Christmas Series Part 3, 2023 with Manda Scott of Accidental Gods

An episode from the Christmas Series Part 3, 2023 with Manda Scott, award-winning novelist and podcaster at Accidental Gods. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

I had this idea that if I could show who we were, I could show who we could be, that people would realize that 2,000 years of Romanization was a disaster and that this was our birthright, and that we could come back to being what I hadn't named but would name now an initiation culture where the rites of passage are crucial.

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hi, I'm Sophie. Welcome to Big Things Little Things, a podcast series where I sit down with inspiring change makers to discuss the big things they're doing, the little things that make them who they are, and together we vision pathways towards a better future. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which I'm recording, the Gethabo people of the Bungalung Nation, and pay my respects to elders past, present, and emerging.

SPEAKER_01 1:01

Welcome back to the podcast. My name's Sophie, and I'm your host. Today I'm very excited to release this conversation with Manda Scott. Manda is the host of the Accidental Gods podcast. She is an author of the Buddhika novel series and upcoming novel, Any Human Power. She is a veterinarian and also a shamanic practitioner. So Manda wears a lot of hats and is incredibly fascinating. So today we dive into a number of topics. Of particular interest, we speak quite a bit about spiritual activism and how to find our purpose as we live through the metacrisis. So I want to give a bit of context before we launch into the conversation. So when we jump into our chat today, what we're talking about is Manda's Bouddhika novel series, and in particular, the first novel in that series called Dreaming the Eagle. So I read this in preparation for the interview and also had been recommended it by a number of people. Excuse my dogs barking in the background or the baby in the carrier on my chest. There's a lot going on right now. So this novel is really interesting to me because as a climate activist, I'm often looking at the world around and trying to identify what's the root cause of the problems that we see, and how can we address this in a way that's not a band-aid, ineffective solution. So there's a lot of commentary on the subject, but some speculate that the imposition of the Roman Empire, the Roman invasion that happened really caused a separation of humans from their connection to land, connection to place, and functioning in a cohesive, coherent community that was regenerative, self-sustaining, and a whole lot more fulfilling than what we're doing right now. So I'm not going to paint a rosy picture of it. I'm sure that life was also equally very difficult during those times without modern advancements. However, Manda's Boudicca novel series really dives into observe how did those tribes organize themselves? How did they live day to day prior to the Roman invasion? And what could we possibly observe and take from how they lived and apply to how we live right now to return to a more regenerative way of living? So the book was really interesting to me from that perspective. And when we jump into the conversation, I'm making a few observations to Amanda of what I saw as the relevant things popping up from the book that we could perhaps incorporate into our lives in the modern day to address some of the root cause issues that are causing the climate crisis. So I hope that makes sense. I hope you enjoy this conversation. I love it. I have so many more questions and would like to speak to Mandar again. I could talk to her all day long. So I'll pop all the links to her work in the show notes so you can learn more about her if you're new to this sphere of the world. But I'm sure you've already heard of her before. I would love if you could like the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify if you enjoy it and share it on social media because I don't have any paid advertisements or anything like that. This is my own personal form of activism. So your sharing is the advertising that I really need if you enjoy it. So I really appreciate that. Okay, I'll talk to you on the other side. Thanks, guys. Bye. And the dreaming, having that connection to the gods of the land, and really revering the whatever came through and respecting that connection with the gods of the land. And having the um very um interdependent, intergenerational community living arrangements where everybody had such a purpose, um, you know, that was essential. Nobody was, even a really um, you know, old person who needed um a full-time kind of carer, which is which was the case with some of you know the characters in the story, you know, the um the elderly people in the book were so important for the knowledge that they held. Yes. And people didn't resent caring for them because it was such an honor. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but I think that just that those day-to-day little things was just so so interesting and really drew me in. And um, I guess, do you were those the kind of things that you were trying to convey to the reader as perhaps elements that we have that have been eroded over time through the last 2,000 years? Is that what you were sort of trying to try to hint at? Yeah. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 6:14

Yes, because these books arose out of my own spiritual practice. So two things to speak to that, and and these have both happened since I wrote the books, but I I had a friend, I have a friend, who spent some time with the Kung Tribun in Africa, who are, again, tribespeople. One of the few genuinely forager hunter cultures still left. And she came back and she said one of the things that struck her most was that if a baby died, it was no big deal. It was it was sad and people grieved, but you could make another one. You know, kids die. I mean, this is one of the features of of forager hunter communities, is people people say, Oh yeah, but they died young, and they didn't. They absolutely didn't. The average lifespan wasn't very long, but that's because infant mortality was high. But if you got to puberty, your chances of living your three-score years and ten were as good, if not better, than ours. So it wasn't that there was a truncated lifespan. It's that infant mortality was a thing. But what she said was if one of the old people died, everybody went into mourning for years because it was a disaster, because they had decades of wisdom. You know, and if the weather changed a bit, they could go, yeah, I remember when that happened back in you know when I was 12, and this is what we did, and this is why we did it. Um and and you've lost all of that. So, and I didn't know that at the point when I was writing the Buddhika books, but but any book arises, so the the concept of the books arose from a particular shamanic event. But then as I was doing the research and having ideas, one of the things I really wanted to demonstrate was this difference between what Alner Lada calls a trauma culture, which is Rome, and an initiation culture, which is what our birthright is, and what the tribes of Britain were. And I had this idea that if I could show who we were, I could show who we could be, that that people would realize that 2,000 years of Romanization was a disaster and that this was our birthright, and that we could come back to being what I hadn't named but would name now an initiation culture, where the rights of passage are crucial, and this sense that everybody will step into the best that they can be, that everybody has something that they are really, really good at that will be immensely valuable to the people around them, and that part of our stepping into adulthood is working out what that is and finding ways to express it in a way that gives us a sense of fulfillment and being and belonging, and that trauma cultures lack that completely.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Yes. Oh, it's just it seems so relevant what you're saying in terms of everyone finding their, you know, what can I bring to the world? What is my purpose? Yeah. You recently, like uh in one of your podcast episodes that I listened to, um, you sort of quoted something that said, um, it's not you'd watched a YouTube video about somebody talking about the the issues with power in the world and power usage. And what this person had said was that it's not that we power everything we do with fossil fuels that's the problem, it's that we power everything we do, and that's not sustainable in the long term. And so I've listened to a lot of your interviews with like Nate Haggins and Simon Michaud and the scarcity of um resources and minerals and how that could impact just every single thing that we do. And I think that coming back to what you were saying with those um more agrarian lifestyles pre-World War II, pre-fossil fuels, you know, it was so labor intensive. Everything we did was so, so um time consuming. Um, so many people were required all hands on deck. And then you look at your recent um interview with the man that released the documentary, The Nettle Dress, where it took, he decided that he wanted to explore the creation of a garment from start to finish. Um, you know, he just only used his hands and the material that he used was nettle, and it took him seven years to create the fabric to create a dress for his daughter. And it just demonstrated that, you know, um everything is that that we do really takes so much energy and effort, and in the absence of fossil fuels, which are creating so much harm to the world, in order to live in the way that we have everything that you know we need, not to the level that we currently do, but you know, everyone is going to have to have a role. And um you'll need to have you need to find what your purpose is so that you can love every moment of your life in this where where we're headed, because you may have to contribute in ways that you've never thought that you would need to contribute before.

SPEAKER_03 11:22

Yes, we need to move back to the sense of being and belonging and an initiation culture and of our job in the world not being to pay bills and then die. What I was trying to make the point when you when I quoted the it's not that everything we we power everything with fossil fuels, it's that we power everything that we do. And that for them was that was the big revelation. And for me, it's no, no, yes, I mean, yes, that's that we cannot keep going. We are a species in overshoot. But we're doing that because we don't have a sense collectively and individually of why we're here. We have no sense of being and belonging in the wider sense, of connecting to the web of life as nodes of consciousness in a greater complex adaptive system. We have this bizarre idea that first of all, we have the entitlement to take whatever we want, and then we have the hollow space inside of ourselves of unbelonging and unbeing and unknowing and disconnection, and we fill it with stuff that we neither need nor want, but that advertising has told us will help to fill the gap, and it never does. You know, Knight Hagen's talks about what we're doing is turning barrels of oil into microliters of dopamine to fill this endlessly vast, sucking void inside of what we have lost, of our birthright, of being connected to a culture. You know, the reason that what Ben Franklin was bemoaning is everybody wants to go back to a tribe is because they felt a sense of being and belonging in those tribes. They felt a sense of total connection, they felt a sense of self-worth, of knowing what they're there for. And and that's absent in the Roman trauma culture that we have. So my concept is that the first thing we need to do is individually and collectively, is reconnect to the web of life. Because otherwise we are going to continue to extract, consume, destroy despair. And and it probably doesn't matter what we're powering that with. You know, there are guys out there, Simon Misho, who thinks that thorium molten salt is the answer to the power problem. And you know, we could stop using molten, sorry, stop using fossil fuels tomorrow and thorium, molten salt will power everything. And we'll still be a species and overshoot. We will still wipe out all of the rest of life on the planet. So in order not to be doing that, we need to reconnect. And that becoming an initiation culture again. The before this podcast goes out, there'll be a podcast, we're releasing it next week, in fact, 15th of November, with Elnor Lada and Lynn Murphy about, and their book is called Post-Capitalist Philanthropy, uh, Healing Health in a Time of Collapse, Healing Wealth in a Time of Collapse, which sounds like it's you know all about the big institutions and Bill Gates Foundation, all that sort of thing, which it is, but it's so much more. This is a book about moving from a trauma culture to an initiation culture. And that's what we have to do. And then the question is, how do we do that? And because you can't go through initiation unless you really want to. It's hard. It's really hard.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Well, this complet totally flows into the next question, which I can pop in here. Yes, because my next question was about the next big human shift. So um it was quoting basically a very similar thing that you said, where the next big human shift needs to be one of consciousness, consciously chosen.

unknown 15:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

So our evolution is no longer just getting faster or you know, developing slightly bigger brains. It has to be a shift at an energetic level, changing our sense of who we are and how we fit into the world. Yep. We need to shift our consciousness and we need to choose consciously to do this. And so you said that when you were crafting the Accidental Gods program, um, that was sort of the intention to facilitate that. And you focused on identifying core ideas to open the connection with the web of life so that we as individuals can ask, what do you want of me? To, you know, the ether, yes, and to to ask that right question and hear the answer back authentically in a way that feels genuine and grounded, so that we can play our part in moving towards, you know, a future, ideally a positive future where everyone is healthy and and you know, sustained. So much of your work is spiritually influenced, and I'm very interested in that. So I guess like I'm I'm very interested in spiritual activism because I feel as though that is how, in some ways, like I have come to be doing this work that I um am doing. It's not so much that I just set out one day and was like, I really care about XYZ and I'm going to do this. It was that in the middle of the night, some strange voice said, You need to do this.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

And then gave me the steps to do it. And then I did it. And then it all just kind of fell into place. And I, you know, I found that really strange. So you're doing this work too from from this one end where we're trying to encourage people to connect with the web of life. But then I also am wondering, is the web of life working at it in exactly the same way at the opposite end, trying to reach us and just jumping through at odd moments, you know? And how can we find our our place and our find out what the world wants of us, like practically um just for anybody who's feeling lost or wants to find purpose or find what their role is?

SPEAKER_03 17:31

Okay. So so the first thing is you have to want to. I, you know, the voice didn't speak to you in the middle of the night, and then the doorways didn't open without your putting yourself in a place where you could hear it. So I don't know what you were doing, but whatever you were doing, it was useful.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

I was just gardening. That's all I was doing.

SPEAKER_03 17:51

But I think you were probably gardening with clear intent.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

With intention, yes.

SPEAKER_03 17:55

And I think you were thinking, I think you were putting yourself in a space where you were beginning to understand that you weren't just here to pay bills and then die.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 18:06

No, that's very true. So, understanding that, I think the Accidental Gods program took me a year of really intense asking of the web of life. Because again, it arose from a set of visions at the solstice, and then the set of visions said you have to do this, and then there's a year of going, I understand that that's what I have to do, but I do not understand how to do it. You need to help me. And and we're releasing a new module, I think, in the new year. I hope if my voice gets better and I can record it. So there's a number of key criteria. The first is you have to want to, and the second is you have to be prepared to let go of what you think you already know. And the third is we live in a culture with the dopamine micro hits where you want something off Amazon and it it arrives almost before you knew you wanted it. And every single initiation culture that I have ever explored says that it takes time and you have to be prepared to ask the questions and wait for the answers to arise. And sometimes you know it's the middle of the night and it's clear, and sometimes it's a year away of asking every single day. And that's what I'm finding with accidental gods is we have the core group of people who get it and are prepared to do it. And I I'm trying not to say do the work because then people go, oh, work, don't want to do work. Yeah, I don't know of another way to say it. You know, accidental gods requires probably 20 minutes a day, and I get emails most weeks of people going, I just haven't got the time, I'm sorry. And I'm thinking, I'm sure you've got the time for 20 minutes on Facebook or Twitter or Insta or whatever it is. And there's a certain threshold, I think. Once you start to engage, it becomes its own feedback loop and it becomes in its own way completely compelling and probably addictive. But you have to get over that threshold. And it's like anything else, it's like long distance running or doing the Tai Chi form, or whatever we do that is really helps us to flourish and feeds us, is there is a threshold where you just have to throw yourself at it and trust the process. So the Accidental Girls program is there. You know, people can go look at it if they want. And I'm not going to go through it in detail here because I don't think that's really useful, but it was the best that we could come up with and still remains the best that I know how to do to help people who have been socialized in a 21st-century, highly industrial, highly technocratic, highly extractive, highly predatory environment where we are raised in the belief that scarcity, separation, and powerlessness are the deal. And we have to reconfigure our whole being into the web of life exists. It and and exactly as you said, if we reach out, it reaches back. But it doesn't necessarily reach out the first time we decide not to drink a glass of wine in the evening and think it might be fun to do five minutes meditation. It just takes a bit longer than that, and it takes a bit more, and it takes a you know, you have to go and sit in the rain sometimes, and and still be able to find that the essence of the three pillars of the heart mind, which for me are gratitude, compassion for self and others, and joyful curiosity, and really sink into those. And we are a trauma culture, and yet I think it really matters that we not get hooked into just focusing on the trauma. We don't have time for that anymore. Really, the metacrisis is the metacrisis. We are right on the edge of way too many tipping points. And I watch a lot of people going down the rabbit hole of healing their own and their ancestral trauma, and it becomes its own self-fulfilling prophecy. And I am not denying the trauma culture. The trauma is powerful and real, and it's 2,000 years at least in the making. And yet there are ways, I believe, of connecting to the web of life that go, yes, the trauma exists. Yes, therapy is a really good thing. I'm currently working with someone who's trained in internal family systems, and it is absolutely life-changing and really fits with what I'm doing. But that doesn't stop me from feeling the gratitude, the compassion, and the joyful curiosity and opening to the magic, the absolute sheer, grounded rain under the trees, magic of the web of life with all that I am, traumatized bits and whole bits. And I think that is something that our culture isn't very good at is bringing everything that I am, without feeling the need to fix it all yesterday, into the connectedness and saying, What do you need of me as I am now? And then hearing answers that are not my projections. In the shamanic world, there is so much projecting that happens. And somehow we need to a lot of the work, I think, for us is how do I recognize an authentic answer from my projected Disney answer of what I think the magic of the world holds. And I can end up sounding quite pejorative, and I really don't mean to, but there is a real distinction between the projections that we bring and what was actually there. And even back in Buddhican times, people would go to Mono for between 12 and 20 years to train. And then they would go back to their original place and take that wisdom with them. And I suspect that quite a lot of the 12 to 20 years was spent in letting go of the projections and learning to hear the web of life. Because once you can hear it, you you don't need to be training anymore. You can ask of the web. And even now, there was a point where I was offered a shamanic apprenticeship with an indigenous elder, and and I had to go and live with that person for a minimum of 12 years. And I didn't do it in the end, but but it is a long time. I'm not sure we have 12 years anymore. I don't think we do. So I'm trying to find ways to help people to connect enough in the fastest time frame possible without missing out on the routing and the grounding and the letting go that needs to happen. And and I still, you know, that's a daily project. How do we do this? How can we help you know somebody who's got three kids under the age of 10? A single mother with three kids under the age of 10 who lives in a high rise. How can we help people in our traumatized industrial society to heal enough to be able to connect, to hear the answers, to do what is needed, and to let go of the idea that humanity has all the answers. It's ridiculous. I have no idea how we got that idea because quite plainly it's not true. And yet we we we persist in this, you know, we're going to fix everything. And we we can't. We're very, very bad at understanding complex adaptive systems. We tend to think in straight lines, we tend to think in, you know, I will do X and Y will happen, and I will do X and Y might happen, but A B C D E all the way through the alphabet to 100 other things will also happen. And then the law of unintended consequences will apply. And I'll go, my gosh. You know, I decided industrial agriculture was fun, and look, I'm destroying the oceans. How did that happen? So um, you know, it's we've got to stop with this idea that we have the answers and we have to start learning to ask the right questions. Did that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 26:23

I find oh, definitely. And um I don't know about like, yeah, there's so many things to say in response to that. Um, and I can relate both to, you know, how you said that sometimes the answers will come and they're clear, and then sometimes you have to wait a year. Well, that's just lit, that's just what's happened to me. You know, I had this period of time when um after my daughter Margot was born, where it was like very clear and fast kind of communication of a sort of series of things that I should do. And I I did those things and then kind of fell off this cliff of um of kind of doom and despair. And how do I what am I doing? And how do we fix this thing? Or you know, and and really that human-centric, like how are we going to create the solution to this problem? And I think that the only way that I've managed to come through that and find hope is through, well, firstly, reorienting myself and how I relate to um to life and death and you know, and time and what our place is, and that we we're so demanding that we deserve this, we should be here. And that thing that death is, you know, in our culture, death is bad. And is it going to be bad, you know, and perhaps it's not, perhaps this is a chapter and and it's a right of passage and it could be really interesting. And and so there's so much to it, but I did draw a lot of hope in um renegotiating my relationship with death for myself and also um just the fact that humans don't know everything and the fact that they're uncertainty and the fact that we don't control everything, that actually gave me hope in some ways, because I think there's so much that's just outside our power, you know, that there's so much more to this story than what than what we have. And and all we can do is is, you know, yet ask what our role is and do the best that we can do in that space. But there's just so much more to it that we probably can't even fathom.

SPEAKER_03 28:41

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Um something that I was just interested in, obviously, without hacking, you know, the accidental gods kind of program, was just um whether you had any um comments on the difference between for somebody who is trying to ask, um, you know, what do you want of me? Um how how do you differentiate between a projection? What is a projection and and what is actually some communication from the web of life? Like, is there is there are there any kind of very obvious things that you can point to?

SPEAKER_03 29:19

I wish there were no it's well in the shamanic work, we do the shamanic training, which is a slightly other thing. No, actually, I'll ignore that. There is a felt sense when it's there is a felt sense that you come to know, but the only way to come to know it is to test it. And so this is if you work with your dreams, if you work in shamanic ways, or if you begin to ask that question. The only way to test is to do what you're told and see what happens. And and my bottom line is if you and the world are closer to being healed and whole as a result, then it doesn't matter if it was a projection.

SPEAKER_01 30:11

That's true.

SPEAKER_03 30:13

So it's really about exploring and experimenting, but I think there is a very clear felt sense in the same way with our dreams. Some dreams are very obviously you know churning through the stuff of the day, and some dreams very clearly are predictive dreams or teaching dreams or healing dreams. And the felt sense of those is is radically different. There's there is once you start to work with your dreams, there is no doubt which ones are which. And it's the same with what comes when we're connected. There's a heartfelt sense, as in there's a physical feeling in my heart space when I'm connected that is completely absent when I'm in my head and projecting.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 31:00

There's that's true, a quality of what comes through. Quite often because my head's going, oh, you really you're not serious. Um when something is real and and when it's a projection in my head, my head's going, Oh, yeah, that's definitely right. Yep, yep, I think we should definitely do that. Uh that that that doesn't feel right, guys. Go on. So so there are felt senses, but you have the felt sense only comes with experience. So this is why it's 12 to 20 years of money. Is you have to experience it. You have to do a real-world test, and you have to see the results. And you have to know what flourishing look and feels like. Because you know, all over the internet you can get people who are working on intention, say, and they're intending to have a bigger house and a bigger car. Jamie Wheel wrote a blog recently about somebody local to where they live, and it was one of these, you know, because I'm worth it, women's groups, and the head of the group was was intending, manifesting whatever, a private jet. Oh. And you know, I'm sorry, but that's not, that is not, there is no possible circumstance under which the web of life giving you a private jet is anything other than massive entitlement. And it's wholly destructive. And I'm sorry, but you're not worth it. There is not a single person on the planet who is worth a private jet. That is self-delusion. It doesn't mean that, you know, human intention is the single most powerful force that we can bring to bear. And it is possible that people could manifest for themselves a private jet. And I really, really would like to think that anybody listening to this podcast is not going to do that. So, you know, there's there is this whole very murky area between what is real and what is just my poor, fragile, deluded, traumatized little ego trying to fill the unfillable gap with a private fucking jet. Sorry, I I just I'm how how and why does anybody think that that is a good idea? But you know, we we can do that, take that down to you know every level of stuff that we think we want to need. And what do we actually want to need? And we live in this predatory capitalist culture. It's really hard to get by without using money, without, you know, embracing the whole of the dynamic of this trauma culture and working out ways to fork the culture, as in FORK, as in like you do with the blockchain, shift it out of alignment into something else is a whole program in itself. And there are people doing it, but you know, it's this this whole toxic blanket covers pretty much the entire planet. It does cover the entire planet, you know. The the PFAS are now in the rain. It it's yeah, it's really hard to escape. So the work, I think, the work for now is how do we create the radical subcultures that are not creating people who want to private jet or any of the layers down below that, and are creating the sense of being and belonging that is our birthright, the initiation culture, where doing the work of learning how to connect to the web of life is a joy and an honor, and we are supported in it by people who have walked the path and who can help us to differentiate between the projections and the authentic, grounded responses. We just need to survive long enough to do that. Sorry, go on.

SPEAKER_01 34:49

How do you navigate because I guess you say we live in a trauma culture which I totally identify with, and I often feel just extremely triggered by just the geographic position in which I find myself and um reading you know, all the modeling and and predictions of the future? And how do you how do you navigate um you know embedding yourself in place and culture, when the place and culture that you're embedded in is at like great peril potentially? Um do you have any any sort of words of of wisdom for that? Because I find that you know the trauma response in me has and the privileged person in me like has considered going somewhere that seems safer, but like I don't know, is anywhere safer? Probably not, I don't know. Do you have any words of advice for that? I'm in Australia, by the way.

SPEAKER_03 35:50

Yes, no, I know you're in Australia. So I'm thinking of um Charlie Herzog-Joung, who I interviewed back in the summer, who who's a great friend from when I was at Schumacher. Um and he he got to the point where the safe place was to be dead, and he threw himself off a building, and and by a concatenation of extraordinary serendipities, he didn't die. Um, and now he's shifted from being in a space where he didn't want to live in this world to being in a space where he was not prepared to live in this world, and changing changing the emphasis of the sentence so that he is alive and he's going to stay alive and he's doing what he can to change things. So I don't think moving, you know, all of the super rich guys who bought up land in New Zealand and are building their bunkers. And I don't understand how they imagine the world is going to be when the only people left alive are the ones who've got the bunkers.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

How do they think?

SPEAKER_03 36:47

I mean, what happens when you've worked your way through your mountain of tins of beans, or your kids have? Or you know, the whole thing is just bizarre. I don't think there's anywhere to go.

unknown 36:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 36:59

Except possibly some of the regenerative finance younger people who are really, really getting it are, you know, this traditional dream factory in Portugal. There's a group that's bought 24 square kilometres in Brazil, and they are just regenerating the land. So I think potentially there is room for getting together a group of people, finding some land, and really working to create that sense of tribe and community on the land, it's not easy. You know, we're not we don't have the models of how do we live in in a tribal culture. Because even if we go back a few hundred years, the the village cultures of our past are the villages that burned people at the stake for not conforming. You know, if I'd been born 300 years ago, there are at least, you know, my my sexuality, my spirituality, my inclination to say what I think, I I would not have been popular. So and yet that didn't happen in health that you know, that isn't, we were still a trauma culture. The fact that we were a peasant trauma culture didn't stop us being a trauma culture. And how do we undo between two and ten thousand years of trauma to learn how to live in tribe rather than judgment? Because one of the things that happened, I think it's fascinating, if we're right, big code of if we're right, at the point when the climate changed and we moved from the abundance of the fertile crescent to having to get into agriculture, which you know, and then we have the whole hierarchies of the person who commands the muscle who makes you work the fields and makes the animals work the field, and the whole disconnection. You start, you then have hierarchies, you then have male dominance over women, and your gods go from being benign to being basically psychopaths who, with no warning at all, will crush you. And you must have done something bad, but you have no idea what it is. So you take basic human instincts and make them bad. And we those are the gods we inherited. You know, the gods of agrarianism across the world are psychopaths. And we need to reconnect with the gods who are not psychopaths. You know, that's probably a whole other podcast. But it's only in that, that sense of reconnecting to the web of life, such that we are no longer in that sense of scarcity, separation, and powerlessness, and the psychotic God that's going to crush our head if we say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. How do we step out from under that shadow is a whole other question. And we can only do it by doing it and experimenting and being very, very kind to ourselves and the people around us and learning not to be triggered. Yeah, our amygdalas are huge now. There was an interesting experiment done way back in 2014, middle of the Obama era in the States, and they did functional MRIs on self-identified Democrats and self-identified Republicans, and the amygdalas of the Republicans were significantly bigger than the amygdala's of the self-identified Democrats. By now, with the world we're in, our amygdalas are just bigger. We are more likely to be triggered. We are more on edge, more aware of catastrophe, whatever our political affiliation on a particularly narrow tribal spectrum. So, how do we how do we work with our triggers? I don't know. Uh for me, the bottom line answer is we go to the web of life and we ask, how do I do this? And you listen to the answers and we do it. And you're in Australia. I you know, I think growing our own food is a radical revolutionary act. However, you do it, wherever you do it. And growing it in ways that are not linked to industrial farming. Do not throw things on the soil, do not turn fossil fuels into food. So growing our own food in a way that is actually in harmony with the land, because we can't go back to being forager hunters. There's not enough. We are a species in overshoot. There are eight billion people, there isn't enough. We can't do that. Hunting is no longer an option. Or even wise, because the the web of life is so flipping fragile now that going out and shooting things to eat is just stupid. But we can we can farm in ways that are moving towards abundance. There's a wonderful book called Glorious Abundance by a couple of French people whose names I can never pronounce, so I'm not even going to try. Um, you know, and they have they have had people come and study them. I think they've got either an acre, I think they've got an acre or a hectare. I can't remember of land. And the way that they farm it, even the organic farms are less productive. And the organic farms are using tractors and spraying stuff on the land. It's just not the stuff that's banned. So growing our own food, I think, moving into communities where your food is as self-sufficient as you can get it, and you begin to build the networks with the people in your local area. So the podcast we published today with Hodma Dodds, who are a group who act as the intermediary between the growers and the people who want to eat what they grow? You know, going to the farmers and going, what would you like to grow that you can grow locally? And finding that the answer was peas and beans. And nobody eats peas and beans anymore. But how can we help them to understand that peas and beans are a good thing to eat? We're talking East Anglia. Um making those networks, stepping as far out as you can away from the predatory capitalist death cult into it.

SPEAKER_01 42:55

I love I just love the terminology.

SPEAKER_03 42:57

But it but it is, you know, it's that's what it is. It will continue. Their news today that the all of the big oil producing companies are planning, and countries are planning to flood the world with fossil fuels. That's actually functionally insane. But they're gonna do it because they want to make a profit because we still exist in the death cult. How do we step out of that? You know, in each each of us, it will be a different answer for wherever we live. Grow your own food, build your own homes, try try and wean yourself off the addiction to fossil fuels insofar as you can, understanding that we do power everything we do. And it's there are big questions around a lot of what Knight Haggins calls the rebuildables of where does the material to make them come from? So try and live a low-energy lifestyle. In connection with people who make your heart sing.

SPEAKER_01 43:51

That's very um it's very reassuring um what you're saying in terms of practicalities of how to respond. On a day-to-day level. And so thank you for breaking it down like that.

SPEAKER_03 44:05

Well, yeah, but I think, you know, partly that's a bit what I've said is a bit fuzzy because it's a bit obvious. I think if you listen to people like Indy Johar, who's doing also doing a lot of really interesting work of how do we reconfigure our cities? Because if you live in a city, you live in a city, and growing your own food is not impossible, but it's it's harder. And yet, Indy Johar, for instance, is has looked at why are houses sources of capital? Why are they part of the death cult? What happens if we create a house and make of it a legal entity that has its own autonomy within a culture, within a tribe? And people who they the great thing about what Indy Johar staying, the whole dark matter labs are doing is that they're actually making this happen. And if you've lived in and around a building that has its own autonomy autonomy and is there for the good of the people around it and is not there as a source of capital harvest for the rent owners, the capitalists, then your understanding of how the world works will be different. So look at the radical edges, look at the people, this very, very bright people who are already thinking about this and harvest the best of what they're doing and make it happen. I think the biggest thing that listeners of this podcast could do is understand that business as usual has gone. We are in the dying days of the death cult. And looking forward to next year and thinking that you're going to have the same holidays and the same consumer goods and the same job and the same life is not going to happen. The sooner we can step back from that and understand that everything is changing and we are the people who are building the future. If we want your daughter and your daughter's daughter, and your daughter's daughter's daughter, and all the way down the line for the next seven generations, to look back at us and say, yes, they did it. We have to start doing it now because we should have started doing it 50 years ago and we didn't.

SPEAKER_01 46:01

And so is can you tell us now just um about you know the book that you're writing and how that facilitates a way out of the death cult for us?

SPEAKER_03 46:14

I hope it'll facilitate a way out of the death cult.

SPEAKER_01 46:17

I'm sure, I'm sure it will.

SPEAKER_03 46:19

I've I'm sure it will. Okay. So this comes back to the concept of narratives. Because one of the reasons the death cult is so prevalent is that it has hijacked all of the narratives. When Thatcher in Britain said there is no alternative, it it feels like that. It is, I can't remember who said it, but that it's easier to imagine the total extinction of life on earth than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And for many people, that's that absolutely is. And and so we end up in the denial, deflection, despair trinity where people go, you know, actually, everything's fine. Next year is going to be the same as last year. And then they go to, well, there's nothing I can do because China or because Ukraine or no because chaos in the Middle East. And then they go to, oh, well, it's too late anyway. And and I've had I I've lost count of the number of quite switched on environmentally aware people going, oh, I just need a really big cataclysm to wake everybody up. Like, no, no, mate, do you do you want to live in a world where we're all like Gaza? Really? Because that's what a big cataclysm will look like. That's true. And and trust me, you really don't. And so, and yet, sorry, and yet, if you switch on your television or pick up a novel, or listen to the lyrics of whatever's popular culture songs, I don't do music, I don't know, or or read poetry, or anything, you know, watch YouTube. It's all predicated on tomorrow being a repetition of yesterday. All of the stuff we see, all of the way that people behave is still, Ia Wilson said quite a while ago, we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and the technology of gods, and that's why we are who we are. And nobody is creating any kind of fiction that presupposes that we could be different. Everything is based on structural hierarchies, everything is based on dominance and power over, everything is based on money being what everybody wants. Yeah, in the old days when they used to say there there's only there are only two narratives, there's boy gets girl or boy doesn't get girl. And and you can change that from boy gets boy, girl gets girl, and you can flesh it out a bit, but basically there is person who is the central hero of this narrative gets what they want or they don't. And what they want is power and influence and sex, but that's still power and influence. And what yeah, where are the narratives that are different that anybody understands how to watch? And there's a whole other conversation about are we all in a hero's journey or are we not? And I spoke to Josiah Meldrum, really interesting. He's doing quite a lot of interesting work with some of the tribespeople from the Amazon, asking them, what do you want from us? And they went, Well, we want you to sell our Brazil nuts because then we'd have enough money to put a fence up to keep the bad guys out. You know, okay, I can sell you Brazil nuts. And he says they, this particular tribe, and I can't pronounce their name, are amazing videographers. They produce extraordinary videos of their world and the Amazon, what's left of it. And people in Western civilized trauma culture of the Delft Cult don't understand these videos at all because the tribes people concept of time is completely different to ours. So it doesn't have a linear narrative, and we don't we just watch it and don't get it. Yeah, and so so I agree. Because when I say there's nobody, there are two sets almost of narratives at the moment of looking forward. There's the dystopias, and everybody knows how bad it could be. We end up with the road and the hand knight's tale crushed together, and their bastard child is what we're getting, where we're all being kebabed over piles of burning tires by our bigger and lastier neighbors. And it's really, and people are behaving as badly as we know people can and will behave. And it's so lazy. As an as a writer, I get really, really crossed because we we know energetically, you know, stepping away from being a writer, that what we imagine is where we get to, where we put our energy is where we go. So, yay, thanks. Another expletive deleted dystopia. Woo-hoo, that was a really useful thing to bring to the world. Why are you doing this? It's intellectually lazy. And people go, well, you know, if if people understand where we're going, they'll change. And no, I'm sorry. We've had these for decades, and it's made not a smidgen of difference to how anybody behaves because you're not giving people an alternative. And then they go, oh, well, but the utopias don't work. And and utopias don't work either, because every single utopia out there is predicated on either everybody suddenly changing or discovering a technology that makes everything different, and then look, the world is all different. And that's just as intellectually lazy. Because what people are not doing, what I am in the seventh draft are trying to do is start where we are and walk a path forward where you can see all of the moves to where we need to get. Because if we don't have those roadmaps, how do we expect anybody to find a way through? Arundati, no, not Arundati Roy, uh Amitav Ghosh said, and I can't remember where, I'm sorry, COVID brain. Something along the lines of if there are future generations and they look back, they will blame the politicians and bureaucrats for the absolute catastrophe of the meta-crisis. And that's not necessarily unfair, but what they should be blaming are the artists and the creators and the writers, because it's not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine a different way forward. And I would say actually, it's the job of our current elected governance system explicitly to maintain the death cult. The death cult has elevated to positions of governance the people who will most effectively keep it going. That's what it's there for. And then we tell ourselves we've got democracy, and we haven't. We've got the worst kind of corruption possible, where basically we have the best governance system that money can buy. The more money you have, the more influence you have. And that's not useful, and it is definitely not elevating the kind of people who have the best imagination and the best ideas. Just not. Anywhere in the world. So, what I'm trying to write, we we I ran something called the Through Topia Masterclass a couple of years ago. We might run something similar soon, is to give writers, any writers, writers of blogs, writers of newspaper articles, writers of YouTube video scripts, writers of novels, of films, of movies, the data and the understanding to be able to write things that are not predicated on business as usual. And and while I ran that, I'm I started writing this novel two years ago. And it's, I promise you, considerably harder than doing all of the research for historical novels is to work out that path through that that will make sense to people who still think business as usual is a thing. And yet will open doors going, it doesn't have to be. And here are ways that we could all get together and make it different. And doing that in a way that doesn't feel like I'm preaching at you, but you've got uh a thriller, basically. You've got something that you want to read because it's exciting to read, and at the end of it, you go, Oh, that might be interesting. Could we do that? And and it is undoubtedly the first in a series because I I start, I'll tell you a little bit, because this is quite interesting from a shamanic point of view. I yeah, I was leading an online workshop in in the middle of COVID, and I drummed a the journey that is the hardest of the hardest of the workshops that I do, and I ended up being lifted out of where I was and taken up the hill. And this is one of those, you know, is it a projection or is it real? And when I'm really not expecting it, and when it's telling me something, what it said was I needed to take, I had a 10,000-year-old horses, fossilized horses tooth on my altar, take that up, get some properly holistically ethically sourced horse skin. That took me a month, bind the tooth onto a particular horizontal bit of very old, hundreds of years old hedge, and sit with my back in a particular frame of mind, looking out down the valley, southwest, for an hour every night until further notice at dusk.

SPEAKER_02 55:08

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_03 55:09

And it's like, you know, and when it comes that clear, very, very rarely do things come through in plain text. But when it's that clear and that plain, and I'm going, okay, I have absolutely no idea what this is about, but I am not gonna argue. And and so it did take me months to get the horse skin, and then I bound the thing on, and this was August, and I'm thinking, you know, this is really nice. I'm sitting watching the crows go to bed. What's it gonna be like in February? But you know, you don't argue. One of the things I have learned is you just don't argue. Um and by the end of the week, I thought I'd finished writing. I thought podcasts were it because writing is so slow and it takes so long to get ideas out in the world. And yet, by the end of the week, I had the idea for this book, and the absolute instruction was no, you need to write the book. And I was being a homeopath. I was about to go into my third year of homeopathy training, and what I discovered very quickly is it's I don't have the bandwidth to hold the book in my head and hold remedies in my head. So homeopathy had to go, the book had to start, and and then I was okay, and and the sitting up the hill thing, and oh, you don't need to do that. You can do it if you want, but you don't need to, you just need to write the book. And the idea for the book arose as the first scene of the book is an old woman, uh old, she's in her 60s, that's not old. Uh a woman in her 60s is lying with her grandson, she's in a bed, he's beside her, and he goes, When you come home, can we go and sit up the hills and watch the crows go to bed? Which is what I'd been doing. And and actually, they both know that what he really wants is to go home and play World of Warcraft with her, because that's their secret, is he's in Scotland, he's been in Scotland, she's in Suffolk, and they play Warcraft and nobody knows. If his mother finds out, she will kill them both. Um, and and she goes, No, no, no, you you I'm not coming home, I'm dying. You do know this, we've talked about this. This is it, there is no coming home. And in the ensuing conversation, he says, he's 15, he's been living with them by then, her and her partner, for reasons that become clear later. Um, and he says, I don't want to live in a world with you not in it. And she realizes he's serious, and she says, I don't know what comes next, but if you really need me and you call, if it's possible at all, I will come. And they both feel all of the gods kind of pause in their labels and look down and go, That that is a binding promise. And then she dies, and then the rest of the book is told from her perspective of being caught in the between, between the lands of life and the lands of death, in the between space, not able to move on, and having having then to find out how can she first of all she's taken into the void and shown how to split the timelines and shown you can never see the one where you have influence, but if there is going to be one, you then have to do she's shown all the way he kills himself, and then she's told, okay, now you have to find a way to not make that happen. And obviously she does, or else it would be a very short book. But um, but then through the book, then later, her extended family becomes the focus of a potential radical shift in things, and she is shown the way to go into the timelines and split all the futures and seize all the ones where humanity crashes and burns, and it's really horrible horrible. We do become like Gaza over the whole world, and then the promise of there being possibly one that if she can find a way to influence, because it's not easy, she can't speak to them, she can't write to them, she can't do stuff. How does she then help the people who are left to find the route through? And we end on the night after a general election, and then the next book will be much more the day details. This is the opening the gates to possibility book, and showing why we need it and that it is possible, and then the next book will be, and here are things that we can do. So there we go.

SPEAKER_01 58:57

Oh wow, that's so cool. That sounds amazing, and I I really can't wait to read it. Do you well I guess you don't really know.

SPEAKER_03 59:07

Well, we're hoping for next May. It's called Any Human Power. It went up on Amazon last night, but I think that was a mistake. Um, I I don't don't think it was meant to do that. Um so by the time this goes out, I think we'll probably have a sp a page on the website, and if we do, I'll send it to you. Remind me. Um because if I get if I can we're on draft seven, and uh there's at least another two to go because they're doing the line edits now. Because getting it so to if people want I want people to want to read this book whether they are interested in radical activism or not. It's got to work as a book in its own right, and it's got to have enough that you get to the end of it and go, Yes, I could do that, and I want to do that. There's a very limited market for the non-fiction book that says this is what we need to do. There are some out there, but first of all, they're always obsolete by the time they come out. One of the things I'm finding is that every time I do a new draft, I I end up cutting some bits and putting bits in because they have become obsolete in the way through, and that's going to become an editorial issue at some point quite soon. Um, but you know, that sort of stuff, that's what podcasts are for, because they're much more immediate. We're recording this now, it'll be out in far faster than any book could go out. And and people can get the ideas from the podcast, but to get the inspiration, to get that sense of yearning in our heart space, we need story. We are a storied species. We tell ourselves stories. You know, everything that we do is is led by a story that we told ourselves of how the world will be, you know, the new house, the new job, the new partner, the new child, the new puppy, the new planting in the garden is because we've built stories inside ourselves of how that will feel and look. And if we don't have a sense of how it will feel when we do things differently, then it's just all head stuff. And our heads are the last bit of ourselves that are ever engaged with anything.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:04

That's right. They're already too cluttered right now with nonsense. Yeah, that's so that's amazing. Well, um, to I guess to sort of wrap this up, this is probably um a very light way to to wrap up the conversation, but this podcast is going to be released as part of a Christmas series. And so something that I'm um asking guests at the end of the episode is what are the some of the things that you are going to do to may not be Christmas that you celebrate, maybe something else. Um what are some of the what are some of the things that maybe you might do at the closing of the year to um yeah, to connect with your loved ones or to yeah, um celebrate the season or um welcome the new year.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:51

Okay, so my theory about Christmas is that if you ignore it long enough, it goes away. I I it doesn't work with much, but it works with Christmas every single year, actually. You hold your breath long enough, you get to a certain point and it's gone. Um but I do celebrate the solstice. I do mark the solstice, and the way that I mark it is um we douse all the lights in the house, we light the fire, and we sit with the fire, asking what do you want of me, really. I was a fire dreamer before I really understood about the web of life, and I still, this is this is the the heart of my dark time because for us Christmas is at the winter solstice, and so it's the it's the closing in, it's the sitting with that heat and the light and the smoke and the flickering flame, and kind of holding up the year that's gone to the web of life, to myself, to my guides, to the gods that I work with, and going here and and then uh asking, really deeply asking, what do you want of me for the year ahead? This is it was doing that in 2018 that led to Accidental Gods as a membership and then a podcast arising in the first place. The the response to that then was what created it. So so this is that's huge in my in my calendar. Um and that's about it. I Hogmanay is a big thing in Scotland, it's much, much bigger than Christmas, and Hogbanay is New Year. Um, but I don't really mark it, to be honest. I mean, we'll probably I I hope if my voice recovers, I will record a new module and the beginnings of a new module, the The Heart Mind, really to help people understand the three pillars of the Heart Mind and how to work with it and how to get to that absolutely being in love with the in love with living and in love with the divine, if that's a sense that you have. Um, so I have that planned, but that does depend a lot on my on my voice recovering. Um, but the plan would be to release the first part of that at the beginning of the year, because it's you know, a calendar year is a useful way of marking something new. But really, the sitting with the fire is it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:54

I did make a note actually here, the three pillars of the heart mind, and I wrote them down, and I'm very interested if you do that. Okay, to yeah, to to tune into that. So if people um who are listening to this podcast want to hear more, um, where should they where should they reach you?

SPEAKER_03 1:04:14

If they want to hear more, then the accidental gods podcast is uh the website for accidental gods is accidental godsalloneword.life. And so that's the memberships there, and the podcast is there, although it podcast is also on all podcast providers. Um the writing is at mandascott, all one word.co.uk. Um, and if they're interested in the shamanic work, that's at dreamingawake all oneword.co.uk. My wonderful apprentice does all of the foundation years now, so I'm only teaching the fifth year and onwards of that. And possibly by the time foundation people now get through, that might not even be the case. Um, so mainly accidentalguards.life and mandascott.co.uk would be the places. Oh, and throughtopia, I suppose. If anyone's really interested in the throughtopian writing, that's it. Throughtopia, which is T-H-R-U Topia. We nix the word with his permission from Rupert Reed.life.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:16

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Manda. That was great. Thanks so much for tuning in today. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Manda. I will put all the links to her work in the show notes so you can follow along if you're new to this area because she is so fascinating. So next week is the last of my pre-recorded interviews that I did before the baby, and that is with the wonderful compost coach Kate Flood, and we talk about her new book and all the different ways that we can turn, you know, all of our kitchen scraps, all the yucky stuff into beautiful golden soil that will grow beautiful gardens. So that's a great conversation, and I hope you tune in and enjoy that one. So I have also reached out about potentially releasing a few short 20-minute check-in episodes where I touch on topics that are of interest to the listening audience. So this is something that I could easily fit into my life right now and is a bit easier than scheduling guest interviews. So that's something that I'm going to do. And the first episode is going to be talking about having kids during the metacrisis, how to navigate that whole space and how to not be, you know, consumed by panic and fear, and how to equip your children for the future. So that will be coming out in a couple of weeks after the Cape Flood interview. So if you're interested, tune in for that. All right. I hope you guys are going well. I'd love if you could share this on social media and like on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And please feel free to shoot through your feedback and comments. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks, guys.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:52

Bye.