00:00:00.860Hey for the Wild family, Ayana here, hollering at you from Juneau, Alaska.
00:00:06.060I'm here with two dear soulmates, Jade Begay and Madison Mogulska.
00:00:11.140And we have been traveling through southeast Alaska, building friendships with folks on the ground to create a platform for co-storytelling.
00:00:19.860And we're all really excited about this new project and can't wait to share more soon.
00:09:16.580It's going to take on a certain shape, leaf shape, behaviors, growth patterns,
00:09:23.180all of that because of the meanings that are flowing through that system.
00:09:27.880the meanings determine the shape if you take that same plant transplant it to russia let's say to
00:09:34.080another ecosystem it will grow very differently because the meanings that are flowing into that
00:09:39.420system are different there so what happens for a plant it doesn't matter what kind of organism
00:09:46.500but for a plant let's say that consumes psilocybin it gets high exactly the same way we do
00:09:53.640The neural net architecture begins to shift.
00:09:57.980It begins to perceive meanings more deeply.
00:10:01.620And it begins to innovate on what it perceives.
00:10:04.700It creates behavioral sophistications and innovations outside of its situated patterning.
00:10:11.560That's what happens with every life form that takes those.
00:10:15.580That's the function of neuronostics, of psychotropics, of psychedelics.
00:10:21.220They function to modulate the neural network of the planet, the neural networks of the planet, because it enhances survivability.
00:10:31.400It enhances the ability to respond to adverse events and to innovate, the most amazing thing.
00:10:38.160So when you start looking at human beings in the West, all cultures, pre-industrial cultures, non-industrial cultures, use neurognostics.
00:10:50.420In the West, it was like totally kind of hidden.
00:10:54.380And then after all of the drug laws came into play around 1905,
00:10:58.620they were totally suppressed in the West.
00:11:01.980And then what's fascinating is in terms of geologic time,
00:11:06.280between 1955 and 1965, all of a sudden,
00:11:10.660the entire Western world was inundated with neurognostics0.95
00:11:15.200and the culture begins to take these things en masse
00:11:18.380and it begins to shift the neural network architecture of the human species in the Western world
00:11:24.460and they begin to be aware again of the metaphysical background of the world,
00:11:29.000the meanings that flow in and all around them,
00:11:32.100and a whole lot of the people that took those, they begin to de-pattern.
00:11:36.680Their habituated behaviors and beliefs shifted considerably
00:11:40.780and the degree of innovation that came then is absolutely phenomenal.
00:11:45.300Hundreds and hundreds of really unique businesses were created, you know, like Apple computers and PCR testing of bacteria and all kinds of amazing things were created.
00:11:56.720The musical innovation was also incredible, and it shifted everything, and it pulled us back into a deeper relationship with the world.
00:12:06.240It let a lot of us know that there's life after birth, and this whole other way of being began to come into the system,
00:12:13.900which really frightened a lot of the more conservative structures in the United States.
00:12:19.820But nevertheless, it's sort of now, with the legalization of marijuana that's beginning to happen,
00:12:27.240the culture is beginning to accept the necessity for this stuff.
00:12:32.540Because those things exist for a reason.
00:12:36.220They enhance adaptability and survivability.
00:12:39.700And at a very deep level, the people in this culture are driven to do those things for those, it comes out of evolutionary necessity, not hedonistic foolishness as our Puritan ancestors would have us believe.
00:12:57.040you wrote in plant intelligence quote real art connects artists and their art and those who
00:13:06.760experience their art with the metaphysical background of the world to the imaginal world
00:13:12.220that lies deep within the physical that is in part its ecological function unquote i think to
00:13:20.100ask what's the ecological function of art would probably elicit a lot of blank stares you know a
00:13:25.820very utilitarian perspective is that art arose as a social mechanism to deliver stories and myths,
00:13:32.460which would create social adhesion as tribes grew larger. I think art expresses the dreaming that
00:13:39.800is central to all beings, and art arose as the human mind became able to transcribe those dream
00:13:46.380symbols, and the human hand became dexterous enough to cooperate. But I would venture that
00:13:53.500all species have the impulse to express in some way or another. And some, like birds, are extremely
00:14:00.060advanced artists. So what do you think about that? And how does art connect with what we were just
00:14:09.260speaking about with the psychedelics and neurognostics? Well, one of the things that I've0.93
00:14:16.560learned i've been focused on this work that we're talking about for 45 years since i was 17
00:14:23.460and one of the things that gradually became clear to me over the years and the decades is that
00:14:32.360there is no capacity that the human being possesses that is not a general condition of the system
00:14:39.840from which we've emerged, that everything has the same capacities that we do.
00:14:46.420They just express them differently, whether it's the capacity for tool making,
00:14:50.260our language, our capacity to dream, our capacity really for storytelling.
00:14:57.440You know, that's not a kind of concept.
00:14:59.720We're getting into a place where the conflict between the real world,
00:15:04.960which I'm describing in abbreviated form now,
00:15:09.700the conflict between what's really going on here
00:15:12.780and what we've been taught is going on here
00:15:15.280becomes extreme as soon as I say something like that.
00:15:18.280People begin to get really twitchy about it
00:15:20.380because even people that are fairly expansive
00:15:26.580in their orientation still see the human being
00:15:29.000as sort of the center of the universe.
00:15:30.980They don't realize that we don't really matter that much
00:15:33.640that we're just a reflection of something else that's much more established.
00:15:38.720Our ability to sing comes because singing, the capacity for music is inherent in this place, right?
00:15:51.300When somebody is able to capture something that can't be captured in words,
00:15:59.220If they're able to capture it in the structure of a poem so that you're reading the poem and all of a sudden it causes you to make this astonishing leap into this experiential perception of the world that's nowhere in the words, right, but that somehow the words were so imbued with meaning that you gathered momentum as you read it.
00:16:23.440and then you take this amazing leap, and then you land in some other kind of frame of reference,
00:20:31.000When you take intoxicants, it shifts the frame of reference in such a way that you're able to begin to play with the metaphysical background of the world to begin to shape it
00:20:40.420and thus affect what people experience when they encounter your art.
00:24:38.780That is really important, and it conflicts with our Puritan background
00:24:42.960that you just have to sort of tough it up and suffer.
00:24:47.880That's important, but it's more than that.
00:24:50.420It's when the childlike self is pulled toward the greater world around you,
00:24:55.860and it begins to have a love affair with matter, with the intelligence of matter,
00:25:00.640with the ability of matter, of the livingness of the world to communicate,
00:25:05.440because it's the child that understands that kind of communication.
00:25:10.140And that part of us grows more mature over time.
00:25:14.520Its essential nature is the same as it was when we were four years old or nine months old.
00:25:21.220That's the essential nature is the same.
00:25:23.940But if you use that part of you for 20 or 30 or 40 years,
00:25:27.660it becomes much more mature and sophisticated in its capacities,
00:25:32.080even though its essential identity remains the same.
00:25:35.440And out of that, all of those great natural scientists that I talk about that discovered so many wonderful things, all of them are really clear.
00:25:56.280Well, it makes sense that science is more of an art than a science, like you've said in your lectures.
00:26:04.020And it also makes sense that the child mind is so threatening to the powers that be and why so many children are being drugged these days with, you know, ADHD meds and depression medications and whatnot, because, you know, the dominant culture is trying to strip that wonder and freedom out of our minds.
00:26:30.680That's the last thing it needs is uncontrolled life. It doesn't want it. And, you know, I was just reading a thing the other day in London, in any area of London that they examined, they found between 500 and 700 out of every thousand people were on antidepressants.
00:28:15.980they they saved up their ritalin and then they would smash it up and everybody would snort it
00:28:21.740when they studied for tests and for the test so there's this whole underground network you know
00:28:26.560for us back when i was a teenager we were smoking marijuana and taking lsd all of them now are like
00:28:31.600you know sharing ritalin with each other it's a whole different world but the thing is that child
00:28:37.800mind the unrestrained exploratory nature the wonder the ability to know the earth is alive which i
00:28:44.900think is the most frightening part of childhood for the powers that be they try to squash that
00:28:51.680from the beginning because it's too dangerous to the system in which it emerges
00:28:59.580i find myself back in school again and it's something that i'm really interested in which
00:29:07.580is restoration ecology but i was talking to some friends they're like oh you're gonna have to read
00:29:13.060a lot and you're going to have to get on top of these quizzes. And I said, you know, I'm going
00:29:17.600to read what I'm going to read. But I had this very overwhelming sense that I was going to
00:29:25.220understand what I needed to understand through just being in the woods. I wasn't nervous about
00:29:30.600having to be so contained in the academic bubble in order to restore landscapes. And it's not to
00:29:38.980say, I don't think that it's valuable information. But still, even in these topics that I really
00:29:44.000feel connected to, I find myself thinking some of it's really silly.0.88
00:29:49.600A lot of it's really silly. I mean, a lot of it is written from the perspective of
00:29:54.300the scientist is standing here, watching the world over there as if they're not connected,
00:30:00.580as if the scientist is not immersed in the ecological field that they're supposedly studying.
00:30:08.000Okay? You literally can't, as soon as they assume they can be an objective observer, which virtually all of them do, as soon as that happens, something insane enters the topic because it's a fundamental flaw.
00:30:26.800We cannot become a dissociated observer. It's impossible. We cannot be an objective observer. We're immersed in the field.
00:30:35.460And the second thing it assumes is that the people, that the organisms that you're encountering aren't communicating, that you're just watching them.
00:30:47.000So what really becomes important is, and that's the difference between holistic and reductive science, holistic science assumes that you're embedded in the field.
00:30:58.940It assumes that everything's interactive and communicative.
00:31:03.620and so that changes everything then what happens is you allow the organisms to teach you about
00:31:12.640themselves you allow the ecosystem to teach you about itself and you become the student of it
00:31:20.360you sit down at the foot of the blade of grass and begin to understand what it means to be grass
00:31:26.940and what you find when you do that is entirely different than what you're going to find in books
00:31:42.420So we're in the midst of a conflict of paradigms here
00:31:46.680between that dissociative mentation and participatory holism,
00:31:54.080and what they're going to find is very different.
00:31:58.600We need people that are willing to be participatory, wholists, who are willing to be taught by the living intelligences of the earth and come from that frame rather than this other orientation.
00:32:12.340It's the orientation of reductive science that creates the outcomes that have these really negative dynamics involved, and you can't correct them using that system. It's impossible.
00:34:20.860Open your arms, open your arms, let it walk, so search out in me, search out in me, take these days away.
00:34:36.320The invasive species debate, interesting because again, it's not trusting Gaia, it's not trusting her to know what's best.
00:34:46.900We even kind of give it these enemy war-like names.
00:34:50.860Well, we do. So it's like, you know, the Republicans hate illegal people aliens, and the Democrats hate illegal plant aliens. You know, both of them have a fear of the other. It's just manifested in a different way. You know, the and I've become very aware of studied invasive plant species for a long time. So I'm much more aware of them. But people you know, or keep, you know, invasive species are really horrible.0.70
00:35:16.700so i started looking at zebra mussel and zebra mussels have moved into the great lakes and
00:35:23.860everybody's like oh invasive species it's ruining everything and we have to get rid of them this
00:35:27.520is terrible but then you look at what they do and that's always the question what is it doing
00:35:33.060that's the fundamental question you have to ask and virtually nobody does they just go oh this
00:35:38.460doesn't belong here so we're going to change it you know we're going to do all this stuff
00:35:41.580very foolish anyway the zebra mussels move into the great lakes now the other
00:35:45.840you know shellfish like that have died off or or whatever but the zebra mussels are really hardy0.98
00:35:53.040they don't really like to be pushed around they're going to push back so they get in and
00:35:56.840one of the major functions of things like mussels and oysters shellfish is that they filter water
00:36:03.040okay zebra mussels filter water even more efficiently than those others do and i forget
00:36:10.240the exact number it's something like they can they can filter a gallon of water an hour or
00:36:14.720something like that and i didn't i don't remember the exact number but it's something like that
00:36:19.560and the thing is so they they're beginning to clean out all of the pollutants out of the great
00:36:24.720lakes which is really important it's the ecosystem correcting itself okay but what's more they did
00:36:30.540this other really fascinating thing is that they there's all these factories lining the great
00:36:35.380lakes that are pulling water out and putting effluent back in right so what they do is they
00:36:40.520clog all of the intake and outflow pipes so that the factories can't work anymore what better kind
00:36:47.560of way of counteracting the problem can you get but that right i mean it's like totally trying to
00:36:54.460shut them down and then it gets all over the docks and the docks you know don't work and the ship
00:36:59.800holes and everything else and it clogs all of the intake and outputs for the ships it's really and
00:37:06.120then people are like oh this is a horrible invasive species well no it's not what it is
00:37:10.760it's a corrective to ecological disturbance that's what it is every time you see an invasive species
00:37:18.820move like this it's a corrective to an ecological disturbance the question is what is it doing here
00:40:02.960We have a holistic paradigm coming into being more spokesmen, more great writers, more innovators
00:40:10.480working with it, whether you're looking at Jim Lovelock or Lynn Margolis or David Abram.
00:40:15.040Martin Shaw or Stephen Harding, it doesn't really matter. There's a Rupert Sheldrake. There's this great movement happening in its early stages that's building more force. And there will be this system will come more and more into being and eventually and ultimately supplant, you know, this sort of shadow side of the Enlightenment that sort of took over everything.
00:40:36.560and then they'll be really wonderful for a while
00:40:39.600and then of course the more conservative members of our movement
00:40:43.380will take it over and distort the whole thing until it becomes horrible
00:40:46.420and then something else will need to take its place
00:40:49.300but these things work in like five, six hundred year cycles
00:40:52.980so we're at the beginning of this paradigm shift
00:40:56.620and it's important to understand that paradigm shifts are not pleasant
00:41:01.700because everything that we see around us
00:41:05.500has its roots very deep in the reductive paradigm.
00:41:08.920All of the businesses, the churches, the cultures, everything,
00:41:12.500and they have huge survival investment in that old form.
00:41:16.960As that form begins to decay, which it has to, because it doesn't work,
00:41:23.260it's not an accurate portrayal of the world in which we're living,
00:41:28.340this new one will come more into being,
00:41:30.960but there's going to be tremendous amounts of disarray and disturbance
00:41:35.240as that process occurs, and there's just no way around that.
00:41:40.100I mean, it's both an exciting time.1.00
00:41:41.620I mean, that's why the Chinese had that great curse,1.00
00:41:44.100may you live in interesting times.1.00
00:50:03.660Another thing you can do is when you're with somebody, you'll both start breathing at a similar rate.
00:50:09.020And if you want to just drive your friends crazy, you can just hold your breath
00:50:12.460but pretend that you're breathing for a really long time,
00:50:15.280and they'll start to get more and more uncomfortable.
00:50:17.800You know, these are just things you can do to entertain yourself any place you are.
00:50:22.160And so anyway, all of the organs in our body, because they're biological oscillators,
00:50:27.740it's just like musicians who all get in the zone together and train, they synchronize.
00:50:33.240So all of our organs, the biological oscillators we have, they can entrain with the heart.
00:50:39.540And when they do that, the whole human body begins to work better.
00:50:44.160There's a guy in Denver that was doing a lot of work, Goldsmith, Goldhammer, I forget, he was a cardiac surgeon and physician.
00:50:53.060He started teaching people heart entrainment and people with high blood pressure, their blood pressure would drop like 50 points and normalize.
00:59:43.740who are not bounded by geography of our time.
00:59:48.140We're doing this work that we're being called to do,
00:59:51.420and each of us is trusting our individual genius to do it,
00:59:55.680and that's the way it needs to be for us to find our way out.
00:59:59.620So, and the most important thing, the greatest act of disobedience that any of us can engage in is to trust our feeling sense and reclaim the response of the heart to what's presented to the sense.
01:00:16.640Thank you for listening to Unlearn and Rewild.
01:00:19.960Our guest today has been Stephen Herod-Beaner.
01:00:22.280The music you heard first was by the Mount Fuji Doom Jazz Corporation, doing Murder Amongst Mannequins.
01:00:29.620Then Spooky Tooth with Sunshine Help Me.
01:00:32.820And lastly, Eric Dolphy's tune, Hat and Beard.
01:00:36.600Our theme music is Like a River by Kate Wolfe.