TrueLife - Simon van der Els - Re:Wild, Reverse the Process of Domestication

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. Got a great show for you today. For those who may not be aware, we are here with the one and only, Simon Van derrilles, A microbiologist, a transition guide, and quite possibly the coolest new word out there is the gyanthropocene wanderer.

Simon, I'm so stoked you're here today. The post you've been putting out lately have been really phenomenal. I really admire the way you sink, you think, and I think you've got a unique idea of what's happening around us and the environment, and I'm excited to talk to you about it today. How's it going? Thanks, George, for having me on. It's fun to be back. Well, also thanks for the compliments on the type of posts I write.

I'm also enjoying writing them and thinking about them. And I'm doing good today. It's a nice, nice sunny day. Most of March has been quite rainy here in the Netherlands. And now that we're in April, it's beginning to get a little bit warmer and more spring. So it's nice to go out. Yeah, what is it about April? You have Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

So you have T.S. Elliott, and now you got Simon Vanderill. What's going on over here in April? Nice. Let me ask you this. So we talk about April being spring, but some of your posts and some topics that you and I have been talking a little bit about is this idea of rewilding. Can you break that down? What does it mean to you? And what would be a good definition for people to get their arms around?

Very good question. So I recently used rewilding to talk about specifically the rewilding of the interior, so of the psyche, of the mind. But rewilding is mostly used, I guess, in ecological terms and ecological maintenance or restoration of ecosystems. And I think the main, I'm not an expert on this, but I think that the main premise of rewilding is to use or to let nature, let's say do the work on restoring an ecosystem. So for instance, allowing rivers to flow more freely, more naturally, so get rid of dams or human-made barriers, reintroducing beavers, for instance.

They also change the ecosystem a lot. And reintroduction of large predators, for instance, or the sort of animals that operate on the top level of the trophic system. So whales or walls or these kind of things. Yeah, and to let nature do the work. As it's like, okay, life, as arbitrary as it sounds, life actually wants to live and does the living. So it's sort of getting our hands a little bit off it,

just putting the right things together and maybe minimal maintenance, but then just letting it go ahead. Yeah, it's a great way to put it. And I think the two of those are really connected. You know, when we look at, when we look at the world around us, it's tied up with fences and tied up with, you know, no trespassing signs and bobwire. It's, it's almost like we have tried to put on our own sort of world on top of the world. And like it's, and it seems as we're going further on. And maybe this is, maybe you can draw a parallel to the.

inward side or what's happening on the inside of our thought process. But it just seems like it's failing and this rewilding idea of, hey, let's get back to nature. Let's let nature do the work. There seems a real parallel between what's going on on our minds and what's happening out in the world. Would you agree? Yeah, for sure, I completely agree with that. So well put. I think it's the the idea is the world is within, the world is without. And I think previously we talked a bit on Ian McGilchrist's work on the left and right hemisphere and his study on that. I think the way that we organize the world. So for instance, a city is already a virtual reality in a sort of sense.

It's let's say thought made manifest. So how we construct our buildings is not. a naturally occurring way. It's not like erosion and wind will at some point construct a house. It's a construct that we build. So it's something that's present in our mind and through our hands and our capabilities we place it. And the danger is there. And this is of course, this is also our unique, not fully unique talent because birds also make nests and deavers make dams and stuff. But it's our, I would say that is our main strength as a species that we are capable of sort of reiterating on thought and constructing all these complex, you know, how you say complex constructions and then manifesting them in the physical world. The problem there is, and that's where the Anthropocene term comes from, is that we, is that we,

we change the world fits to our model. And that's our left hemispherical model, which is a sort of re-presenting of the present. So we create pictures, so to say, or snapshots or, yeah, thought construct of reality. We link them in our brain and we link them to our myths and all our other structures and language and stuff, and then we impose it on the territory.

So the danger that we walk into is that we change the territory for the map that we have in our heads. Instead of updating the map for the territory. And the Anthropocene is so the human-shaped world. That's what the term means, I guess. Yeah. And this is also, of course, it's very much a problem that starts in here, starts it with the interior and then manifests in the, the outside world and in the interior i think it manifests due to are in a way how you say

that we might get stuck a lot in our concepts of the world and also our concepts that are that we culturally inherit for instance when we grow up so maybe cultural concepts on what it means to be a human or what it means to coexist with other people, how to collaborate, how to just add the way of being in the world is then most informed by these maps that we have. And these maps, so these cognitive maps might not be up to snuff or up to speed or fitting reality anymore or they never fit reality quite well. And I guess rewilding how I meant it is pointed towards that part. It's to see, can we let go of our maps somewhat?

We need maps. This is how our brain works, I guess. So we need a view or goggles to see reality. We construct reality in that sense. There is a real, I believe that there is a physical reality outside of our own. our cognition, that we need our cognition to make sense of that. But I would, what I would point towards is that we might want some rewilding as to have this map be organically updated towards whatever the physical real outside of us is doing and what we are doing to it and how it's

changing. Yeah, I love that idea of the idea of maps. And, you know, it seems to me, like, if you go back and you look at these old maps, whether it's like the Puri Res map or these, some of my favorite maps, like the ones from the Middle Ages where they have like a giant octopus in the middle of the ocean or like a giant sea creature or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, I think of those as our mental models today. Like if you can, if you're just listening to this, like just imagine one of those old like kind of black and white maps. It's almost a sepia tone and it has like a giant octopus and it's, you know, just catering over a ship or something like that. And that is a lot of what we're teaching at school.

Like instructors today are giving people maps of old sea monsters that may or may not exist anymore. And there's other routes around that. And there's different things. There's different models. And while I agree that we definitely need models to move forward, I don't think we've updated a lot of those models in a long time. And it's really beginning to show in mental illness or mental wellness, in the economy. me in the way we treat each other and everywhere. It's all around us. Like we're, we're just working off bad maps. Imagine if you had a bad map and you're trying to find your way down a

trail. We're not going to be able to get there because you don't have the right map. And that means you have to do some investigating. And I think it's a very rich environment we find ourselves in because there is time to explore. There's time to recreate models to take an old map, dust it off and maybe create a new trail on there. And that's a lot like neuroplasticity when we start thinking about it like Yeah, yeah, right? For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the, the, the, I think McGilchrist uses this analogy or this, this, this uses a metaphor to explain the, the difference between the two hemispheres. And as of course, this is, his books are massive, as you know. So for the listeners, just read the books and don't take my word on. but he says that let's say you're a boat captain or yeah you're a captain on a boat and you have to navigate a reef and you have two ways of doing it you have to you can do it by looking out from behind the steering wheel

and trying to navigate that way or you can use a map that was previously made of the reef but if you would have to pick which one you would use if you would can only use one, which one would you use as you are navigating through it? For me, the answer is obvious. Yeah. I don't know. It depends on who owned the boat, but I would probably just look over the steering wheel. Yeah. Now, but I like the analogy that you make also with the here be dragons and octopuses and stuff

right that's the the I would say as myth as myth makes up our reality or are the foundations of our sort of collaborative

stories that well we build society around if there's faults in the foundation or if you in the blueprint of how you build up ideas, then those will, of course, echo through. And if a civilization has a very long arc,

or a long arc in time as to build on these myths, then of course you're going to end up in the end with a whole lot of cracks in the foundation in the end, or if it's used in all the stories that are built on it. And, yeah, I guess on the economical level, of course the myth of progress and these large things yeah yeah it on some level when i think of myth i think of the idea and the something that seems to be in all history books or what seems to be in all cultures is this idea of storytelling and this idea of being able to relate history

through stories we come to myth that way and you know it It's interesting to me to see how many like archetypes are there. And it seems like every culture has like the wounded healer or every culture has the underdog. But there's so many of these exploration myths that move through different cultures. It's like our personal story right there. And when I think of rewilding not only nature, but remodeling the maps in our mind, I think that there's no better way to do that than to return to the club. classic stories of what humanity is about.

And I see that with with the ideas of McGillcrest. And I see that with the ideas of a narrative in play. You know, whether it's look at the way in which today's media tries to control the narrative. Like they're desperately trying to control the story so that they can get everyone out there to see the same thoughts, to be on the same page. Even if it's a silly map, they're like, look at the silly map. this was it, you know, and they're trying to sell you this idea because they know that everyone has to have skin in the game on some level, right?

Is that the idea with controlling the narrative and maps and changing reality and maybe why it's not working so well today? Yeah, yeah, most likely. Let's see. what I think is that we're in a in a very in we're living in a very interesting time in a unique moment as the I think that this this is also what postmodernism of course alludes to is so you have modernity or we went into modernity I'm a sort of amateur philosopher I tried to read up on these things so again this is my understanding of it And we had the myths of, or we had the coherent stories of modernity.

The myth of progress was a very strong part of this. The myth of progress was underpinning both the sort of Western development in the Western economies, but also in the sort of the Soviet stories or the communist stories. It's also the ideal of man-made paradise through technology. That's like a very short descriptor of the myth of progress. And because society and how information was propagated through society was fairly top down or very centralized. So with the invention of the printing press, it's also said that that was the invention of ideology. Because you had a mass produce, reproducible, or you have mass production of

a singular idea which can be spread very quickly throughout a population and then people can adhere to this idea. And then you get, they say like ideology as a sort of, as we use the map metaphor, ideology is a map to watch reality through. So it's a set of goggles that you, then you can code information from reality. And it allows people to quickly adhere or quickly see the world in a similar way, and which is a way of, of course moving populations and getting great great works done either very terrible works or actual great works but great in that sense you're right and of course religion previously like world religions were also capable of doing this but i think there's a very similar structure in these kind of ideas and then with post in a postmodern society i think that's most

likely due to information overload. So with the TV, radio, mostly TV, I guess, as a natural sort of follow-up on radio telegrams. Now with the internet, of course, the amount of information that is slung about, our information ecosystem is like it's so overpopulated, there's never been this dense before. and also the speed of it. And the idea of postmodernism, as I understand it, is that you can have a society where you can sit on a bus with 15 different people and they have 15 different sets of glasses on for maps of seeing reality.

Because there are, let's say the information channels that we have allow this kind of propagation of mini-ideology. let's say, or big ideologies depending on how much mass they acquire, how many people carry them around. And what is now happening to our central structures as the big ideological stories are failing, so the nation state or monarchy or even now economical ideologies such as capitalism, as a sort of main idea of like capitalism is come and deliver. while we saw the fall of the Soviet Union.

So that main ideology also collapsed. Now there's a lot of sort of competing organisms. I like to think of ideas, ideologies, religions, that these are actual organisms. I like that. Yeah. So there's a lot of competing organisms for a large organism, which is sort of the previous idea of the, I would say, the state or the sort of central governance. You maybe can picture like a very large tree in the forest and you have all these smaller organisms or the smaller

ideologies which are like other types of trees or maybe even fungi that are growing on the tree and decomposing it. And this large tree is trying to put all its effort in in surviving, but it's already dying. And in that sense, it will try to send out a very clear message on a, no, this is actually reality. So there's a competition between ideologies and the amount of people that are getting, let's say, colonized by ideologies, different ways of seeing. And there's a competition for who gains the most mass.

And the legacy systems such as state governments or larger, organizations. Of course, they have a lot of skin in the game and they control still a lot of the wealth and also assist them. So they will try to stay alive. There's hardly any animal that dies gracefully. Humans also don't die gracefully. Yeah. That's I like that. It's a really well said and I like the concept of thinking about ideas as organisms because they are. They're fighting for their life, they're fighting for oxygen, and they want to continue to colonize. And in some ways, you know, you can look at your life like an idea. Like, what is the idea of your life? What are your goals? What is it that you're accomplishing? And it's an interesting, it's an interesting concept

to think about because it gives you a way to see yourself as the observer instead of just being a subject or an object. And there's like, just like a small moment of clarity, one can find in between decision and action. You know what I mean by that? Like there's a moment there where you have this weird influence where you can either go this way or go that way or you have a just a split moment to think about things. And when you find that time, I think you can change your life. And I do think that that is part of the rewilding or the reimagining of your life, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so. Yeah. And I think we, so it's clear we both have experienced also with psychedelic components. Yes, yes. I also practice meditation. These kind of experiences and meditation, sort of this development of consciousness,

allows you to put a little bit of a space between the thought and the observer or the thought and the action. And the moment you can separate those is that helps, because then you can also start seeing indeed your interior as an ecosystem. Because already looking at yourself so the human body, it is an ecosystem. I'm a sort of swarm. A multicellular organism is already a composite of all these different types of cells. They share a genetic code that in structure they are completely different. So I am a collaboration of organisms and the aggregate of that thinks it is.

Simon for some reason. Also I carry in my GI tract I carry about the same amount or up to 10 times the amount. These calculations are a bit iffy, but this is roughly the figure. So the same amount or up to 10 times the amount of microorganisms. So what what am I? I'm a walking aggregate of different cells collaborating with also different organisms, collaborating, inside my GI tract and providing me with different chemicals and doing decomposition for my food and I feed them as well. If you look at that, that's just a physical reality of my body. If you then, if you then translate that to our psyche, why isn't the substance of our psyches or our interior, isn't that also the case? Isn't that also a composite of all these different types of presences? So even in our cells, we have retroviruses that are insertive in there and that are part of us already for millions of years. We have transposals, which are small pieces of mobile genetic elements that can jump around in genomes. You can also picture these

as organisms. So playing around with this, then this metaphor of rewilding the interior, you become more of adding this little bit of distance from whatever thought you might have and whatever action you might want to do.

If you can then start observing them more, you become more of a sort of gardener or a wildlife documenter or something. And you have access to playing around with it a bit. So you can say like, no, I want to feed the wolves a bit more. Or we do have a little bit too many buffalo now in the system. Can I observe the buffalo and see what

they need so we can get something else in that space? Can we let the river go a bit more free? And using these kind of metaphors, you can start playing around with the interior of like, okay, what are the fences that I have in my head? What are the places where I feel a lot of friction? maybe there's a lot of barbed wire on that fence. Maybe you can bring some bolt gutters and get rid of that. Maybe I can infuse some, I don't know, maybe infuse some like vines, let some wild plants grow over them, so overgrow them. Yeah, I don't know.

I like this kind of playful thinking. And it's also a way of re, if we're talking symbols and language. Yeah. It's a more playful way of talking with yourself in a way. And it's re-symbolizing certain thoughts, giving them a name, helps. And then finding ways of, okay, what does this organism need? And not fight it. So not fight like, okay, I really don't like this part of me or these thoughts and this is not nice.

And yada, yeah, you can start bringing napalmen in or start hunting them. But I guess we both know that that hardly ever works. It's the same with like if you have a challenging psychedelic experience. Yeah, it's something that you have to go through instead of you cannot fight these things. And then you can take a little bit of wisdom and see if you can get a healthy ecosystem going. And through there, yeah, most likely your general experience of life will be a bit healthier. yeah i love it it's really well said it's it's fun to get to see the emissary begin to fail the master is known all along you know and it's it's yeah there's another um as great as as as that book is and

and as as forward thinking as ian mcgill christ is i there was another um i was reading in this other book. I'll send you the title of it. I think it's called Alter States of Consciousness. And it's a book from the 70s and it's all these different scientists talking about the way in which we think. And one of them that brought up this point that it's so strange that here in the West, we have decided that verbal acuity and linguistics seems to be a higher order of thinking than mental imagery. And why should that be? And what you just described about whether it's the woods growing over the fences or whether it is feeding the woods or whether it is you know feeding the bear that becomes you like you know whatever it image it is like i really think that that is something that

is changing the world like your thoughts become you and the better you can imagine them in a physical form or a story form or a mythological form the faster you can make change in your life because the images are in my opinion i think that the the world of mental imagery is vastly superior to linguistics because it shows you what you want to do or what is possible and linguistics has a tough time catching up with that like it's really good the scalpel's beautiful but it's that mental imagery that shows you connections it's that mental imagery that can really help you become what you want to be and i want to share a quick example of something that happened in my life. For a long time, I found myself, and this is after

a few years of doing some real deep work with psychedelics and meditation, I came to this understanding that what I didn't like about myself was that I didn't have a lot of courage. I kind of felt like the scarecrow in whatever that was. The wizard of balls. Yes, thank you. Yeah. And so, you know, I wore this exterior shell like I was, I was mean sometimes. I would do it. these things, but the more that I began to think about courage, the more I began to think about how to do it, the more I started acting out, the more I started seeing myself as someone, oh, if I want to be someone that has courage, then I should try to show people, other people had out of courage. Instead of pointing out that they don't have courage, that's an opportunity

for me to show someone that they can have courage. And it becomes with that mental imagery, whether it's the scarecrow or whether it's putting up a shield, whatever it is. It's a way in which in your life you can begin to do these things if you have the right imagery combined with the linguistics. I know that was kind of out there, but what's your take on the? No, no, no, no, no. What do you think? Oh, I like it. I like it.

Thank you. And what immediately popped to mind where you went into that analogy, a big part of my process in coming to these things. coming more to myself or this ecology of self. I like it. Is distrusting of putting less trust in voiced thought. So whenever the mind is babbling, so it's using actual words and actual sentences, it's most likely the left hemisphere talking to you.

And the left hemisphere is the mapmaker, it is the one that puts up the fences. Very useful. But have a talk on itself is, usually it doesn't bring anything useful for me if it's just babbling. And I kind of have the feeling that this goes for, or this might be a universal, that if you start babbling to yourself,

usually it doesn't go anywhere useful. And I remember that David Bowen in one of his books on nature of reality and on thought, he made like a very simple diagram in which he said like, in the one part you have, the physical world. So it's non-thought. So anything that's not yet captured by thought. And they have thought.

And what we're doing is an active buffering between the two. So we're constantly filtering our percepts into concepts and basing our actions on it. And what he says is that if you're too much in the internal monologue, then you have the chance that instead of non-thought, being transcribed this thought. You have thought being transcribed to thought. So there is a, the brain might see a thought for non-thought.

And if you have an error somewhere in your thoughts, the brain just passes over it and incorporates it for the next one and for the next one and for the next one. So you get all these chains of associations which might go, which might have an error in them. So I would notice this at a certain point. So I was in the process of sort of moving out of depression, for instance. Right. And it took me a while.

And I just started paying more attention to these kind of things. And then at a certain point, I figured out, like, look, I've been stuck in a loop for like two days. I'm just not going to pay that much attention anymore to this, whatever is going on here, because it's not giving me anything. And what I had to think about what you just mentioned is, again, with the analogy of are you the boat captain looking with his eyes or you have the map that's made. Either you, and it's not an either or, it's an end, but if we have to put it in an either or, this way of linguistics, this only,

so homo sapiens only arrived about estimate 300,000 years ago. Modern language is probably even younger than that. this other way of seeing or of cognition of the interior is billions of years old so which tool would you trust more and we put what you just mentioned we put a lot of trust on this other one i think therefore i am and our our construction of all these these large analytical uh or analytic constructs and all these things. Well, actually, this way of single word or images or myth, this is a way older way of being and of being in the world. And this is also humans didn't, we aren't unique in the sense that we didn't, I believe so, I'm a biologist, we didn't arrive at the scene from nowhere. We are also in a

tradition and we evolved with this massive heritage of the natural world. So we carry, we carry actual bulls in us. We carry, we carry memories of being something other than an ape in us, even so in our physical body, let's say. And if we go into more holistic, sort of collective consciousness kind of models, that I truly believe that we are connected to the sort of interior of Chaya, the sort of the world's soul. And that one doesn't speak in like a nice written letter. That one speaks in images and in deep feelings and gut feel.

Well, as with psychedelic experiences or deep long meditation, or dreaming even, you can get all these super evocative and real, more real than real experiences, which we hardly ever get if we're in, if we use the analogy, if we're in the village, if we're in the conscious mind, if we're not out there in the wilds,

if we're not rewilding. I love it. Language is something we use to tie up time, right? Like we use language to talk about right here, we're this thing. But imagery, you know, I wrote down a quote that says, a basic problem in understanding human thought has to do with the fact that we inevitably rely

on some aspect of language to determine the nature of private experience. And so, like, I can't explain to you exactly what I'm thinking. I can't explain to you what happened when I was on this trip. I can't explain to you what it was like when I fell in love. I can try and I may get close if I can harness the canon that is the English language or if I'm Christopher Hitchens or if I'm one of these people that had this. ability to just utilize the flowers of rhetoric. Like, I can get close, but it can't be beheld.

And that is the difference. When I look at a nautilus shell, I can see the cycles of life. When I look at a glacier and the water that has flown down the side of that mountain for generations, I can understand what life is about. And I think it's, you know, it's this Eastern tradition of the answers to life are everywhere around you if you can just take a moment to look at them. And I think more of us are moving back into that tradition. Maybe that's because we've found the narrative failing.

Or maybe that's because some of us look at these old myths. And when I think of old myths, Simon, or different types of stories, and now this is interpretation, but I look at this tower of Babel. And you see this giant tower being made and then it's just destructing. It's almost like this is the idea of language. Like, yeah, you can build a lot, but it's going to fail at the end. because it won't reach the heights of what is possible. You can build a high, but at some point in time,

the bottom starts being unable to understand what these people up here are saying. And that's the same thing as happening in our world right now. You have all these people that are, you know, the elites or the bottle builders or the map makers. And they're saying like, look, you just got to go out there and you make a right over there. But, you know, like you said earlier,

the map is not the territory. And so many of us are disconnected. and we're starting to create our own ways. Is this, okay, so we've explained kind of what can happen and what's going to happen. Do you think this is an exciting time to go out and rewild yourself? And what does it mean? Is it an exciting time? Is it a scary time?

Or how are you feeling about rewilding yourself in the world around you? Nice, nice. It's a scary, exciting time. I love it. I think that's what I would call it. It's the same if we use the psychedelics analogy. Often if someone asks me to describe or if I want to describe something, I say it was intense.

Because intense just described, it's both scary and it's also beautiful. But it's intense. It's just it's it makes you feel very much alive. And I think that is if you're on my best days, if I'm tuned in, if I'm feeling good if my ecosystem is doing well. Yeah, I feel alive. So it's very intense. It's an intense time.

And also incredibly motivating in time. Because there's never been in recent history more cracks showing in the foundation of this old building, of this old map. And I think a lot of us, let me talk for myself, but a lot of us are quite sick. of the old building and moving into the old building and having to put on the same suit and tie. All metaphoric. But that makes it very exciting. And also there's rewilding. For me, it is, it is, rewilding is done via the connection to, I would say, the divine.

And what the divine means for you might be something else that it means for me. But I think when we start using that type of language, I think most of us that have some sort of connection to things larger than just themselves know more or less what we're talking about. And there's a big sense of comfort in that because then you're not stuck here with only your map of trying to make sense of things or trying to make meaning of things. there's also a relief because once you can let this again I'm speaking for myself but I'm using the you as a sort of general term and once you get that relationship going in the sense that you can start listening better and listen to these symbols to dreams and these deeper experiences and also incorporate them into daily life you start expanding way less energy.

Because if I'm only operating from, this is how I felt, if I was only operating from the structures that I have in my head on how I have to operate things, now I must do this and then I must do that. If I'm more in contact with this, it's flowing. It's more like, okay, I'm just dancing along. I use the map to make a planning for the day. so I arrive on the scene where I have to be or have the sort of things I have to do. But apart from that, I'm not planning anything.

It's just, yeah, we'll see what pops up. And if you're, let's say, playing around with this, then you have a lot more fun. You have a lot, you have a wilder ecosystem to play around with. And they also teach you a lot of things that you would normally not think about that you would not learn if you were just stuck with the, let's say, the normal curriculum. Yeah, I agree. It's almost like the tools are all around you and have been,

but your whole life you've been conditioned not to see them. You've been conditioned to not build with them. And it's scary, though, right? Like, it's difficult, and maybe this is why they call it a process. And maybe this is why psychedelics help in that process, is that it's difficult to veer off the path. It's difficult to go and do this thing that you believe in or that maybe you have an image of

or something that you've been shown or something is speaking to you. It's difficult to follow that voice, that sign or that symbol because you are afraid. And fear seems to be this thing that keeps people in this world of scarcity. Fear seems to be a tool. of the analytical side of the mind. It's this giant thing that pushes you in a direction to not be true to yourself, I think.

And I wanted to kind of segue, as we're talking about the self and we're talking about the journey and we're talking about rewilding, you had given a really beautiful analogy about the forest and the village in one of your post, about the folk tales and myths and secrets and dangers and stuff like that. Can you maybe flesh that out a little bit? Do you remember that in your post about what the forest is and what the village is? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is highly inspired. My thinking is highly inspired by the mythologist Dr. Martin Shaw.

So I can really recommend checking up on him. He's also a eloquent speaker. Well, he's a mythologist. He tells stories. Of course he is. Great figure. And I really got into his work. And also I've been reading fiction since I was able to read.

So I'm continuously reading fiction. So I really enjoy story. So what I put down in my post is the explanation or the symbolism in a lot of old folktales. In a lot of old folktales, the forest is the uncomfortable. is the is also the underworld for instance and the village or the castle is the is the conscious mind and so it's really a split between man-made the man-made world and the wild world so to say so the conscious and the unconscious and in these stories you often have heroes or if there's a typical heroes journey they have a call of the

wild. So they have to go prepare themselves and go into the forest and well go through typical hero's journey, fight monsters, find treasure, go through trials, survive, find love sometimes.

And then they return to the village but they've grown or they've learned things. And that's very much the image of traveling through to the unconscious opening up and the unconscious is also dangerous. If you heard about, for instance, what I really like is the stories on Nietzsche and Carl Jung.

I haven't read that much about them or from them. My two read list is too big. But I love the story that I think, Jung, I heard this somewhere, that Jung was very much impressed by Nietzsche. He called him the first psychoan. analytic or psycho I don't know what the word is but if and then he said that Jung got or Nietzsche got as his powers grew as his madness grew he went deeper and deeper into the unconscious and at a certain point he could not

resurface anymore he could not resurface sane to the conscious mind and so he got blown away, or he got lost in the unconscious labyrinth. And Jung also, he, Jung said, I think, that what saved him was that he had a family and that he was very much anchored to the conscious mind or to the village. So he always had a tether that would call him back to, he wouldn't range too long in the forest. He would always go back. Even though I think Jung's red book was a collection of his memoirs written when he was when he was in a psychosis for a long period of time was mad. And so there are dangers in the forest and it's not for everyone. But if we pave over the forest with our with our village,

well we depend actually on the forest I guess to most likely you have all these numbers like okay conscious mind is 4% and unconscious is like 96% or whatever I do have this image of like a tiny village in a massive massive forest we don't even know how big it is and we are in danger when we lose that sense that when we start thinking, now the village is the only thing. When we build high enough walls that we block out the forest,

that we start treating the forest as externalities, for instance. Then we get into issues like climate change and biodiversity collapse and all these kind of things. Because we get so stuck in our village that we build. And it's also with, I had to think about this when we were talking about it, the thing with these old maps and these stories, language works if it's referring to, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, it mostly refers to itself in the sense. So you need axioms.

There need to be, at some point, there needs to be put down a boundary, let's say, or an axiom saying like this we state as a truth, and from this we can build our stories. and if those truths start shaking if those are the foundations of the Tower of Babel the Tower of Babel is built

on a certain set of assumptions which might be to a certain extent true but everything changes in the world so at a certain point these assumptions are also sinking in the sort of the forest is reclaiming them or whatever so when something gets too big

it's time for a collapse and recomposition yeah so just some ramblings. It's so true. It's so true. You know, everyone is talking, not everyone, but for a while we went through this phase where people are trying to redefine gender and just redefining everything. And, you know, it's such a, in some ways, it's like the, it's like the greatest thing in the

world. And in some ways it's the most disastrous. Because if we can just redefine words, like, why don't we redefine what overtime is? Why don't we redefine what a lawyer is? Why don't we redefine what money is? And on some level, the smallest win for redefining words opens the door for redefining everything. And you get them all together.

You can't just have one. If we're going to redefine what this is, that we get to redefine everything. And I think that whether some people get that or some people don't get it or whether that's just a cycle of humanity. My grandpa used to say, if you want a new idea, read a really old book. And in some ways, right?

Like, we're just maybe maybe what's happening, Simon, is that we have to forget or we have to give up things so that they can be rediscovered and reimagined later. Maybe that's the process of building and we're seeing that now. Is that something that you think is

possible? Yeah, I like it a lot. I immediately get again the image of if you have a I like natural metaphors. If you have a large tree if something in an ecosystem dies, it's not stuck there. It gets decomposed, right?

Yes. So if a tree is an ideology, for instance, so it's a large structure made up of different signs, symbols, words, meanings, this forms the edifice, this massive tree, if it falls, so it's painful, it crashes, it doesn't mean that the individuals, words in that tree or in that composition are bad. No, you just need decomposition. And

after it's decomposed, all the resources that were in that thing are become available again to the whole surrounding ecosystem. So it's actual this cycle of birth, growth, decline, death is necessary for everything. And I think language, we talk about language as it is a living thing. We can talk about that. We use the literal words like dead language. Yeah. And if you also talk about, I think about this when you mentioned it, that we start to define redefining words. I think language in, we have a relationship with language. So language is a living, language is a living organism that is living in us. I love it. And we can try to steer that a bit.

But as you might see or as you alluded to, there's quite a bit of discussion, of course, in the current culture and internet. Of course, internet and these information technologies are also a host language and allow it to evolve or to clash, let's say, with all the algorithms and all this kind of stuff. I still have the feeling language is doing its own thing. and we you can be if you're rewilding right and that's why I like poetry I was never into poetry and I don't ask me to write a poem but I'm I'm I'm growing into it as I'm liking it more and more and as I'm letting go of my sort of analytical kind of thinking or that mind if I open up a bit new words new meanings all these things we receive. We don't, we are not the author. And so these are sort of, they are just looking

for a host for which they can sprout. And if the forest is dominated by massive old trees, then there's hardly any light. So these large, these tiny new things cannot sprout. So in one sense, add some, and indeed psychedelics, where do we come from usually? Yeah, fungus. and what is a fungus doing in a woods? Yeah, it's decomposing. So maybe the act of taking conscious psychedelics, microdosing is adding decomposition to the brain to allow these large trees to be decomposed,

be reintegrated in the system, and give a lot of space for all these small young trees to grow or these smaller organisms. I love that. You know, on some level, I'm romanticizing the idea of language as a virus that is looking for people like you or me or someone out there to infect to give them the ability to grow like the tallest tree in the forest. And if you just think about language as a virus, imagine this organism, this living organism

that's desperately looking for a host that wants to grow inside of you. It's almost like an alien or a virus is a good way to look at it. Yeah, yeah. Let me try to tie this to myth. So all of us, a lot of us grew up hearing different myths, regardless of what culture we're in. So imagine you as an individual, you're going through your day and you come upon this mythology or you revisit a story when you're telling your kid, but you're reinvigorated. You've caught in the virus of language that is mythology and it begins to rise up in you. At that point in time, maybe it's that language that inspired.

you to stop being the villager that goes every day to the well and start becoming the hero that falls in love on the journey. And it's the story you tell yourself, this language, this alien, this virus infects you. And as it begins to well up inside you, you begin to change. The language changes the way you think. The language changes the way you act. The language changes the way people see you. And if you think about it from a poetic form, there's all these ionic potameter and this, different ways of cadence to get yourself speaking.

There's all these different ways of communicating that become infectious, that become something that changes you. And all you need to do is look back at the Homeric verses to see that it was storytelling in this certain way, this certain virus type of format. You know, it's almost like a genetic sequencing that can get inside you. I love it, man. And the more you started talking about poetry, the more I started to see these things too. Like, yes.

Have you ever spoken to someone or better yet, how to have, a poem read to you when you got goosebumps or you see someone's face gets flush. Like maybe that's the real form of communication. Maybe that's how I know I'm getting through to you, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. We've gotten so far from that. Yeah, but the space is opening, huh? Yeah. And I was using the term. So Martin Shaw uses the term courting the wild twin it's it's a core shift and what I like there because a virus that's why I'm also interested in these kind of I'm a microbiologist of bacteria and also a bit of viruses problem with viruses is that usually in a in a in a cultural context viruses have very negative

connotation even though there are also like retroviruses that incorporate themselves into DNA and might change the levels of transcription of certain genes. So they might be even beneficial to the organism itself. And that's why I like the term that Marta Shaw uses the courtship. And I like the imagery of animals or wild spirits or these kind of things, because that's more of a relational relationship. A virus in my mind puts up imagery of code and of relentless, relentless code.

Well, I actually picture language. Again, here's also, as you were speaking, I also got these images or I will start, I could really feel what you mean. There's also danger here. And that's again, that's a danger of this. It is what language. what language are you speaking? Who are you courting? Are you courting something that has your best intentions in mind?

Or is it something that just wants to be incarnated, that is just looking for mouth to speak through? And with these larger ideologies, you can quickly picture like, okay, this doesn't have the best for the individual in mind. It is definitely a mass-speaking animal, let's say. It's something that seeks to colonize a lot of humans. Well, if you have this quiet relationship with, I don't know,

pictured like a single raven that you feed every morning and at a certain point we'll start talking to you. If that is your muse or that is the myth or something, that's different. That's a very different, and especially if it's telling you very nice things in the sense of it's helping you. And I was recently on a plant ceremony and a man, who had a plant medicine ceremony and a man who had a series of like a very intensive ayahuasca

retreats in Peru. He went there and was like there for two months or something. So he was still still very much in that space. He was talking to me about how he was taught there about how to interact this courtship. And specifically in this setting, of course, because in this state, you're wide open and you might interact with sort of more exotic species or whatever you're courting. And then he would say that the training that they will get is whenever something appears to you and start speaking to you in that space, you first have to ask them, are you medicine? Yes or no? and if they say no

then you say no thank you even if they look very nice even if they have interesting things to say so that that is a code that sort of their shamanic tradition uses I like that point because then it's also it's not I like to reiterate

it's not all fun in games yeah and what I dislike about the secret or sort of this new agey stuff sometimes is it's very much like you the stressing is on you can manifest blah blah well i feel like if you start okay maybe this is a bit esoteric but i feel like if you um who is the you that's already a question who is the you that is wanting something and if you start putting it out there and you're

saying like okay i'm going to manifest and usually it's like very uh what i've seen written I don't want to completely flatten the whole idea. But what I've seen written was material things, like, okay, you can manifest a new house or whatever. Then if something comes in and we'll just say like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can help you with getting that. Then you're like, oh, great, he's going to help you for getting that. And it's like, yeah, maybe we should learn a bit and be a bit hesitant with these kind of things. that's really well said you know and and i i think it speaks volumes of what happens to us a lot but it is in those heightened states of awareness be it a a ritual a ceremony a psychedelic experience

you know i think that we both of us have shared some of those experiences and we've been accustomed to that environment and i can tell you in that heightened state of awareness in that environment i think you're allowed to try on ideas you're you're you're a little bit you're a allowed to invite things to work through you. And some of those things you invite in should scare the living bejes out of you. Like I've had ideas like, that would be, I would make so much money if I did that. And then I'm like, but you know what the consequences would be? Oh my God.

Get out of here. Thanks, but no thanks. You know, it's that initial enticing idea of like, oh, yeah. And I like the way you said, I can help you with that. Oh, did you want that? I can get you that, you know? But it's like, how are you going to get me that? And is that really what I want?

But I think that there's something to be said about trying those ideas on. And maybe this gets back to what you said about not everyone is meant to walk in the wild. Not everyone should be out in that area because some people can try on ideas and go, no, it's not for me. Where other people try on ideas and they're like, oh, this is going to give me that one thing that I want. And then you get into the idea of these things working through you or manifesting through you. for their own nature instead of for the good of nature, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I fully agree. And here I also, again, like the analogies, analogy of the human GI tract, because we have bacteria in there, and they can have different types of relationships or not, so they can be commensal, they can be mutualistic. So they can be, they can really be beneficial to us,

they can be benign. They can also be parasitical. They can also be pathogenic. And if you picture it like that, like our brain is like a GI tract, but for thought. And we feed thought with, well, I don't know,

our energy or electric impulses or our glucose. So we become a host for, well, then it's very good to picture it sort of like, okay, let's say you're, let's use the metaphor of language. Let's say you're out in the woods and you were prepared. So you got your camping gear, you're set out to be there for a bit.

And you want to court new ideas. Yeah, you make your campfire and you go sit on a spot. And then maybe different thoughts will come by and different entities who are entertaining these thoughts. And you can have, you're still in the wild so that you didn't bring them back to the village yet. Yeah. So you have some time. you can converse with them. And also, depending on how crafty you are or how strange you are,

I would say I'm beginner level, I would say. But depending on how good your discernment is and sort of your mental focus, you can have a conversation. Yeah, and then entertain the thoughts. But the integration part, then you can really think about, okay, what did I invite in? And I think what this man also stressed how they teach it in that tradition where he went. It can only take hold if you invite it in. And that's also like a classical folktale story, right?

So a vampire can only come in if you allow it in, if you invited it. So it's also with these kind of ideas. So it says it's do you invite this foreign species in and are you going to start feeding it as well? And so yeah, I like this this I have a sense here that the that older older civilizations or older traditions had a much more potent psycho technology to deal with these kind of things with knowing that language is alive. And we. having just our having had our bender on scientific rationalism or materialism, we kind of have to now sort of re-reconnect to this different way of seeing it.

Because I think we're running in a society, we're living in a society where these kind of organisms are running rampant and a lot of them are very pathogenic. So they're really not working on the best. beneficiary the benefit of the individual or of human kind or of the species wide or planetary wide flourishing and they're running their own show yeah and it sounds that maybe it comes into the space of conspiracy thinking and stuff but I think you kind of get what I'm what I'm saying it's like it's a different different yeah I have to sense that in the in the in the

relatively short future will get more and more people sort of sort of getting a feel for these kind of ways of seeing things I've seen the word agragor popping up a bit more which is like a it's like a manifestation of people like collective collective imagery a collective construction of gods or spiritual entities and it's like a very occult word but I've seen it use more and more and sort of other types of discourse.

And if we use this analogy of the ecosystem of the mind, language as a species, it makes a lot of sense. It's like a collective of people feeding the same thought, the same organism. And then at a certain point, it gets a life of its own, and it's capable of colonizing other people. And then it can work through them. So we should be, I think, very careful in what is the stuff that we're feeding. what is the name what is that word again agriphor agrigore yeah yeah you know and i and i the way you

describe that how language as a living thing and technology you know it seems to me like maybe language as as we know it today began to fail when we started stripping spirituality out of it because, you know, when you think about spirituality, like, it's an attempt to describe the ineffable, and it's an attempt to describe kind of what we're now, like we're putting the spirit back into language. And when you strip the spirit from language, it allows,

language is then allowed to strip humanity of any meaning in a weird sort of way. Because it's just, it's just scientific rationalism. It's just, you know, this this peeling back of it's only material there's nothing else well then there's no meaning right yeah and wow i like your point here um so we strip it from we strip it from me the meaning is still there but it's a different meaning we're not aware of it yes that's much that's well put that's right yeah and and using the analogy of like courting entities or whatever what is a better host for

a type of entity that is like, yeah, I can get you that. What is a better type of host than a person who thinks he's in complete control of his thoughts? That's so true. And that's what our worldview, of course, provides us, the myth of I am my thoughts or I think therefore I am. If we lose, yeah, if we lose the contact

with this well as you say the spiritual the the metaphysical it's still there we're just not paying attention to it and that we've invited all these things into the village and we're completely not aware of them wow that that makes my mind race about certain things like vessels and filling ourselves up and the elephant in the room and the vampire got invited like it it just brings it it helps to rediscover or uncover all these ideas that have been around us. And, you know, I almost need a few minutes just to think about the whole idea of that because it's, it's beautiful. And I think there's a lot, a lot in there to think about. But yeah, I really think we're on to something. And I think it's these things that we're talking about,

about inviting the spirit back into you, whether it's a parasite or it's a symbiotic relationship. You know, which one do you want to have? And if, if you're not aware, then a parasite is a sort of symbiosis. It's not a really good symbiosis, right? It's not like you guys are both getting something. It's like one thing is taking. And that's kind of what's happening in society, whether it's the model of government we have,

whether it's the economic system we have, whether it's the relationship in our lives. There's a lot of parasitic things happening when it could be a give and take. It could be more of a symbiosis where everybody's getting things back, right? That's why I also. And what I would like to add, I fully agree on that, George.

What I would like to add is, for instance, the work of Tristan Harris on social media algorithms and these kind of things. He's from the center of humane technology, I believe it's called. If we look at how our information landscape has built, and specifically the Internet, And I think the average person spends a lot of time on the internet, very unproductive time. Myself included, I also wrestle with it. You hear this, this horrible thing. It is also designed in a very, very parasitical way. And even the word feed, we only use the word feed if we're talking about farm animals, right?

So it's already, here it's very, it's very useful. useful to think about what are the words that we're using. Yeah. How is this thing designed? And what is speaking through us and what's speaking to us? Because I also feel that with the advent of, so if you would say that the Gutenberg printing press was the spawning moment of ideology. then I think information technology like silicon-based computer like servers internet blah blah I think that's the next evolutionary step for ideology because now with artificial

intelligence with algorithms and all this stuff we've created a second ecosystem where these thoughts can manifest themselves into a physical shape so they can carnate sort of say. Apart from, it used to be only in our neurology, in our physical mego. Now we've created all these exterior phases where these

entities can more or less settle and copy. Here come what I like here is the idea of forbidden texts in myths and in fiction. Like, oh, if you read this book, then the spirit comes out or whatever. There might be some sense in that,

that what you physically store is a is a spore for a living organism for a thought it's a physical like like some bacteria form spores and then they can survive for thousands of years well if you create a book if you create a server if you create a hard drive and store things in there it's a alternative place of language storing and if language is a blanket term for these different types of fault organisms. Yeah, look at WikiLeaks. Like, that's a forbidden text, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we're living in a, in a, I think we're also living in a situation of massive indigestion of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, information, obesity. So I have to play, I really, I struggle with this a lot because I really enjoy reading, for me too. But if I'm playing to, if I'm spending too much time on digital media, I just, I don't find the time to read and I find it more difficult to read. So, and then it takes me like a half an hour to really settle down or longer. So every now and then I try to build in like these, like a short retreat and then they have no internet for seven days or something. Just to see what happens to how is this all quiet down and stuff. Just to notice like, what effect is this? having to me and it's so difficult i find it's super difficult to to because there's also a lot of joy coming from interacting on the internet also having some conversations uh reading interesting things but i have to really start finding the time to also sit with things to digest them instead of gorging on more and more information yeah i i get it 100% like i love books and i love reading

and I love stories. And I recently had a podcast with a good friend of mine, Dr. David Solomon, who our podcast was, my library is my lab. And he was speaking about this new college is happening in Vermont and how the library there was going to be purely digital. And he was telling me about like,

oh, you know, look at, look at what's happening here. And on some level, like, I get it. Like, you know, these books are a way of communicating stories from the past. hold so much information. But on some level, and this is like the dark side of me, is like,

I understand why they would burn the Alexander or the library. I understand book burning. I understand burning down. Let's get rid of all this knowledge. Garbage. All someone else's stuff. You know, and it's hard for me to say that because I have such a fondness for books and I have such a fondness for stories.

But on some level, you know, on some level, what is all of that stuff? It's just another story. And might it be better if we started, you know, are you really getting, you're not, just because you burn all the books, I mean, you're getting rid of the information, especially if we can agree that information is, is revealed to you. You know, might that be what is necessary or might that be what it takes for a new start

is to get rid of all these old fences? It's a weird thing to think about, right? Because I don't want to be a heretic or, you know, sacrilegious, but I get it. I also get it. And there is also the question like, who burned the library of Alexandria? Was it a competing thought structure that was like, okay, all these thoughts that might colonize suitable minds that I want to colonize,

let's get rid of them. And that's ideological warfare. It's actually conflict between these thought organisms that use. It's like a collection of ants is. way more than a collection of ants. It's a super organism, right? And so a collection of humans is way more than just individual

humans together. And so these larger intelligences, which are these ideologies, these are the ones competing, I think. And these are the ones that want to burn books. Because the physical transcription of it disappears, it doesn't mean that the idea is gone.

Most likely the idea is still somewhere in the collective unconscious. Sure. It never goes away. ideas come from, but it does determine the trajectory. But here I like to think again with a sort of ecological mindset. Usually the biodiversity is a strength. So usually having a very diverse ecosystem is a very robust ecosystem. And that's why I would say that book burnings in general, while I understand it,

it's most likely not a very viable strategy if robustness is a thing that we want to move towards and I very much want to move towards robustness yeah yeah yeah I would agree I it's I love the idea of looking at us as a superorganism I I think it was Christopher Ryan's book I forgot what it was called but he spoke about he gave the the example of a grasshopper and a grasshopper is a grasshopper until it becomes a locust, right? At a certain point, in his critical mass, and then its form actually changes, and the mindset changes. And if you just hold on to that idea, you can think about a crowd or a riot or a group of people or a nation or whatever conglomerate you want to. At some point in time, we change the same way the grasshopper changes.

Our ideology shifts and we become this force of nature that is almost unstoppable, right? It's fascinating. And then we're right back at the answers. The answers are all around us. I'm sorry. Go ahead. And we're already operating on a superorganismal level. We're in a global civilization that's operating as a sort of amoeba that is always looking for growth.

So the entire global ecosystem is, economic system is built on growth and the whole macroeconomic system as a as a entity let's say is just focused on looking for more oil for instance which is the lifeblood of the system for this I would really recommend checking the work of Nate Hagen's podcaster and he talks he has an excellent synthesis on how to picture our current position or what you humanity, what this moment is. Super high quality, very, very good thinker.

And he goes on to this superorganismal theory as well. And he has a very, I think he focuses on energy. So on the sort of base level of what is necessary for the civilization and where do we get energy from and these kind of things. But we're talking a bit more on the ideas on the no sphere or that's that level. With the locust is interesting, by the way, because a grasshopper and the locusts are genetically, they're identical. So it's the expression of the genes that changes. So the expression pattern that changes.

And that's epigenetics. So epigenetics is genetics on genetics. And that's determining which gene switches on or off or more or less. and there are a lot of different ways of epigenetics changing. But the interesting part there is that these social conditions of the locust, so they change the epigenetics, and the epigenetics changes the morphology of the grasshopper into the locust, and also the behavior.

And there's, I've been interested in this. I didn't work on it, but during my studies I was reading up on these kind of stuff. is how is memory encoded or how are thoughts encoded and it's most likely linked to epigenetics so that also for human thoughts yeah and they did this with also tested with lab animals to see how thought gets encoded into the into the genome because for a very simple example is so take mammals so even humans or let's take a whole horse, horses is easier. At the moment of fertilization, there's no neurons yet. So you only have an X cell and a sperm cell. They go together and that is the total genome. So you just have

one cell. There's no nerve cells there. Then as the baby just fades, it grows out. But the moment it is born it's already if it's a horse so within like 10 minutes it can walk around it can eat it can breathe it has all these reflexes and this memory of what is being a horse so the body moves already in a simple way or a simple way in a natural way and that memory was not stored in neurons because there weren't any neurons in the moment of conception so where where is that coming from and where's the physical storing of that kind of thing and so with humans it's interesting because of course babies are if you look at it on a biological or sort of sort of natural

framework human babies are born way too early if you compare it to different types of like a horse so within 10 minutes it can run around and feed itself and it most likely has to do with our brain size and these kind of things, but also our capacity for adaptive learning throughout life is way bigger than for a lot of animals. So there, I don't know, there's this interesting playing around with these kind of, I'm just trying to stay a little bit up to date on the sort of scientific, yeah, what is known about these things. And on the other hand, what we were just talking about, the more esoteric like thought

organisms and these things. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that that is, I think that that is a theme that runs through all of human history. Like, we do have the ability for adaptive learning and to change models and to recreate something we never have. But we do seem to fall back on these models. And these models, whether it's the locust or, you know, if we fall back on a, if we were to fall back onto a story of human history and use epigenetics as somewhat of a model and we look at the locusts or we look at the bees. You know, we could see the same way

that locusts get to a field and eat it to death, you know, and then they begin to turn on each other. That's kind of like populism right now. And like what happens? Like, you know, you could make the case that, hey, this leader led us into this field and now there's nothing left to eat. So then they just all turn on the queen and eat the queen.

And the history is rife with the queen being beheaded or the leaders being beheaded or, you know, part of the hive being segmented and then going their own ways. And if we look at that as a model, like, that's totally plausible. And then there's the other side of like, okay, well, we're at this weird moment where we could do something different, but will we do something different? You know, it's interesting to think about. Yeah. And then I think that, again, rewilding. is a means of finding changing the epigenetics i'll say it like that of course it's not exactly that but it's changing our it's changing the world views that inhabit us and that are running

us towards ruin let's say and inviting different ways of seeing things and that's actively changing your your interior and what i like about this this way of trying to change things is I think in the long term this this is a way of getting out of our predicament because if we try to do it with other ideologies other left hemispherical solutions then then I think we're we're continuously running the or we're running the massive risk of just just making the same mistakes because then we're again, colonizing ourselves with these massive organisms that don't really have our best interest in mind. Then we're again ran like an ant colony, for instance, where maybe the colony itself is surviving, but all the ants are miserable.

I'm not saying that the ants are miserable, most likely ants are fine as they are, but as humans. So and if we then picture this idea of rewilding, but also doing this in co-creation with other people, is sharing again, like do rewilding together in the sense like, okay, start experiencing, do cold water, cold river sittings with people on Sunday, spend the day in outdoors in quiet or in nature, share what you saw, maybe make some nice drawing, or write a poem or share these share whatever you're courting and court it in a natural setting

and then let nature sort of guide us back towards sort of a life-affirming way because if we try to do it the other way with this this this ideological way i think then then it's not us speaking it's it's an ideology speaking. Yeah. You know, it makes me think. So if we take the idea that ideologies are superorganisms and we've had communism, we've had capitalism, maybe we've been the locust for the last 250 years. Maybe we've been gorging ourselves.

And now we're re we're retaking the form of the grasshopper like, yeah, I don't really want to go out and conquer anymore. Like I'm fat and I just, I want to go bury a hole. You know what I mean? And it seems like the superorganism is dying. It's running out of steam. And the leader's like, come on, let's keep going. And we're like, no, we're going to fly over here.

But maybe we are, and maybe that's rewilding. Maybe we are losing the drive of the superorganism so that we can retrace the retrace like the ebb and flow, right? Like superorganism conquers and then it flows back. And maybe we're becoming the grasshoppers again and starting to rewild ourselves and realizing, okay, well, we need to. to take a break now. And like you said, maybe it's nature doing the work. Oh, I 100% think that nature is doing the work. Yeah, it's crazy to think we would, right? I like what you put there. There's an analogy that I really like to use that also fits and it's also insect. It's the analogy of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The caterpillar's life is, if you look at it,

it's mostly feeding, feeding and defending itself for predators, but gorging itself. Yeah. To acquire nutrients, mass, and at a certain moment in time, if a caterpillar would continuously do that, it would just eat itself to death and kill its environment. So there's a cue at some point where the caterpillar most likely from inside here's, this is enough and gets triggered to crawl up a plane. band under a leaf and then spin itself into a cocoon. Imagine a creature that is focused on gorging itself,

just only eating and competing and trying to keep it away from predators. So it's fair-based, most likely. I don't know what the interior of a caterpillar is, but let's be a bit poetic about it. And so its whole life is dead. And then at a certain point, it feels like, oh, this is enough. and it spins itself into a cocoon in which it can hardly move. Then it actively starts to dissolve itself.

So a caterpillar first goes from the caterpillar shape. It has to die more or less, trusting that at a certain point, the program or the plan of becoming a butterfly, so the epigenetic map, again, the caterpillar and a butterfly are exactly the same genetic blueprint, that it first has to die. It's metabolically active, but at a certain point, there might be a moment where it's actually a soup. And then it will restart reconstituting itself into a butterfly.

And then it goes out. So maybe, let's see if I'm in my most, let's say, active hope or in my, if I feel life, I think like maybe we're in this process and we are all being asked to spun our own cocoon and move into this process of start listening to whatever this cue is to become a butterfly. And it's something that the caterpillar has to first let go of all the old stuff because it cannot stay a catapaterpillar. It's already in its cocoon and it cannot go back. So the only way is forward.

but how does it know how to become a butterfly yeah it most likely doesn't know it just received it receives it by letting go of the old and i have a very strong feeling and conviction that that's that's the way we should do things yeah i love it i i i see the transition of form as something that is definitely happening no matter how you look at it whether it's generational terms and you have this wide swath of baby boomers who are essentially us just, you know, if you subscribe to, if you, if you can say to yourself, you don't come into this world, you come out of it, then you can see the older generation on a, on a generational scale. And like, there's such a large number of people that are going to be over the age of 60.

And like, they're dying. So why wouldn't the world be in turmoil? if a large part of the planet is dying, wouldn't we all feel that, whether no matter how old you are or how young you are, you see part of you dying, like it's painful.

You feel it. It's hard. But you can also, especially people that maybe our age and maybe each generation goes through this, but we're like this weird bridge where we see this big swath of us dying, but then you and I are looking over

and seeing this new birth, this new form. And maybe that's why the community that we tend to find ourselves in Simon are so, some people may say irrationally optimistic about what's coming. You know, it's like we see the new growth.

We are the ones creating the new stories, the new myth making, or reintroducing the myths to the next torchbearers in a weird sort of way. It's a beautiful thing. And I love the idea of the transformation and the caterpillar and the butterfly and the changing a form.

And, you know, even that changes the way you experience time. A new form experiences time in a different way. old form would. If you could fly versus trying to crawl on a thousand little feet. You know, it's interesting to think about. Simon, I cannot tell you how much I love this conversation. And I would keep talking to you.

I got a hard out coming up here. But I think you and I could probably do three hours. Yeah. Yeah, it's very easy. But before it. That's a lot of fun. It is. It's really fun.

And I feel like we just kind of scratched the surface. And our conversation is really starting to unfold. its own new form. Before I let you go though, where can people find you? What do you have coming up and what are you excited about? I think for now, mostly people can find me on LinkedIn. I kind of like last year I joined LinkedIn and I'm using it a bit as a platform to post my musings. And I like that it's a bit short format and then every now and then I just put something out there of things that I find interesting or just similar kind of stuff as we were talking about. And I'm working on a website, but that's also a place for me to maybe also bundle a bit of the

information that I want to put out there, but also ways of contacting me. But I think the best way is via LinkedIn. And I guess what I'm working on a lot of different things. and it's mostly with other people in the sense of conversation. I feel, again, I have this sense that things are working through me and through us. And so I don't want to build a fence around it. I'm just, of course, at a certain point, that will take shape. And then if I feel a clear go ahead, I will build a fence.

Oh, what I have coming up is my PhD defense, which will be in September. this year so I managed to finally finish that's what I'm happy with congratulations that's super awesome yeah thanks thanks so you just have to get up are you just waiting to publish it or like what what is the next the next yeah it's it's like a bit of a bureaucratic set of steps so the the book is done and it has to go to a committee and the committee will have to read it then I have a public defense which is also a bit of ceremonial so there's for professors that read it that will ask me some critical questions i have to defend my thesis and then i'm officially sort of right my doctorate and then there's also the published book

but all the writing is done oh that's so i i can't wait to read it myself i hope that when the time is right you'll let me read it because i maybe you can come back on when it publishes and stuff like that and i sure sure it will be it's very jargony yeah these these type of that it's it's molecular biology so it's highly specialized so it's only for the I would say it's esoteric knowledge but if you take joy out of reading it's

sure okay I would I would and I think that I speak for a lot of people when I say that I hope that you begin publishing more I'm sure time is a factor for you but I really enjoy as do as you can see the elevated

numbers of people that are constantly moving to your post like it's you have a really great way of synthesizing a lot of material and making it digestible for people and also interweaving the different ideas of different authors. And I love the way in which you describe whatever this is happening, Simon, working through us, working through you. I really enjoy it. And I know exactly what you mean. And I'm thrilled to be a part of it. I'm thrilled to be in this conversation with him. I'm thrilled to be in this community and all of us like-minded people. So with that, I will put your link in the show notes, and I will look forward to talking to you on the other channels that we have together and this one.

And if anything ever comes up, feel free to reach out and we'll do this more often because this is a lot of fun. Thank you so much, George. And the feeling is likewise. It's a very fruitful conversation. And again, dialogue is also a living thing. So by going back and forth, there's different entities talking to each other. And if it's fruitful and creative, then we get, yeah, we go places. So I think we went somewhere.

So very nice. I agree, man. It was fun. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending time with us. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did. And that's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen, Aloha. All right. Let's do that.