Writers at the Well

Novelist Manda Scott on Thrutopian Fiction and Creating a Roadmap for the Future

• Season 1 • Episode 4

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Award-winning novelist, teacher, and podcaster Manda Scott talks with Tess Callahan about her shamanic spiritual practice, her new Thrutopian novel ANY HUMAN POWER, and her highly acclaimed podcast Accidental Gods. Tess and Manda discuss dreams, visions, and the liminal states between waking, sleeping, life, and death. Manda encourages writers to create new narratives that will pave the way to the systematic changes our world needs.

Best known for the Boudica: Dreaming series, Manda's previous novels have been short-listed for the Orange Prize, the Edgar, Wilbur Smith and Saltire Awards, and won the McIllvanney Prize. Her latest novel, Any Human Power, is a mytho-political thriller which lays out a Thrutopian roadmap to a flourishing future we’d be proud to leave to forthcoming generations. With degrees in veterinary medicine and a Masters in Regenerative Economics, Manda Scott hails from Scotland and now lives in England with her wife and podcast co-creator, Faith Tilleray.

Explore these links to learn more about Manda's writing, her podcast, and her Thrutopian Master Class for writers.

Manda Scott's Website: https://mandascott.co.uk/
Accidental Gods Podcast: https://accidentalgods.life/.
Thrutopian Master Class: https://thrutopia.life/

Tess Callahan is the author of the novels APRIL & OLIVER and DAWNLAND. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and is a certified Mindfulness Meditation teacher taught by Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield. She offers author interviews on her Substack: https://tesscallahan.substack.com/publish/home, and guided meditations on her sister podcast Heart Haven Meditations, available on Apple, Spotify and elsewhere.

By tapping "like" and "follow" you help others find the show. Thank you for listening!

Host: Tess Callahan
Substack: Writers at the Well
Guided Meditation Podcast: Heart Haven Meditations
Meditations on Insight...

Tess Callahan:

I welcome to Writers at the well, a podcast that offers intimate conversations with authors about how they draw words and images up from the depths of their inner well, how do they move into a flow state? Do they meditate? Walk in nature? Do they do cartwheels? Let's find out. I'm your host. Tess Callahan, author of the novels April and Oliver and Dawn land. I hope you enjoy this deep dive into the inner workings of the creative process. Today, my guest is Manda Scott. Manda is host of the acclaimed podcast, accidental gods, and an award winning novelist known for her bodhica Dreaming series and other genre bending books. Her latest novel any human power, is a mythopolitical thriller which lays out a through topian roadmap to a flourishing future we would be proud to leave the generations ahead with degrees in veterinary medicine and a master's in regenerative economics. Amanda's life is oriented towards creating radical new narratives that will pave the way to the systematic change our world needs. Amanda hails from Scotland and now lives in England with her wife and podcast co creator faith Tillery. You can find out more about Amanda's work on her website, which I will link in the show notes. Welcome Amanda.

Manda Scott:

Thank you. It's such an honor to be here. Thank you. Oh, it's

Tess Callahan:

an honor to have you here. I have so much I want to ask you, including about your spiritual practice, your new novel and your podcast. Fantastic. So if you don't mind, let's let's start with your spiritual practice. Sure, we're recording this conversation shortly after the presidential election in the US Yes, commiserations, and you might say, yes, the phenomenological display of existence right now is pretty intense. Many people are feeling thrown off precisely at a moment when balance and clarity are needed. Yes, and I know you are a busy, informed, highly engaged person, and also very grounded, so I'd like to ask if you have a daily practice for staying connected to yourself, to truth that might be of benefit to our listeners. Yes,

Manda Scott:

yes. So first, I would like to say I don't live in the US. I extend my heartfelt condolences to all of you over there, although I think, I think we've just seen proof of concept proved. I think the the radical right, the Neo Nazis, will take pretty much everywhere. The consolation that I take from this, which is not exactly directly answering your question, but I it's in alignment, is biophysical reality beats ideology. Every single time we are about to see the people who think they can control everything discover the nature of hyper, complex systems which are, by nature, uncontrollable. We have also seen that the current system is not fit for purpose, any system which creates the binary, tribal divides that we've had, where one side feels euphoric and stamping on the other side and the other side feels utterly destroyed. This is not a system that's fit for purpose. The good thing about this is that this is the part of the population that feels utterly destroyed within and beyond the US. Is not the part that reaches for semi automatic weapons as their first recourse to feeling injured. What we have, I think those who feel injured is the capacity for introspection and grounding is actually, as you said, and I think this is the time where we all understand that it's not a question of holding our breath and waiting for years and hoping our side wins. Partly, I don't think there will ever be another set of free and fair elections in the US. But also, even if Harris had won, and I thought she did a remarkable campaign, I was really impressed with some of the creativity on show. It wasn't going to fix climate change. It wasn't going to fix the metacrisis. It wasn't going to look at the totality of everything that is rolling towards the edge of the cliff, because they are an integral part of the system that created this. We need total systemic change. What I think this result has given us when we dust ourselves off and pick ourselves up, is the capacity to go for that total systemic change. This may not be what you want to put on your podcast. If you want to edit all that out, that's fine. I think it's I think it's really important now. That we stop trying to fix a system that is unfixable, because the system is not broken. The system is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to elevate into power the people with the most money and keep them there, and the fact that these are people who hold views that we disagree with doesn't stop it being the way the system was designed. So I think we let go of the system. I think any change into a new paradigm, which is what we're looking for, has to be peaceful and it has to be narrative led, which is why I think that finding the narratives of change and building the visions of a future that actually we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us is what's so important? And to answer your actual question, all of this comes from my spiritual practice. So my spiritual practice is shamanic, which is not to say that I believe I am a shaman. I absolutely don't think anybody who has been socialized in our culture, the Western, educated, industrial, rich and at least until Tuesday, notionally democratic, weird, trauma culture. We cannot be shamans. We've there's things that genuine shamanic cultures imbibe with their mother's milk. We imbibe PFAs and microplastics, and we don't imbibe the known, the bone deep, knowing that we connect inherently to the web of life. We don't imbibe the knowing, how to connect to the web of life and ask it for help. However, we can use the tools of shamanic practice in our culture, and those tools do allow us to connect to the web of life and ask it for help. So my daily practice is to do that from the moment that I wake up through my sleeping I when I wake I record my dreams, because dreaming for me is an integral part of connecting to the web of life. It's a way of bypassing my head mine. I build before I get out of bed, the for what for me is the core of the practice is the three pillars of my heart mind, which is gratitude, compassion and joyful curiosity. And I build that to the point where I have a furnace in my heart space. And then I do my morning ceremony, which connects me to the 10 points of the wheel. So basically we're looking at east, west, south north and then south east, south west, north west, north east. But we're coming to the center after the Cardinals, and again, after the marriage points. So there's 10 points at all I connect to each of the directions. I welcome them to the joy and the beauty and the glory of the day. I thank them for the gift of this life and all that that direction embodies for me, and I invite them to share this day with me, and having made that as my commitment to the day, I then carry that through whatever else is happening. So I have a pony with colleague at the moment. So I was standing with the ponies, giving thanks, offering compassion, standing in joyful curiosity. Try not to let my veterinary head take over and tell me exactly what was going on, but to invite in whatever healing is available, while giving thanks for the crows and the red kites and the paddocks and the trees and the fact that I still have the privilege to pick up a phone and invite someone in my former profession to come and stick a needle in this horse and sort its buscap deficiency, while also checking out my things and giving her I gave her next phone, because I did spend a year doing A veterinary homeopathic degree. And why not so, but it has to imbue every single thing that I do. I think that's the important thing about my practice, is that it's my I am in every breath that I take, endeavoring to connect to the wider web of life, standing in my place as a node within the hyper complex system that it is which maps onto a vision that I had years ago, and asking what it needs of me in this moment, and offering and endeavoring to be whatever that is. So does that make sense in any way, too?

Tess Callahan:

It makes total sense. I love the question what the web of life needs from me in any given moment, and that daily practice of cultivating in your heart stove, gratitude, compassion and joy, no matter what's out there a horse with colic or a political situation that looks unfixable, bringing those three elements to it is very counterintuitive and powerful. Thank you. So I really appreciate your sharing that. And can you say more about you said, when you wake up in the morning, you record your dreams. Can you say more about the importance of that and how that feeds into your day, your insight? Sure.

Manda Scott:

So I teach something called shamanic dreaming, which is contemporary shamanic practice. Again, I am not pretending to teach anyone to be a shaman, but we're using the tools of shamanic practice to connect to the gods of these lands. And I live on the islands of Britain or wherever you live. And for me, one of the core tenets of shamanic practice. Shamanism as a spiritual coat, is that the reality that you and I are speaking in is a very, very, very tiny fragment of all possible realities, and that with training, it's possible to step out of this reality into the other realities in order to ask for help. And that's crucial. We're not just flipping out because we don't like it here we want to escape. We're going out to places. There are a number of criteria that I teach the students who need to know where we're going. We need to know how we're going to get there. We need to know what kind of things we might meet and how to identify those which come with our best and highest good at heart, which is quite critical. We need to know what kinds of questions we can ask and frame them in a way that is useful because words have meaning, and they have meaning that we often don't see until it's too late. And be careful what you ask for you may get it is absolutely crucial. Also, you can ask for what you want and what get is what you need is fairly crucial. Also, we need to know how to ask of what we've met. We need to know how to hear an answer that is authentic, how to bring it back, how to come back. One of my early teachers worked a lot with schizophrenics, and said the difference between them and us is that we choose when to go out. We know how to come back. We know where we're coming back to, so we need, we need to know how to come back to this time and this place and bring back the understanding that we've got. If you've got all of those, you're using the tools of shamanic practice, absent any one of that chain, you're not. So there are ways to leave this reality. And very popular are medicine plants. And I don't use those, partly because I get it quite frustrated with the trauma cultures attempt to fast track stuff. When I wrote the Boudicca books, which are one of the first sets of books that I wrote, kind of directly under shamanic instruction, or instruction from my guides, I remember reading Herodotus, ancient, one of the early big writers who said that the island of Mona, which we now call Anglesey, was a druidic College, and we could Druidry was the shamanic indigenous spirituality of these lands before the Romans came and destroyed it. And people would come from all over the known world, which known for them was basically Africa, most of Europe, through to India, up into Scandinavia, bits of Russia. And they would travel to this tiny island off the coast of Wales, and they would study for between 12 and 20 years, and then they would go back to their people and take what they'd learned and and even now, in indigenous cultures, true initiation cultures, the training is between one and two decades. And I don't think short fitting that is useful or that it can work. So I don't use entheogens particularly, but I use dreaming as one of the ways most effectively that we can get but we need to bypass our head mind, because our head mind is very good at telling us what we think and what it thinks we need to know and what we need to be doing is connecting with our heart, mind and our dreams are one of the best ways of bypassing our head mind, once we have got to grips with the capacity to hold our sense of self and the question that matters to us most in the moment, from when we fall asleep to When we wake up and one of the early teachings that I have is that this is a practice for when we die, and this takes us on poster, potentially to any human power, because the primary character dies quite early, but she has learned this. And so the teaching is that every single night we have practice of that losing our sense of self, that then arrives at the deepest dreaming, which is death, if we can hold our sense of self without too much ego. Just, you know, I am under Scott, I am dreaming from when we fall asleep to when we wake up. Then there is a chance that we'll be able to do the same when that final sleep comes and we enter into what is one of the most exciting adventures of our existence, which is the passage between lives. So I see death as a rite of passage, and I see sleep as a practice for that rite of passage, and dreaming as an integral part of that but also a very useful place to ask for help and ask questions and get to know myself better.

Tess Callahan:

Yeah. So this brings us to any human power which I love this book so much, and I was so moved by the opening and our protagonist, LAN I don't think it gives anything away to say that. I

Manda Scott:

think you can give away the fact that she dies. That's pretty much on the back cover with it. It's not a spoiler, really, right?

Tess Callahan:

And she has this Mongolian teacher in her youth who teaches her how to step into death consciously as into sleep, and just to highlight what you just said, because I think it's so critical, you know this, if I could remember my name as you're saying, Not Igor. Oriented. But if I can remember my name and state while asleep, you know, I am Amanda Scott, I am asleep, then I could do the same while newly dead. This is what LAN learns from her, her Mongolian young teacher. And it's also it resonates with Tibetan Buddhist practice of, yes, sleeping, consciously, yoga, Dream Yoga, yes. So the idea being, I

Manda Scott:

think it, I think every culture outside of our culture does something like this, because, you know, it's there to be done. Why would you not? Yeah,

Tess Callahan:

and it's so fascinating, because we're just getting to know ourselves, right, even if, yes, even if, just to watch ourselves, watch our consciousness change as we fall asleep and in the morning, watch, watch the mind wake up. It's, it's beautiful, yes, and it's an a portal, as you're saying, It's an invitation, and then it also can bleed into waking life, right? Like the waking dream. This has reminded me of Carl Jung's red book and his experiences with Philemon and his regular guides who would give him guidance, and he didn't have to be asleep for this to happen.

Unknown:

Exactly, exactly. Yes. So in the dreaming, as I teach it, it's not just sleep dreaming.

Tess Callahan:

Uh huh, yeah. So say more. So you not only have this in your novel, you not only practice it, but you also teach it. I see on your website, you offer classes in in related to death and dreaming and shamanic practice. Do you want to say anything more about what you offer there?

Manda Scott:

So yes, within the shamanic practice. Dreaming encompasses all the ways in which I and my students we leave this reality. So waking dreaming is absolutely a key and crucial part of that. And we do shamanic journeying in the kind of modern, contemporary, traditional way, partly because I want my students to be able to go off and learn with other people. But we we do it in other ways too. So dreaming is not just sleep dreaming, but the sleep dreaming is pretty crucial. So originally, I was just teaching small groups in person and progressing through that. Obviously, in lockdown, we couldn't do that, and we discovered we could teach online, which I have to say, I thought there were things that we could only do if we were actually in the room with people, and there were certain things where I thought you had to be lying in physical contact, because that's how I'd been taught. And in lockdown, we discovered you could have somebody in Nova Scotia and someone in New Zealand, and it worked just as well, which was an enormous and quite exciting revelation. So we have a program, and it is a minimum of 10 years to go all the way around the wheel, and nobody actually has done it in Lesson 16, because things like lockdown gotten away. And that's that's teaching the contemporary shamanic work in 20 winters. Also 2018 I had a series of visions which basically said that I had to start teaching at scale. And I had no idea, but it took me a while. And so the podcast arose out of that. And also, podcast is called accidental ghost podcast, and there's an accidental ghost membership, and that's my attempt to teach how to connect to the web of life in a way that anyone can do. My kind of target audience is a single mother with two kids under the age of 10 living in a tower block, and has them in all day. And we launched in January of 2019, and low then, then lockdown happened, and there were many more people living in a terrible lot with their kids than had been before. So the aim there is that you just, if you can give us the time, you just put your earphones on, listen to to a particular recording on day one, and then you follow the instructions, and you have something every day for as long as you want, you'll be repeating things eventually. But we're connecting to the elements, to the water, the fire, the Earth, the air, and then we're practicing intent, and then we're practicing letting go. And now I've got the heart mind module, which is helping people to build the gratitude, the compassion and that joyful curiosity that says, Wow, everything is amazing. I wonder what happens now. And it's that bit of I don't know what happens next, that lets our head mind back down. So that's there as a do it at your own pace, a set of teachings. But then I also teach gatherings, which are online, partly because there's a lot of people, I do not want people getting on a plane to come to spend time with me. Really, we need to stop that. So, so what can we do online that will allow people to engage and dreaming your death awake, which we always do somewhere around Showa. And so we did it. I think two, two Sundays ago is a four hour online opening of doors of how we can treat death as our advisor. I'm not a great fan of Carlos Castaneda, but one of the good things he said was treat death as if it were always over your left children. If you can live in a way where death is omnipresent, then your death will be more conscious and your life will be more alive. Life. My aim. I have two aims. One is I want everyone to be able to connect to the web of life. Ask, what do you want to be and respond to the answers in real time? And the other is, I want everyone to fall in love with the process of being alive, just with the magic of being alive. And one of the best ways of doing that is becoming completely aware of our own mortality. I could die in the middle of this conversation is that if you are the last person I speak to, I want this to matter. I want it to feel real. I want us to both feel alive in it. And so how do we make that happen? And so I also do other gatherings. I think a lot of next year, we always do dreaming your year, awake at the beginning of the year, and then there's others through the year. And I really think at the moment, my focus is on, how do we become the best ancestors we can be, which is partly what feeds into to the book and to the rest of my writing and and I think now is the single most important question any of us alive can ask ourselves.

Tess Callahan:

What you're saying, Amanda is just speaks directly to my experience of your writing and your podcast accidental gods that it's, there's no spiritual bypassing in it. It's so real and grounded, and at the same time, there's so much hope and invitation to joy in it. Yeah, it's very counterintuitive, and it's, it's a bomb. So thank you. I really appreciate what you're offering. You have said that your spiritual practices have given you instructions or visions that have led to both your writing any human power in particular and in the podcast, accidental gods. Can you talk about that, if it's possible to talk about how that came, how those came to you, and how you said yes to them, sure.

Manda Scott:

And they aren't the only ones. I would say the first really big set of visions were the ones that led to the Boudicca books. And at that point, I thought, if I could show who we had been before the Romans came, before trauma really descended on the culture of our lands, then we would all shed shed Rome and go back to being connected. And it didn't quite work out like that, but I did start teaching which was which was grand and lovely. So one of the other really clear instructions I got was in 2016 and that was to go to Schumacher college and study for an Master's in regenerative economics. And I absolutely guarantee you, economics was nowhere on my radar until that point, like, like, not at all. I was a vet, and then I was a writer. Economics was something that strange people in suits did to make money. Anyway. I went to Schumacher. It was a completely transformative year. I came back. Our lives totally turned over and and I thought I'd stopped writing. I finished the previous book. While I was at Schumacher, we did 17 drafts, which was painful and not anything I ever want to do again. And I got to the point where I just I hated the process, and it's too slow. And I thought I've got the podcast now. You and I could be talking live. We're not, but we could be, and I don't know how long before it goes out, but it's not going to be obsolete. And so it's got that immediacy, and I could talk to people that I really respect, ask them the questions that feel like they really matter, and get out there, and that felt like a really useful thing to be doing. And then the pandemic hit, and we doubled down and did more stuff. Let's put more out for people, because everyone's in trauma. And then I was teaching, and we started to teach the shamanic work. And there was one particular course that I said, there are no circumstances under which I am doing this online, really. I do need to be in the room with you guys for this. It's too dangerous. I'm not doing it. And by 2021 we were on the second summer of lockdown, and I had people in Germany and Switzerland and Ireland, and they would all have had to do two weeks quarantine either side of coming if they were even allowed to come at all. And it's a progression round a spiral, and they were stuck. And so I had a lot of begging emails, and in the end, I cracked and said, okay, okay, we'll do it online. And we did it over the summer solstice of 21 and on the Saturday night, which was the solstice, I was drumming for them to do the big journey. And I had a series of visions, which is not unusual, but they were particularly sharp, particularly clear text visions. And the instruction was to take a 30,000 year old fossilized horses tooth that I have on my altar sources, some ethically sourced horse hide got the hill on the land that I live on, and we live on a land that's been a farm for many centuries. And there's old, old light hedges where the the Hawthorne is, is about a foot thick, and I had to bind the tooth on a particular place so that I could sit with it in the sole of my back, look down the valley Southwest in a particular frame of mind for at least an hour as the sun goes down every night until further notice. So okay, and one of the things I have learned in 40 years of doing this work is that you do not argue with the plane. Text instructions. You don't hang around going, Yes, but why am I doing that? You just do it to the best of your ability. And it took me a while to get ethically sourced suicide, partly because we were in the middle of lockdown, but eventually it turned up in the post. And so end of July, I went up the hill and sat watched the sun go down for an hour, and it was gorgeous and and I still had the old dog then, and she and me just sat up the hill, and I got into the frame of mind and and watched the crows go to bed. And it was beautiful. And, and I had no idea why I was there or how long I was going. It could have been decades, who knows? And on, I think the ninth day, I had a series of visions again, and the first one was that opening chapter that we just talked about a little bit. And then the three void walks and the concept that I needed to write our route from exactly where we are through two words of future that we'd be proud to leave behind. Also, I needed other people to do it, so I had to set up the throughtopia masterclass as well, which was kind of hard work when I was trying to write a novel that felt impossible, but. But the point about this is, first of all, again, you don't argue it's not my job. If I've asked, What do you want to be and I've got really, really clear answer, it's my job to do it. And also I will get help, which I did so that really, it was really clear and and then the only question was, how, how do I do this? But also, I had been running the podcast for two and a half years by then, so I, every single week, been speaking to people who were bringing ideas into being that could be part of a regenerative future. I was, I had got to the point where I knew we need total systemic change, and I was endeavoring to move up Donella Meadows, 12 levers of change to the ones at the top, which are the second to top one is change the paradigm, and that was the one I thought I could work with. The very top one is abandon all paradigms, which is much harder actually, but writing, we can change a paradigm with writing. And that's the second top of 12 levers of change. That seems to me, not a bad place to start. So so that really I came down the hill and started writing the book.

Tess Callahan:

I just so admire your trust in that initial instruction to find these objects and go up to the Hill not knowing what it was for, and just to sit there with patience and openness and curiosity and without preconception, I think it's astounding.

Manda Scott:

Well, thank you. I mean, the not real preconception was part of the mindset. It was really clear I have to be in a there's a particular texture of internal being that I am familiar with, but at that point was not terribly practiced at, and it was Hold this. Hold this for now, that's your job. And that was quite hard, but it was also challenging enough that it held all of my attention to do it and, and, you know, I think you do a lot of spiritual work, if something is really clear, then, then all of you goes into making this happen. That's, that's the nature of the work, I think, and that's

Tess Callahan:

the aliveness you were talking about, right? That's, that is the invitation of your work, is to to welcome death as ever present in order to, you know, experience this total aliveness. I mean, so much of the time we're only partially alive, yeah, so it's just extraordinary invitation, yes, in those instructions, you mentioned when your character, Lon, she makes three visits to the void. Yeah, can you talk about that? And she went, while she's in there, she she reaches into timelines.

Manda Scott:

Okay, yes, I can that a bit. So to get there, we need to have a tiny look at the first chapter. And guys, this isn't really not a spoiler. It's basically covered on the back, the back cover. So, so the vision of that first chapter was of 60 something year old woman lying on a bed, and her 15 year old grandson is sitting at her side, and he says, when we go home, can we go up the hill and watch the crows go to bed, which is exactly what I've been doing. And she says, No, I'm not coming home. You know this, I am dying. There is no coming home from this. And he's broken. And in the course of the ensuing conversation, she says, I don't know what comes next, but if you really need me and you call, I am not going to abandon you. If I possibly can, I will come to you and he and she, and we all see the gods pause in their labors at that point and look in on the scene and go, Okay, that was a promise you are held to that. And then she dies. And the whole of the rest of the novel is told from her perspective, caught in the between, which, for me, is a very distinct place between the lands of life and the lands of death, kind of like the Bardos. In Buddhist thinking, Yes, or some of the descriptions of areas in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, all of the genuine books of the dead say something very similar. And so she has a crow as her guide, partly because I do too. And she is taken very, very early in her death, when things are still confusing, she's taken to this place called the void, which, again, is a place with which I am familiar as a shamanic concept. It is not a place to visit, because this is the place where total annihilation happens. I absolutely believe that we move from one life to the next. The evidence for that being the case, is utterly overwhelming. Reincarnation is, I think, is scientifically impossible to ignore now, and yet, in the void there is actual total annihilation. That's what I've been taught, and that's what I believe. And it is not a place to go without somebody who really, really knows what they're doing, holding you safe. And so the crow is there as that guide for LAN in that first void visit. And what she has shown is how to anchor ground so that you will not be swept away, and then hone her intent so finely and so cleanly that she can split the timelines and look at possible options of what may happen, and she sees many of the ways where Finn, her grandson, does succeed in killing himself on the night of her death. If you're in the void, then the implic and you can do this. The implication is that if you can take agency, you can create a timeline that does not exist yet, that you haven't seen because it isn't there, because you haven't yet taken the agency. And so she's kicked back into consensus reality, into kind of the lands of the living, but she's dead with the instruction of, okay, you care enough about this, see what you can do. And I read a lot of books, first of all, near death experiences. And second, similar books where people had collected stories from people who felt they had been connected with by people they knew who had died recently, so that I could get a sense of what is possible. What agency can you take when you are nearly dead, and Angela does what she can. And then there are two more void walks, and she is very, very afraid of this place, and she's already dead. It's not a place to go without real need. And she splits time twice more, once for the family and the extended movement that is arising at random that is going to foment the total systemic change we need. And then the third time is for the whole of humanity, where she sees the bus metaphorically going over the edge of the cliff. She sees all the ways that we could crash and burn really, really badly if the right takes over and gets what they want, the OSD balance, 10,000 year Reich, that's where we end up. But the implication is always that if she can take agency, she can affect a future that she hasn't seen yet, and using the bus metaphor, she can help us all turn the bus away from the edge of the cliff. And then she by now we're 15 years further on, she has to figure out how she can possibly take agency when it seems that when one has a lot more agency when nearly dead than 15 years dead for reasons that I don't understand, but I don't need to understand them. I just need to know how to make them work. So so that's the core of her narrative arc through the book, is is her learning how to take agency when it really matters and finding out what she really cares about.

Tess Callahan:

Those are some serious skills right there. The notion of the void, for me, evokes quantum theory and things existing as probability, right at all times, and then they snapping into existence at the moment of observation, yeah, and that, it's seems to me, in those moments, she's going into the primordial abyss, but she has gained the skills to be grounded, which is really the same. You're just talking about the skills we need in life, right? And including, back to the beginning of our conversation. Of our conversation in this in this moment when things may seem as chaotic and confusing as it does for lawn in the void. Yes, truly.

Manda Scott:

And one of the things I didn't say is that before my morning ceremony, the first act that we do is to ground, to really, really makes sure of our grounding before we do anything else. So, yeah, grounding. I think grounding is one of the core skills of any spiritual path that's that's genuine, is I am here now, and I am rooted in earth, and my heart connects to the heart of the earth and the heart mind of the universe. And we have that kind of hollow. And link between the two. Yeah, yeah. I'll

Tess Callahan:

just refer listeners to on the podcast you have, is it an equinox or Solstice meditation? I have both, where you kind of guide us through, through grounding, experiencing, going down into the various layers of the physical planet, to its center and up to the cosmos. It's very empowering. It's very beautiful, and it's very real. Thank you. It's yeah, yeah.

Manda Scott:

I have done meditations at each of the eight points, certainly the equinoxes and solstices. I think I haven't yet done Milton and Lucia and showing and in book, I think I meant to, and I didn't get around to it, but yes, those four are there and and that, what you've just described is how I start all of the visualizations that I do, they all start with that, because I think it's really important, and if I talk people through it enough, it'll become innate. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Tess Callahan:

So I'd like to ask you, I'm not sure how to formulate this question. But you know, obviously shamanic practice goes back through millennium, and we see what happened with druidic practice in your part of the world, and here in the US, with indigenous practice. I'm thinking right now of, are you familiar with the Ghost Shirt practice of the Lakota? Yeah, and there was a Ghost Dance, and some of the Lakota wore these ghost shirts at Wounded Knee. And this is just sort of an open question, because when I think of this, it's my heart breaks, and I feel a deep part of me feels like, well, the belief was, if I understand it correctly, that the ghost shirts would repel bullets, and they didn't. And I I feel like that should have worked and but we can. We can talk about countless examples through history like Gandhi and, you know, things that appear to have not ended the way they might have, and yet are not lost. Somehow, something still happened there. This is a very disorganized question, but just presenting to Amanda with this pile of thoughts for you to respond to, yeah,

Manda Scott:

and and I have gone through a very similar thought set of thought processes. Is, why did the boudican forces not win that last battle with Rome? Because if they had that, it kicked Rome off the islands of Britain, the druidic movement would have stayed alive, and Rome would probably have shrunk back to being Italy, and Christianity would never have spread. There's a very one battle, one afternoon where somebody made a strategic decision that went the wrong way, and the whole of western history changed. James Lovelock, this is going places that will become relevant in time. James Lovelock, who wrote the Gaia theory, his last notebook, not novel, his last book was novosi, and I read it, and to be honest, I didn't think very much of it, but I recently listened to Indy Johar, who is definitely one of the smartest thinkers of our time on Nate Hagen's great simplification podcast, and in the said he drew it never seen, and his interpretation of the early half of it was that Luz lock was hypothesizing, that Gaia, the entity, had stored as much sunlight as physically possible and then released it as fast as possible in order to create an additional eight and a half billion nodes on the web of life, self conscious nodes on the web of life. And that we are those nodes. And that reframing I find interesting. I don't necessarily believe it, but where I get to is that when I ask for help, I am sent up the hill to write a book, amongst other things, I ask for help every day. But what do you want to meet? We want you to write this book. Okay, I don't need to ask why. I just need to make it the best book I can make it and ask for help every day. To do that, when my students ask for help that are astonishing things happen that break all the known laws of our reality as we have been taught it, with our Citadel mind and our weird trauma culture. And I think this is a point where I would like to pick apart initiation culture and trauma culture. This is a concept that Frances Weller has put forward, and Francis Weller was taught by Patrice maladoma, some who wrote of water and the Spirit, which is essential reading for anyone who's interested in this area. And he posits two kinds of cultures. There's the one that was 300,000 years at least of human evolution, until our trauma culture split off from it and continues in all of the indigenous cultures. Yes, and that is the cultural knowing that we are not separable, that we and the web of life are an indivisible whole. And he says, according to Weller, the hallmark of an initiation culture is that individuals undergo episodic, intermittent, contained encounters with death, and that the containment is held by the elders and the tribe and the more than human world, and that these happen a lot through life birth, for mother and child as a contained encounter with death, but the obvious one is the adolescent initiation, in which someone who has been born with the expectation that they will land in a serotonin mesh of community where they will be cherished and their every need met. And it may be that the tribe doesn't have enough food, but actually, what we learn in the west with our ghastly physiology studies of macaque monkeys that are taken away from their mothers is the babies that are orphaned will go to the model that has the fur on before they go to the model, and in default of the model that has the food that orphaned monkeys go for the Cuddles, if we like, the sense of safety and connection over food. And that what initiation cultures offer a child, as it is growing, is total safety and connection, that confidence of being, of being and belonging, of maturing within a space in which everything is possible, and they are taught how to connect to the web of life. And then they go through the contained encounter with death, in which they are pushed to the edges of themselves, and they encounter the potential of death, such that they have to ask for help from the elders the tribe, but mostly the web of life, and they have to be able to receive that help and embody it. Or frankly, they don't come back. And when they do come back. They come back with that sense of meaning, of being and belonging, of knowing what is mine to do, of knowing who I am. Now I'm not in a space where everything is given to me. I am in a space where I give, I give of the best of myself. I am now in a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the web of life and with the people of my community. I'm in a serotonin mesh of respect and pride and serotonin. This is real neurophysiology, 101, but serotonin is one of the reward centers in the brain, and it's characterized particularly by respect and pride. I am proud to be amongst people that I respect who respect me. In turn. I do what is mine to do, and I do it as only I can do it, and I do it to the best of my ability, and I am amongst people who are doing the same, and we're all working for the good of the whole. And the whole is not just humanity. It's the more than human world as well. It's the whole of the living way. And I am respected for that by the trees and the rocks and the red kites as much as I am by the people around me. And I thrive in that. In our culture, children, infants are born expecting to arrive in that because it's in evolutionary terms, a tiny fragment of time since we split off. And what they arrive, what they find instead is a sense of separation, scarcity and powerlessness, and a culture that has no serotonin mesh, and instead, our reward centers, particularly now in the last 20 years, are dopamine led and dopamine is short term and it's serotonin is additive and it's it's long term. Dopamine is short term. It doesn't stack. So I may get a dopamine hit from alcohol or sugar or white carbs or porn or my side winning in a tribal conflict where I thought it was going to lose, and then I want more, because it is also dopamine networks are subject to the laws of diminishing returns, so I will never fill the void inside, because the void inside is not a dopamine void in any way. Dopamine can't last long enough to fill it. It doesn't matter how many boxes I ordered from Amazon, how many rockets I send to Mars, if I'm the richest people on the planet, I will never fill the void inside, because it's not fillable by the stuff that I get. I need the social connections and the connection to the web of life. So if we look back our culture, the Western cultures shift away from initiation culture to trauma culture must have happened at least 10,000 years ago, because you cannot have the agriculture that we have, where we take ownership of land, we define what grows there, and we take ownership of livestock and make them do things that's not possible in a world where I am an integral part of the web of life and everything is is a relation. So we're looking at 12,000 years, probably, of trauma. And the point about the the trauma culture is we don't have contained encounters with death. We just have trauma that's tax and tax. Stacks and stacks and stacks until it overflows. And so it seems to me. Now, one more thing so Bill Plotkin says that he defines human evolution, the evolution of a single human person in a healthy society. There are four state teachers, infancy, adolescence, adulthood and elderhood, and each of these is divided into two. There's a social component and a natural world, integrative component our culture, the trauma culture, is locked in early adolescence, which is the c1 to take. I have to prove myself. I haven't yet had my contained encounter with death that shows me my sense of meaning and being and belonging in the world. I'm still running around hurling rocks at things and trying to run faster than anybody else, or and or do whatever I think will give me social approval. I'm trying to get stuff. So it seems to me that part of the task of now, now, this minute now, is for each of us to find what it takes to become adult, and if we can, to move to elderhood, and that's a big task. It means really doing the inner work. It means finding the parts that are frozen in trauma and finding ways to let them flow. It means finding ways to create reciprocity, me with the parts of myself. Me with you, another human, me with the rest of the web of life and letting those relationships flow so that Sarah stotter has this great phrase of being seen, feeling felt and getting gotten. We need to do the feeling felt. We need I need to feel. I need to not run from things that trigger me. I need to know how to ground. I need to know how to ask for help. I need to know how to hear the answers. But coming back to Wounded Knee in the Ghost Shirt. I don't know why the gods of the indigenous peoples of my land and your land did not repel the trauma cultures as they arrived. But we are where we are, and I what I see is that when we genuinely ask for help, that help is there. And I don't think that help would be there if we were all necessarily going to drive ourselves over there to the cliff. And the one thing we can be 100% certain of is that the radical right, the trumpians, the fascists, will drive the bus over there to the cliff, because their ideology doesn't even acknowledge that climate change is happening. And I genuinely believe that we will discover that biophysical reality beats ideology every single time you cannot ignore and deny the whole of the climate and ecological breakdown into not being there. So they will take us over the edge of the cliff, which is the one thing that really gives me great hope that Steve bannon's 10,000 you're right, can never happen, because biophysical reality will hit. But I also think that what we have now, those of us who yearn for a world that we would proudly give to the next generations, I have a vision that I take people on where we step back to the Big Bang, we step forward and we step forward another seven generations. Look in the eyes of the young people we meet and go, did we make it what can I learn from you? What can I do for you? And I've never brought people back yet not had pretty much every eye in the room wet, and the visions of our culture are too narrow. We see what we've been told to see. We've been told that it's easier to imagine the total extinction of all life on Earth than it is to imagine an end to capitalism, and that cannot be and those of us who write, those of us who create, it's our job now to create the visions of a world where we are adult, where we refine that initiation culture, where we reconnect with ourselves, each other in the web of life, and we build a world that actually works, because we have the capacity for that now. We have the social technologies, we have the digital technologies. We have all the understanding of how we could do this. We're just not putting them together because it's not cost effective. And that those last three words have to go. So my big question, other than, how do I help people connect to the web of life is, how do we help people step out of predatory capitalism as fast as humanly possible, so that it just collapses under its own weight? And I think that anybody can do

Tess Callahan:

and what do you feel is the role of art in this process you're choosing to be a novelist among other things,

Manda Scott:

yeah, writing the roadmaps, showing what's possible.

Tess Callahan:

That is it? Because art can work on our more pliable hearts in a way that our stubborn minds don't respond to

Manda Scott:

Yes, but I think we can do both. I think yes, because good art, any good art, it really moves in at a subcortical level. But I heard somebody else the other day saying that our cortical decisions are only 0.5% Of the decisions that we make. So most things move in a subcortical level, really. But yes, good art moves us at a limbic level, for sure, but it also opens cognitive avenues. It makes us if we can see a route through, we can believe it possible, and people will do really difficult things to get to an end result that they believe is possible. We are a storied species. Every single thing we do, from buying a new car, a new house, starting a new relationship or a new job or moving to a new country or voting for a political party, God help us, is predicated on the stories we tell ourselves of how it will be better after and also we know that if I read a really good book, I internalize the experiences of the characters with whom I most empathize as if they were my own. My physiology is incapable of discerning the difference between the fiction that I have read and my own memories. My body responds as if both were real, and that counts looking forward as well. If I Can you Can anybody listening? Can paint images, pictures, ideas of how we get to a world that works. Then other people can help walk them into existence. I have a concept that says, what we are doing, we create. We're throwing ghost lines across the landscapes of tomorrow so that other people can walk them into paths. Because this is Amitabh Gosh in the great derangement. He says, future generations, looking back on the great derangement, will blame politicians and bureaucrats for their failure to act as they should, but more, they will blame writers and artists, because it's not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures. That's our job. The thing you could say about politicians and bureaucrats, this is not amateur, gosh, now this is me, is that if they were capable of imagining different futures, they would not be in the job. This this system self selects for people who are not going to rock the boat. We need the people who can rock the boat. We need the people who can imagine a world that really works and works for all life, not just for the cis, straight, white, old men with a lot of money. It's got to work for everything. I want a world where humanity takes its place as an integral part of the hyper conscious, hyper complex network that is the web of life on a flourishing planet where ecosystems are thriving, and I genuinely believe that's still possible, but it will take all of us who write. I have a vision also, that anyone who is writing that that no producer or publisher of anything can get a text that is not through topian. The only texts they can get are the ones that are envisioning better, that are accepting that the existing system is broken and gone and finished and over, and we are in its death throes. And yes, they are painful, and we can build better. And here's how. And you can do that. You could do that as a crime novel. You could do it as a romance. You could do it as a political thriller. We were just watching diplomat the other night. You could do it in many, many ways. But please, people listening, don't keep writing the status quo. That's propaganda for a system that's dead and needs to be let go of. I know I sound quite pejorative there, but the system is gone. And I think accepting that it's gone, and it's not just a question of holding our breath for four years and then we'll get the right answer. The system is not fit for purpose. It probably never was. It definitely isn't now, and we can create the imaginings of the futures that could be different. I am hoping I am, in fact, going to rerun this through topia master class next, next year sometime, probably next summer. So I hope I will have a new, whole new suite of people so that writers and creatives can come along, and we'll bring the people in who have got the ideas of the leading edge of new governance, new politics, New Economics, new ways of doing business, new ways of creating transport or producing power, or doing regenerative agriculture or new social technologies. What does a war and data lab feel like? What does it feel like to be in a sociocratic meeting? What does it feel like when we begin to discuss community so that people can go and write these because I couldn't have done any human power, I hadn't had the podcast behind me. So we need to kind of try and get all that conceptual stuff, the research that people would do if they even knew it was possible to do it, and bring it all into one place, so that people can run with it

Tess Callahan:

and by Thrutopian. So you're distinguishing it from dystopian, which is paints the worst picture, which just leaves us hopeless and utopian, which is rosy, but we don't know how to get there, whereas through topian is offering the roadmap. Is that correct?

Manda Scott:

That's absolutely correct. Yes, from where, exactly where we are through and it's I. I borrowed the name from Rupert Reed. He wrote a paper in 27 Dean and Huffington Post about this, and he spelled it T, H, r, u, topia. So that's what we've gone with. But honestly, I think a lot of people write dystopias under the very reasonable concept that if they can show people how bad it's going to be, everybody will walk away, and it has never happened. It is never going to happen because it's not how our neurophysiology is wired. I did my thesis at Schumacher. I wrote it on the neurophysiology of language, how it works and why it works, and there is no chance that writing yet another dystopia will change anyone's behavior unless you give them a sense of agency and a direction to go instead. And that's what a thrutopia is. It's the agency and the direction, and then it's not a dystopia. It's a throughtopia.

Tess Callahan:

And writer to writer, I'd like to ask you how you manage to not have your characters be kind of mouthpieces for a certain political view, I have them be like LAN is so herself. She's so autonomous. So how do you achieve that?

Manda Scott:

Because it needs not to be a polemic. Yeah, nobody wants to read a polemic. And so, so being aware is that's a danger, and I think, as a writer, it's about giving characters autonomy and finding what really matters to them, and then giving space and the agency to do what matters in a way that that matters to them. And so they become alive within us. I'm sure you've written characters that are alive within you, yes, and and they go in directions you really weren't expecting. And that has to be fine. I didn't know other than the first chapter in the void walks, I had no idea where this book was going and and didn't know right until the end where it really was going. And so it has to have its own life, and I have to be asking the questions of, you know, that kind of joyful curiosity. Well, that was quite interesting. What happens next on the way through, as much as the reader is so that it has that aliveness, so that you two are asking that question and and then absorbing the concepts as as part of the landscape, rather than here's another data point that I'm going to throw at you. I wouldn't want to read that kind of book, and I definitely don't want to write that kind of book. Yeah,

Tess Callahan:

And agency has been a through line of this conversation. So giving agency to your characters and humility and surrender has also been a through line. You know, the way you respond to the instructions you get in the and the way you respond to the will of your characters is very humble. So it's very beautiful. Sure, I'm

Manda Scott:

a very humble person. I try and do the best that I can, and it matters that I bring as much integrity as I can to whatever I'm doing. So and

Tess Callahan:

humble is not contrary to confident they can coexist.

Manda Scott:

Okay, yes, that's true. Yes, it is. It is contrary to arrogant. And I think I I really spend a lot of time endeavoring not to be arrogant, partly because you look at the world and one can't be but the that would definitely be one of my inner parts that I'm constantly wrestling with. Well, I could

Tess Callahan:

ask you a million more questions, but I want to be respectful. Be respectful of your time, so I'll just ask you this one, last one. So we've talked a lot about the species, really, and I was just wondering if you have a vision for the evolutionary arc of the species, and if, if you think we're at very It seems, you seem to imply we're at least momentarily stuck in this adolescent phase, or pre adolescent, and if you seem to be very hopeful but not naive at the same time. So I was just, I'm wondering if you have, yeah, a vision for the where we're going and what we're here, what we're here for. You know, why are we here? Where are we going? How do we get there? That's, it's a big last it's a big last question.

Manda Scott:

Yeah, I really had clear answers to all of those. The world might be a different place wherein life is an emergent process. I think we're right on the edge of what Elia Prigozhin defined when he said that when any system reaches maximal complexity, it either crashes into extinction, chaos and extinction, or it emerges into a new system. And I think we're at that crux now. And the point about a new system is that its construct is wholly impossible to imagine, unpredictable from the old system. If you can imagine it, it's not a new system. You don't. Painted the wheels on the bus a different color. So I don't know what the new system of humanity looks like, but I can get a feel for what happens when everybody is alive and awake in love with being alive where they come from, a place of heart mind, of gratitude and compassion and joyful curiosity as their driving force, when we completely let go of the predatory capital mindsets and the value set of scarcity, separation and powerlessness that underlies it, and come instead to a place of agency and connection and the knowing of sufficiency. I think, I believe, I can feel a way forward to seven generations down the line to waking up in the morning feeling utterly safe and utterly confident that I know my place in the world and I can carry it out to the best of my ability, and I am surrounded by others in the human and the more than human world who are doing the same. And I don't know what that job would be for any individual or for the seven generations down the line me, but I would have that sense of agency, of being and belonging, a sense of meaning in the world. And I can imagine a world where every human being has that, where we don't have to enter into zero sum games all the time, where one of us has to win and therefore the other has to lose. I can imagine a world where humanity is no longer predicating everything on who dies with the most toys wins and a flow of value to the top of a very, very steep sided pyramid that is predicated on extraction, consumption and destruction. I can imagine a world where consumption is not what people live for, where they live for connection instead with the parts of myself, with other human beings and with the more than human world and that that feeds us and gives us that sense of being and belonging and agency and meaning. And so the world that we arrive in, then is a world of infinite possibility predicated on the extraordinary human capacity for creativity. It's astonishing what we can do, and if we all put ourselves in service to the web of life, I have no idea what the possibilities might be, only that we're not even beginning to touch the edges of them now and and there will be a degree of ecosphere destruction, because that's baked in to where we're heading with the amount of carbon. And it's not just, I think we have to let go of the idea it's not just the carbon. There are polyfluoro and para alconited substances in the rain. Now that's forever chemicals in the rain. There are microplastics in the clouds, in the rain, in everything that we eat, such that if you melted our brains down, you would get credit cards worth of plastic out. We don't know what that does to anything that's alive, but they we know they're endocrine disruptors. At the very least, it's going to take a while to clean everything up. But the thing that we also know is that ecosystems regenerate faster than we ever thought possible, if we give them the space and make that part of our priority. So I would beg everybody listening to accept the old world is done. Stop trying to promote the agendas that the old world gave us, and start imagining a world of total connection, and that will mean also doing the internal work, because there are parts of us that do get triggered that are horribly I parts of me die inside every time I see a picture of Donald Trump, and those parts need not to freeze, because we know that trauma makes us freeze, and when we freeze, we lose the capacity to flow. How do I get that flow going inside? How do I get the flow going between you and me, so that I feel you feeling me, feeling you, feeling me. And then how do I extend that to the rest of the web of life that I feel the tree, feeling me, feeling the tree, and the red kite and the hill? And those feel like big questions, but they are beautiful questions, and I would suggest they matter more than how do I get the next car, the next house, or even, how do I write the next big novel? How do I how do I grow up? How do I connect? How do I help other people grow up and connect? Thank you, Amanda,

Tess Callahan:

thank you for helping us imagine that. Because the more we can see it, the more it happens, we manifest it. So yeah, I really appreciate what you're offering, the vision you're offering in your writing.

Manda Scott:

Just I wanted to say that if people get to any human power, every single thing that I put in that book is being done somewhere around the world. There is nothing in there that is not already there. And I it was to, it's, it's, we stopped writing the first draft in 2022, and then the rest was edits. And I was pushing more things in, but my publisher got to the point of, please don't put anything else in. We just got it solid. This isn't, you know, this is new quadratic voting on the blockchain. Look, I could put it in anyway. I. Yeah, it's very exciting. So everything in that book exists now. The potential, the possibilities of how we could be if we changed our value system, are extraordinary, heart explodingly Amazing. So just knowing that it's possible, I think, opens a lot of doors for us,

Tess Callahan:

yes, yes, and helps us step out of fear, out of fear and contraction and frozenness into what we started with in this conversation, gratitude, compassion, joy, your morning practice.

Manda Scott:

Thank you. Yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Tess Callahan:

I'm so grateful for your time, Amanda, I'm grateful for your work, for your writing. I highly recommend that listeners go to the accidental Gods podcast is so rich, both the interviews, the conversations, and your individual posts and meditation offerings. Amanda, so infinite. Thanks. Thank you.

Manda Scott:

This has been lovely, really, really interesting set of questions. I hope they land well with people. Thank you so much for offering this out in the world, because this is glorious, too.

Tess Callahan:

Thank you, Amanda and listeners. Please go to Amanda's website. I will put it in the show notes, and I'll also put a link to accidental God's podcast in the show notes

Manda Scott:

and Thrutopia, because we'll be running it again next year. And anybody who's writing, who's interested in this that that might be a thing that you might want. I'm not pushing it particularly, but it will be there fantastic again in the summer.

Tess Callahan:

Yes, fantastic. Okay, we'll put that link in as well. Thank you, Amanda, thank you. It's been glorious. Look forward to whatever is next from you. Okay, thank you, bye, bye, that's it for today. If you enjoyed this episode, please help spread the word. Follow us. Review us. Give us five stars on Apple Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe to our writers at the well substack, where we offer short written interviews with authors on similar topics. Huge thanks to Christopher Lloyd Clark for the intro and outro music, and to Eric Fisher for his ever patient and often miraculous audio engineering. And thank you for listening. See you next time you.