer to learn how to play chess so it can beat any human being,

he just gave it the rules of chess and said, now play against yourself for as long as it takes. It took nine hours. That just shows how fast AI can develop. So it may be that these evolving AIs themselves may be interacting with the universal intelligence in the same way. that we are, which would be a hopeful sign. The idea that consciousness is outside of us and we access it.

Yes. And you're saying that if it gets to the point where AI has consciousness, the only way that's possible is that if it too is tapping into this universal consciousness? I think I'm just saying that's one of the ways it might develop. I think that the part of our insularity and our kind of collective egotism, which has come about because we are in separate individual material bodies, is that we think that other forms of intelligence or consciousness have to be like ours. But we don't apply that to a dog or cat, for example, do we?

So I think there's no reason why an advanced AI may have a very sort of. special and advanced form of consciousness, which isn't, however, like ours. And if there are these different forms of intelligence evolving all around us, some of which will have been evolving since the Big Bang. So they may be pretty intelligent. Some of them may have been meant to be by the great cosmic intelligence. That may be what angels are, for example, or gods. But there may be others which were not meant to be in the same way. And they may be closer to what we think of as aliens. We might imagine for a moment an unembodied, intelligent entity

swimming through the universe and becoming curious what it would be like to experience. the material world in a sensuous and sensual way. Like a ghost, not a ghost coming from a human, but a ghost-like entity. Yes, yes. Well, I think that some aliens may be like that, and they want to know what it feels like to touch and to have sex and to smell and to taste. And maybe, let's imagine them coming across human beings at an early stage. of evolution, looking at the human brain and thinking, oh, that looks like a nice little cozy nest.

It's like Mount Olympus. This story exists. Yes, yes, yes. And, of course, the story of the Watchers and the mighty men of renown in the book of Genesis and the book of Enoch. There are stories all around the world about gods and divine beings mating with humans. And there are several different meanings you could describe to that, but one is that is how we each come to have a divine spark in us. And mystics would say it is because we have this divine spark in us that angels are attracted to us. As nutrition science advanced through the mid-20th century,

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Daily nutritional support in a glass is now the result of applied science. Learn more at drinkag1.com slash tetra. Do it today. What is the new high strangeness? These days, statistical surveys show that you are as likely to experience an encounter with an alien as you are to encounter an angel or a spirit. And I think that what's happening now is that after a couple of thousand years, when we in the West have been, dominated by monotheistic religion, by the belief that there is only one God, what is happening right now is a shift back towards the polytheism that the Greeks and the Romans and

Indian religion taught, because people are experiencing many different types of alien, angels, cryptids. In the Psalms, there's the phrase, the God of Gods is the monotheistic Bible. Yes. And it says the God of Gods. Yes. It's an interesting phrase. It is, isn't it?

I don't think the Bible is a monotheistic document, but we've been taught to believe. But when you hear God of Gods, maybe in all of the polytheistic religions, there's still a god of gods. Maybe there is the godhead or the father in the same way that in the Christian Bible there are angels below God. Yes. Maybe those angels are a version of the gods of polytheistic religion. Maybe it's all the same. I think it is all the same. When Paul talks about the powers that be, he is referring to the same entities as the gods of the planets that the Greeks and the Romans discussed. I think it is also the case that the spiritual realms evolve in the same way that the material realm does. And I think also there are regional variations so that, for example,

in a Japanese or Korean horror film, a demon is going to look very different to the way a demon looks in an American or an English horror film, well, is that culture or might it be the case that they are actually different in different places of the earth? And I think similarly, the higher beings evolve, and some fall by the way. I worry when I hear about some occultists today who actively cultivate gods and other entities. from previous ages, gods who have nothing to do with modern spiritual evolution. I think that is probably quite harmful. Plants are not the same all over the world.

It's not unreasonable to think in the spiritual realms that could also be the case. Yes. Because it is life. It is. Yeah, taking that thought for a walk, I think it's interesting to consider how, our ideas about what happens to us after death have changed. If you look at Greek myths or the Old Testament, the Psalms, there's no idea of heaven there. What happens is that the spirit of the dead goes to a place of shades, to a dark valley,

where it has a sort of half-existence. And ideas of heaven, as they're talked about in modern Christianity, that's a very recent idea. The idea that we go to this place where we hang about with angels and we're greeted by our relatives, that originated with Swedenborg in the 18th century, and it only really became popular in Victorian times. And in a way, it's a very materialistic way of thinking about heaven. It's heaven as an embodiment of all the nice things in this life. Have the great scientists always been believers?

Yes, they have, I think up until the 1960s probably. When John Maynard Keynes discovered Newton's cache of, diaries and his notebooks and discovered how obsessed he was with magic and alchemy, he said that Isaac Newton was the last of the magicians. Well, he was wrong. If you look at the extraordinary lives of the scientists that I describe in the secret history of the world, they were all deeply interested in the esoteric and the occult. They were strange people. They are very good examples of the idea that genius is next to madness.

Not only did they have to find new modes of thought to understand the data, the results they were seeing, they needed to have other forms of consciousness too. And some of them achieved these different forms of consciousness by spiritual practice, some by means of drugs. Nikola Tesla was a very good example of that. I mean, he had a form of consciousness, which is very different to most people's. He had something like an electric,

storm going on inside his head all the time. And images often of scientific equipment, which had yet to be invented, appeared to him in minute detail. And sometimes he had to reach through them to see if they were really there or not. He had a vision of his mother dying at the exact moment that his mother was in fact dying on the other side of the Atlantic. He was very interested in Indian mysticism, in Advaita Vedanta, which these ancient Indian texts

were only recently translated into European languages and European intellectuals, Tesla, and in fact, all the great scientists of the beginning of the 20th century were absolutely fascinated by, And Tesla was strange in other ways. I think a fly landing on a window pane next to him would be deafening to him. Highly sensitive. Yes.

He said he couldn't touch a woman's hair except perhaps with the barrel of a gun. His closest relationship when he was living in America was a pigeon. He used to go and feed pigeons in Central Park, and he took a wounded pigeon back to his flat and looked after it. This pigeon was his constant companion. And when that pigeon died, he said he saw a brighter light than he had ever seen before in his life, including in all his experiments with electricity and light.

So he was mad. by most people's definitions, but he was also a genius, and by inventing alternating current, he made the great advances of the 20th century possible. And he was also, I think because of the influence, or partly because of the influence of Indian teachings, he was also a great idealist. He was working on ways of finding energy which would be available. for free, for everyone. And some people would say,

there were industrialists who didn't want that. How did you come to write this book? The secret history of the universe is a result of having written the secret history of the world. I was working in publishing in London at the time, and I had been fascinated by esoteric ideas for many years and I'd been looking

for this book in second-hand bookshops new bookshops when it became clear it didn't exist I thought somebody needs to write this so I did and what I did was that I

looked at esoteric and mystical ideas about history from around the world to see what they have in common because if something is universally believed to be true, that doesn't make it true, but it makes it more likely to be true. And I didn't try to prove any of it because I think to prove, actually even a small part

of it would have taken more books than all the books on the many hundreds of miles of shells in the Vatican Library of the occult to prove. I just told it as a story, and what I was saying to people was, does this resonate with you? Does this describe the universe as you experience it? And it did resonate. I love that book.

That's how I came to learn about you. Yes. Beautiful book. Thank you. It very nearly didn't happen. I was working in publishing it, and my agent was going to send it, out and I thought, God, if everyone in publishing reads this proposal, they might think

are completely bonkers and it might ruin my career or they might just think it's rubbish. And he sent it out and it was rejected by every single publisher in London. And then a new publisher started up and my agent sent it to him and he said, I'd been looking for this book for years. But I think what's interesting about that is that it only just squeezed through from the realm of ideas into physical reality. It might very well not have done. And publishers sometimes say any script which is worthy will find the publisher. I see no reason to believe that's true. I just think that's complacency. But it did get out there. Thank goodness, many people responded to it.

And one of the things that happened then was that various people from different walks of life began to get in touch with me. Obviously, spiritually inclined people, but artists and writers, soldiers, spies. Spies love a good secret. I mean, there's always been this connection since Dr. D through to Crowley, this connection between the occult and spying. But perhaps the most surprising was scientists. Some of them confided in me about their very well-developed interest in the esoteric and the occult, even extending to taking part in magical ceremonies, quite senior scientists, professors at major universities.

I have to be very careful not to give clues, because I think in the present climate they'd lose their jobs. They very kindly and carefully began to explain to me why the book resonated with them and what was happening in modern science, which also resonates. And I think it was difficult for them. I realized that many of them don't think in words. They think in mathematics. And if they have to explain the ideas to a dunce like me, I mean, I hated physics at school.

I think I just got a grade above fail. To explain it to me, they have to translate it into words. And then I thought it was my job to try to turn those words into visual images. Because I think if you can visualize something, then you understand it not on the level of maths, but on quite an important level. And it's the level you need to understand it if you're to understand it's philosophical.

spiritual implications. So there have been books in the past which have talked about the relationship between science and spirituality. Some of them may be a bit vague. Richard Feynman had this phrase hand-waving, which is when people don't really completely understand. But they say, oh yeah, well, this all, you know, the quantum realm and spiritual experience is sort of like like this. So I was pointed in the direction of the right materials and the book. I think it has about 100 pages of notes where the scientists themselves are quoted so that there is no question about the reality of what is happening with the new physics and its spiritual implications. You said you were pointed in the direction of the information. How do you mean?

The scientists... Oh, I see. I thought it was maybe... more. Well, I think that it's certainly true that large sections of the secret history of the world kind of downloaded themselves. And I have the spiritual practice, which is part of my spiritual practice, but I find that when I wake up in the morning, if I lie there still, I will often find that new ideas, new sentences, new paragraphs have come to me during the night, and that they're in perfect form, and that is true of this book as well. And the esoteric explanation of that would be that during sleep, your soul and your spirit arise partially out of your body. And this enables

spiritual beings to talk to you without the filter of the material body. And so that's quite a good way to get informed about stuff. How does the book begin? Well, the book begins by saying that most people want to believe there is something beyond the material world, but we have been brought up to believe that science is, a barrier to that. So that I've written this book to try to show that that is not the case. And the story begins at the end of the 19th century when scientists were discovering new things in science and in the spiritual realms. Many of the great scientists, for example, Mary Curie,

were very interested in spiritualism. Now, these days, we might tend to look down on spiritualism. But in fact, at that time, it was very advanced thinking, and it represented a movement to try to examine spiritual phenomena in a scientific manner. And when the originators of quantum mechanics were, enabled to follow up on Marie Curie's discoveries about the energy content of atoms. When they were enabled by the technology to look at things at a smaller and smaller level,

they began to see some really weird things. They began to see particles popping in and out of existence, which raises the question where, has they come from? from. They would see particles passing through a solid object and coming out the other side unchanged like a ghost going through a wall. This doesn't work happily with the materialist worldview. No, not at all. No, it's completely contrary to it. They saw that particles long distances apart could coordinate their behavior, although there seemed to be no possible causal connection.

They saw that you could change the behavior of an object just by looking at it, which suggests something which in other contexts is called psychokinesis. And as you just said, classical science was completely ill-suited and unfitted to explain these phenomena which would count as supernatural if they happened. in the realm of human affairs. And that is why Niels Bohr and Heisenberg and Schroeder and Pauley looked to the Kabbalah, to Indian mysticism, to Rothera crucianism, to find new models of thought and new forms of consciousness.

They look to alchemy to try to understand how just looking at a part of the world. political could change its behavior. This way of looking at things reached a crisis in the Second World War. Because of Hitler, many great scientists fled from Germany and other parts of Europe, which were under threat. In the early 20th century, most of the great scientists were German, and they were also German Jews. And it's interesting to speculate that if Hitler hadn't been anti-Semitic, the international language of science today would probably be German.

Interesting. But they fled, some to England, most of them to America. And some of them knew that Heisenberg, who had chosen not to leave, had chosen to stay, despite. the things he knew were going on. They knew that Heisenberg was helping the Nazis to develop the atomic bomb. And they knew that if Hitler had the atomic bomb first, that would be curtains. Einstein and others wrote the American president and said, look, you've got to fund us to make an atomic bomb first. And that is how the Manhattan Project started. And it was led by, of course, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It sounds a lot like the AI race now. Yes. We need to develop faster than China. It's very like that. It's very like that. And there are other esoteric parallels we can go into, I think. When I hear you describe this group of German scientists, I'm hearing that at that point in time,

science had become supernatural. Yeah, that is right. And it was about to get a lot more supernatural. Oppenheimer was a very weird guy, and I really enjoyed the film. But the film obviously needed Oppenheimer to be a hero so that we could root for him. But he lived a life of barely suppressed mania.

He tried to kill people on two separate occasions. Really? Yeah. He was on holiday. with a friend in Paris and when that friend told him he planned to get married, Oppenheimer made a very serious attempt to strangle him. He was working as a post-grad student in Cambridge under a physicist who would later win the Nobel Prize for his contribution to inventing the atom bomb. This physicist didn't reflect back to Oppenheimer, who,

his own estimate of his abilities. And Oppenheimer injected an apple with cyanide and gave it to the professor, which luckily he didn't eat, but there was a huge scandal. And Oppenheimer's parents had to come and sorted out with the college authorities. I've no idea if any money changed hands. But here was another very strange man. And at the same time that the Manhattan Project was in progress, there were some English magicians, Alistair Crowley and others, who were performing magical ceremonies in

Ashdowne forests and New Forest to try to keep Hitler at bay. Is that widely known? Yes, it is. It is. Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, was also involved in that. But a much deeper and more effective form of magic was taking place in the Manhattan Project, because what Oppenheimer, John von Neumann and the others were doing was that they were taking these supernatural phenomena in the underworld

and finding ways to coax them up into the realm of human affairs and amplify them. So they were like magicians in the story by Lovecraft, summoning up monsters from the deep. And the result was Hiroshima. And Oppenheimer famously says it. Yes, yes. I am become the destroyer of worlds, yes. So science then and now, as you say with AI,

brings these supernatural phenomena into the realm of human affairs on a very large scale and they can potentially bring enormous benefits and they have but they also take us to a crossroads

they're dangerous tools they're very dangerous yes yes in esoteric tradition in the mystery schools of the ancient world and the secret society a lot of care was always taken so that the powers that people gained through their practices would never outrun their moral and spiritual development. But I think that what we see in the world today is not that.

But the enormous power resides in the hands of a very few people, and we don't know how moral and spiritual their intentions are. L MNT. Element Electrolites. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function.

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Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmn-t.com slash tetra. And stay salty with element electrolytes. L MNT. Why was secrecy always such a big part of the mystery schools and the early esoteric traditions? I think it was partly because it enabled the people who were initiated to have powers which they could wield for good or ill. I think it was also a very delicate process. So the mystery schools in Greece and Rome were in buildings which were near the great temples,

some parts of which were open to the populace, but nobody was allowed in them unless they were candidates for initiation. They were a bit like Freemasonic lodgers and that people knew they were there, but almost nobody knew what went on inside them. And out of the Greek mystery schools, which initiated most of the great writers and artists and philosophers we know about, came great changes in human consciousness. Out of the mystery schools came mathematics, geometry, philosophy. Greek drama was the development of the enactments of the deeds of the gods which took place in the mystery schools.

So they were plays for the gods? So if you were initiated into a mystery school, after a long period of instruction, during which you would be asked to fast, probably, you would be taken by priests wearing masks, Sometimes animal mass, down very long corridors, you would be asked to drink something called the waters of forgetfulness, which... Would that be a chemical? People have always speculated, you know,

where they're hallucinogens in the waters of forgetfulness. You would have to take part in ceremonial and sacrificial rights. Which were not unusual at that time. Anyway. No. This would be in a confined space in a chamber. You might be bathed in blood. To us, it sounds really foreign. Yes. But in a time when ritual offering was common in religion, yes. It wasn't so foreign in that world. No, that's absolutely right. Sculpture was another unfolding of the human spirit that came out of the mystery schools. and sculptures were originally conceived of as physical bodies for an unembodied being to inhabit.

And it was thought that the god could then speak to you through the statue. So the candidate for initiation was experiencing all these sort of things. They were going further and further down into the earth. At one point, they might be shoved into a snake pit. They might be confronted by monsters, a giant snake apparently with a human head. There's one account of a candidate being attacked by hordes of demons. So they were descending into what, in terms of our culture, we'd call hell. And it was getting darker and darker.

Then when the darkness was complete, they would suddenly feel a blow across the forehead, which knocked them over. And at this point, they sincerely believed they were going to die, because they had sworn on pain of death in the process of instruction, that they renounced all wickedness, that they were totally good-hearted, and they had told the whole truth. And as they're lying there, they're thinking, ah, well, perhaps I didn't. And perhaps I'm about to die. And that's very important because initiation is a form of rebirth of being born again. And that's where Christian ideas are being born again. Is that where baptism comes from? Yes, yes, it's part of that tradition.

And at that moment, when they were in the depth of hell and thought they were about to be extinguished, priests would come again and lead them upwards into a huge chamber of light where they met shining beings they believed to be the gods. And it said that once you've been through this process, it was impossible to doubt life after death. It wasn't just that they were taught information. The idea was that this would make them enlightened beings so that they would. they could be leaders of the nation in a better way.

With the Greek mystery schools descended from the Egyptian mystery schools? Yes, I think they were. And behind them, there may have been Atlantean mystery schools and Lemurian mystery schools. Those mystery schools existing at a time before matter was fixed in the form we have today. always been mystery schools around the world? I think there have, yes. There are two different schools of interpretation because some people would see initiations in African tribes, for example, of the sort that anthropologists studied in the 19th and early 20th century as being the sort of primary form of initiation. There is an esoteric tradition. There is an esoteric tradition

which says it's the other way around, and that those tribal forms of initiation are sort of partial memories of much more formal initiations that took place in Atlantis, say. Who are some of the other scientists you cover besides Oppenheimer? My favorite scientist is Wolfgang Powley. He was the generation after Einstein and Niels Bohr. He is probably best known for the Powley Exclusion principle, which dictates that no two particles in the same state can be joined together. What arises from that is that the universe is full of a vast array of different types of molecules,

If it wasn't for this exclusion principle, we would just be living in a soup without any bits in it. Could it be as simple as just positive and negative, though? Well, that is one example of it, yes. Einstein said of Pauley that he was his spiritual air. I think he was the brightest of the next generation. And he had quite an emotional life. His mother committed suicide when he was in his 20s because she discovered that her husband, Paola's father, had been having an affair.

This was made worse for Powley because he'd just written a letter to his mother in which he said, I'm afraid I can't love you in the way you want me to love you because I'm a scientist and a very cerebral sort of fellow. So he felt really guilty about that. So he was quite a spiky individual. He was sort of famous for his put-downs, even though he was hypersensitive to the things people said to him. He went looking for love in the Red Lights District.

He was often very drunk and he'd get thrown out and badly beaten up sometimes. And he fell in love with a very beautiful... nightclub singer. And he married her and took her back to the university where she was very quickly unfaithful to him. And Powley said, well, I could understand if it was a Matador, but a chemist. And he also suffered from something which became known as the Powley effect. scientific equipment and other things like vases would often shatter and break and malfunction in his presence. And one Nobel Prize-winning physicist banned Powley from ever visiting his lab.

So, like, he would get around electronic equipment and it would malfunction? Yes, and sometimes explode. And glass would break in his presence. Yes, yes. He was very depressed by this, because, he was very depressed by this. Because what was actually happening was that he would feel this build-up of intense darkness within him. And it was when this reached a pitch of intensity that these things would happen. And it was because of that, he went to seek treatment from Carl Gustav Young.

And they became firm friends. And they worked together on something. which has become a concept which has become very important in spiritual circles, which is synchronicity. And it originated with an idea that Powley knew his friend Schrodinger had talked about. And that is the idea referred to earlier of particles coordinating their behavior, even though they were not attached and even quite far away. At that stage, I think it was 1935 that Schrodinger first wrote about this. He had this idea that something like this might be possible.

He wrote it in a letter to Einstein. I think it was in 1935. Einstein didn't believe it at all. He thought it was fooie. And for a long time, people tried to reproduce this phenomenon in the lab to create it. And eventually they did. and they found that they could make particles coordinate their behavior over a number of miles. And then people began to think, well, actually, perhaps we don't need to create it.

Perhaps it happens spontaneously all the time, which is now what physicists believe. So that a physical object, a cup on a table, we might think is supported there by the the table beneath it. New physics would say there are other factors necessary. It is attached to other things very far away. Is that entanglement? That is entanglement. That is quantum entanglement.

And quantum entanglement goes a long way to explaining why things in the universe are shaped in the way they are and why they behave as. they do. Quantum entanglement, leading physicists now think, is what knits the universe together. So we've come a long way from that kind of gleam in Shreding as I. What Pauley and Jung were concerned with was trying to work out how this entanglement might play a part in human affairs. entanglement, for example, explain mind reading. Might it be the case that because of entanglement, something I feel very deeply materially affects things that are happening out there and the world. So it's about a meaningful connection which, obviously, in terms of classical physics, is

completely impossible. Jung gives an example of it. He was giving this woman therapy. She had a very narrow, materialistic view of life. She found her life meaningless, and this was painful to her in the therapy session. She was describing how she had had a dream in which a scarab beetle had appeared, a golden scarab beetle. And just at that moment, A beetle started knocking on the window next to them. And Jung was able to catch the beetle, show it to her, and say, look, here is your scarlete beetle. And so the universe was telling her something.

The universe was saying, yes, there is meaning. Now, Pauley was obsessed by the number 137. I-137. One over 137 is what in physics is called the fine structure constant. And it's one of those things that has to be in exactly that proportion for the universe we live in to be as it is. It is also a very important number in the Kabbalah. And so here, Pauly was again making these connections between ancient and spiritual.

traditions. Did he know it was important in the Kabbalah or no? Yes, he was deeply read in the Kabbalah, yeah. And why is it important in the Kabbalah? What's the meaning of 137? Well, in the Kabbalah, it is the number of the name of God, and it is the number that describes the way the universe is working together. So it's a very similar concept.

Powell used to see this number wherever he went. And when he was dying, he died young, I think he was 56, he had pancreatic cancer. he was lying in his hospital room and people were coming to visit him to say goodbye and he suddenly noticed the number of the room and it was 137 and so the universe was telling him something on one level I suppose it was probably quite grim it was telling him you are going to die but it was also telling him, yes, there is something beyond, as mystical traditions teach. So much of today's life happens on the web.

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Track inventory and connect with customers while you're on the go. Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit Squarespace dot com slash tetra and get started today. Since classical physics and new physics are at odds, is classical physics now considered obsolete, no longer taught? I think the sad thing is that the academic establishment, although it would, of course, it cannot

deny what new physics has revealed, it still has its head in the world of classical physics. It's hard. Yeah, it's very odd. When I worked in publishing, I used to publish Rupert Seldroyd, who is a fantastically interesting biologist. He was a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Morphic Resonance. Yes.

And because he published a book on that, he was a book. that subject, which they thought was woo-woo, the whole of academia turned its back on him. Similarly, there's a man called Brian Josephson, who in his twenties discovered something which came to be known as the Josephson Junction, and this shows how at the quantum level, a small particle can disrupt and be used to control a stream of particles. And it's only because Because of that, we have the computer technology we have today. He made all that possible. But he joins the Society for Psychical Research.

And again, the whole of academia turned its back on him. Grants were canceled. Invitations to conferences and lectures were canceled. And it was very hard for the guy. It's a real closed-minded, living in the past attitude. It is, yeah, deeply conservative. Surely these people must have the same spiritual impasse as we all have. Why are they denying them?

We were brought up believing that matter is more real, that physical objects are the yardstick of what is real, and that there was a material universe for a very long time before mind or consciousness arose in this planet. And when this planet can sustain human life no more, if we haven't found a way to migrate, then consciousness and mind will come to an end. So consciousness and mind is a very small, brief island in a vast ocean of matter. The other view, which says that mind and ideas are what is real, that is the view that everyone throughout history believed in without question. that is how people experience the world.

Yeah, it wasn't either or. That was the understanding. Yes. People couldn't even conceive of the other way around. I think there were a couple of philosophers in the Roman era who devised a theory of atomism, but it was only a handful of people. And until the scientific method and empiricism

and materialism came to dominate, everyone believed that the material world is a small, very temporary island in a vast ocean of mind. And that materialistic view became more and more widespread until in the 20th century it came to dominate. And we now find it hard to imagine why anyone would believe the other thing. One of the reasons I've written this new book is because I think that the belief in materialism will prove to be just a temporary blip because of what is happening in physics and information technology. It's a very limited view of things. Idealism is a grand view of the universe.

Yes. And I think that we experience things which couldn't be true if materialist science explained everything there is. But we're kind of conditioned to screen it out. How does science explain something like love? If materialism is true, then it cannot be the case that we meet someone fall in love with them, and that love is meant to be, because that kind of meaning doesn't exist in a materialist universe. In a materialist universe, is there any meaning? There's only the meaning that we choose to invest in things, so that in soccer, for example,

if you kick a ball between the goalposts, that means a goal. But that, that, that meaning isn't inherent in the universe, we have put a mental construct around that activities, which gives it meaning. In the materialist universe, there is no intrinsic meaning. And other phenomena, I think that we probably mind-read all the time, but we're conditioned not to notice it. I mind-read a lot.

I think if I say something, if I'm trying to explain my ideas to someone and they don't believe it, I can't have a clunk. I can see a visor go down behind the eyes. And I think there's a way to test it, which is on the telephone. If you're on the phone to someone and you're asking a very important question, where the answer will mean a lot to you, I think you should listen to the silence before you get the response. If I ask, do you still love me?

Or what do the results of the tests say? If you listen to the quality of that silence, you know the answer before you get it. That sounds right. I think that is right. I think that's right. I think we have a knowingness that we don't always embrace. Yes.

And maybe we've been taught not only not to embrace it, but to ignore it. I think that's right. And I think we all experience premonitions. And one of the exciting things about new science is that it shows how that might happen as described in the language of science. Tell me about philosophy versus science. Science and philosophy have always up until, the 1960s been very deeply intertwined. For example, the great scientists of the early 20th century,

Einstein and the founders of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauley. These were very well, widely read people in literature and philosophy. and they were all concerned to work out the wider philosophical implications of their ideas for how we understand the world and how we live. And then what happened, I think it's probably happened after the war, and it may be to do with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think that people became shy of asking the wider questions about the implications of the science. And by the time you get to the 60s and to people like Richard Feynman,

who was a brilliant, brilliant physicists very well loved today, even by especially male physicists, an inspirational figure, he said that the questions philosophy asked are goofy, that was his word for it. He believed that Stephen Hawking, who after him believed the same thing, they said that science is on the brink of answering all the big questions. If there are any others, they're not worth asking. And there was this catchphrase which arose at that time, which went, shut up and calculate. And what they meant is keep focusing on the nuts and bolts aspect.

Don't ask the bigger philosophy of life questions. They're meaningless. So at that point, scientists were trying to do away with philosophy. in the way they thought they'd already done away with religion. Do you think it's because science is something that they can control, where's philosophy is sort of beyond control? I'm not sure whether science is ever controllable, because I suppose the history of science shows something

that they were perhaps ignoring, which is the one thing we can be certain of in science. is that the current theory will always be overturned. Yes. And the history of modern science shows that those overturnings came from very unexpected places. But yes, they certainly wanted to exercise control. And the problem with materialism and scientism

is that it leaves you with a very narrow understanding of what the good things... in life are. The good things in life are goods. They're material things, their power, their sex, their money, and the higher things in life get screened out. Do you think that math is an overlay on the world we know and see and interact with, or is math first and the world grows out of math? Well, I think very much the latter, yes. In the second half of the 20th century, physics became very maths-led. And that was largely because of the influence of one of the founders of quantum mechanics called Paul Dirac.

And he noticed that he would come across immensely complex, beautiful mathematics. patterns considered entirely in the mathematical universe, and he would then find that these patterns exist in nature. So he instituted a mathematics first program, which really drove physics in the second half of the 20th century. And one of the most interesting aspects of that was that People like Dirac and then today, Roger Penrose, who was Stephen Hawking's best buddy, worked with him on discovering great discoveries in the field of black holes. Roger Penrose and others have described how these mathematical patterns come to them. They don't invent them.

They don't methodically put them together. They appear whole and fully formed. They discover them. They discover them, yes. And Penrose compares this process to an explorer coming across a range of mountains that no one has ever seen before. They pre-existed their discovery by a human being. and perhaps they pre-existed the material universe.

So in some ways these ideas are never ours? I think that's right, yes, they're never ours, and I think they probably emanate from other intelligent entities. I think that the esoteric interpretation of what Dirac and Penrose's experience is that a great thought being swims into their private mental space and it is then their job to throw a net on it and to pull it into the realm of human affairs. And by doing that, they have made extraordinary improvements to human life. to the way we live. And I think they're also bringing spiritual enlightenment as well. We're just

beginning to realize that, perhaps. So what Dirac and Penrose are doing is the same thing that great spiritual and religious leaders and great artists have done down the millennia. It seems like the way science happens and the way art happens historically have always been parallel and related. I think that's true. I think it's true. I think it's a very. is to do with an area of ideas I know you're very interested in, which is that, again, it arises from materialism, it arises from the fact that where our spirit is sunk into these fleshly bodies, and it means that we have an exaggerated idea of the importance of our individual self. There's a long tradition of reading sacred text slowly, allowing each word to settle, echo, and reveal meaning over time.

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resource. Find inspiration there, now and always. Learn more at leccio-365.com. Tell me a little bit more about you as an editor and a publisher. I have a fantastic time working as an editor and a publisher. I think I was very lucky to be doing it when I did because up till then, uh, britt. British publishing certainly had been a matter of a number of small family firms. And if you're working in publishing and you were not part of the family or if you didn't have a private income, you would be very poor. But just as I started working in publishing, it became big business.

And publishers were bought up by people like Rupert Murdoch. And I think that I was able to meet people from so many different walks of life. And if you're editing someone's book, particularly if it's an autobiography, you get to know them really well. And sometimes I think you know things about them that no one else does. And that was very good for me, I think, because if it hadn't been for that, you know, working with rock stars and actors and soldiers and spies and criminals. I loved all of that because I was able to then see the world from so many different points of view. If I hadn't been doing that, if I'd just tried to make a living as a writer, I would have just kept on circling around this area of esoteric ideas.

So it was tremendously broadening. It was also great fun because you were working with these people who had quite a high level of erudition often, but also had some kind of. commercial Nouse. And we just had such fun. It was a bit like madman, but with not so smart suits. Besides Rupert Sheldrake, who were some of the other authors that you edited? The books that people wanted me to edit and publish would be Rockstar's memoir. So I published Donovan, for example. I loved Donovan as a child. Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, Holly. Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I'm still friends with some of these guys. I published quite a lot of military stuff. There was an S-A-S hero called Chris Ryan, who started a trend of special forces,

thrillers, which did tremendously well. I published a guy called Sir Richard Shiref, who had been very high up in NATO. He wrote a book predicting that Russia was going to invade Ukraine in exactly the way they have. Comedians was a huge, huge favorite of mine, because I think comedians have a care for language which is as great as any poets, because if you're on stage in front of 5,000 people and the words are not in the right order,

you're going to suffer. So those were the sorts of books they wanted me to do, and all the time I was trying to slip in these books that they weren't so quite so keen on, So there was Graham Hancock, who was still a close friend. And there was an extraordinary Irish woman called Lorna Byrne, who I met just as I was finishing the secret history of the world. And she's one of those people a bit like Tesla,

who has a form of consciousness, which is very, very different to most people. and she sees a whole ecosystem of spiritual beings, including angels. But unlike other angel-bothering ladies, she doesn't have to struggle to see them occasionally. They are there for her all the time. And if she was sitting here, she would tell you who your guardian angel is and who the other angels who help you are. Did she write a book? Yes, I commissioned her book called Angels in My Hair, which was a huge international best

sell. It's her autobiography. And I feel blessed to have known her. I met her just as I was finishing the secret history of the world. And she told me that everything in it is true. She said I made a couple of mistakes, but basically, essentially, everything in it is true. She is very dyslexic. She hasn't read a book in her life.

She just sees these things directly. And I think that if there is a disaster going on somewhere in the world, she knows about it. And she feels it. And she feels that it's part of her role to take some of that suffering on. How did you come to meet her? She was living in quite hard circumstances in Ireland. She's had a really rough life. She barely went to school.

She married, but her husband died soon afterwards, and so she was bringing out three children on her own. And the Archangel St. Micah told her she had to write a book. And she said, well, look, this is impossible. How am I in rural Ireland? How am I, Kenner? And they said, well, somebody will come and help you. And a woman called Jean Callanenon, who came to consult her.

ask her about her own problems, took a copy of the artist and writers yearbook. Basically, it's a list of all the publishers and editors in books and in newspapers and magazines. And Gene read out all the names of the editors, and when she got my name, that's him. And I do believe that no one else in publishing would have taken it on at that time. It would have just been too weird for them. She and Jean came over to see me, and obviously, I wouldn't normally see someone like that, but something prompted me.

But I thought, I know, I'm going to see them in the canteen on the ground floor, because if I allow them up into my office, I'm never going to get rid of them. And Lorna was there. She was wearing her sort of Irish country clothes. She looked a bit like a country mouse kind of blinking in the light. I don't think she'd been in it. She's certainly never been abroad.

I don't know she'd been to a big city before. And I sort of handed this scrap of paper with a few ideas on it. And I don't know, something prompted me. Lorna would say I was listening. And I said, but this isn't going to work. These ideas have got to unfold out of a narrative. You've got to tell your life's story. And that's how it started.

And we've been close friends ever since. And I sort of feel blessed and protected. Howe. Tetragrammatin is a podcast. Tetragrammatin is a website. Tetragrammatin is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of tetragrammatin? Counterculture?

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