Any Human Power: Thrutopias instead of Dystopias or Utopias
Thrutopia "is the art of writing engaging route-maps through to a world we'd all be proud to leave to future generations." Manda Scott's new book Any Human Power is a wonderful exercise in Thrutopia.
Popular author Manda Scott and Andrea Hiott meet here for the first time to explore transformative ideas beyond traditional dichotomies. This episode delves into shamanic practices, the concept of Thrutopia, and systemic evolution as expressed in Manda's podcast 'Accidental Gods' and her transformative new book 'Any Human Power' which introduces new paths forward, some inspired by frameworks that already exist, like Joanna Macy's Three Pillars of the Great Turning and Riversimple's innovative governance models. The two explore the crucial role of storytelling and community in fostering sustainable change and finding new pathways for leveraging technology thoughtfully and promoting a deeper sense of connectedness for a more inclusive and supportive society.
#anyhumanpower #mandascott #andreahiott #thrutopia
Rather than dystopia or utopia, thrutopia "is the art of writing engaging route-maps through to a world we'd all be proud to leave to future generations."
Thrutopia article: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rupe...
00:00 Introduction to Personal Energy and Choices
01:09 Meet Manda Scott: An Inspirational Introduction
02:36 Exploring Manda's Work and Philosophy
05:33 The Concept of Thrutopia
14:25 Shamanic Influences and Personal Journey
20:19 Complex Systems and Nested Relationships
33:28 HeartMind: Integrating Head, Heart, and Body
37:25 Academic Frustrations and Indigenous Knowledge
37:54 Paths to Understanding and Connection
38:56 Exploring Life, Death, and Edge Work
39:31 Violence and Social Media Toxicity
40:37 Shamanic Practices and Liminal Spaces
42:10 Non-Violence and Systemic Change
42:38 Global Movements and Student Encampments
47:11 Fiction as a Tool for Change
01:13:35 The Role of Love and Compassion
01:16:45 Final Reflections and Gratitude
Accidental Gods podcast and community: https://accidentalgods.life/
The book Any Human Power: https://mandascott.co.uk/any-human-po...
Other bestselling books including the Rome and Boudica series: https://mandascott.co.uk/books/
Love & Philosophy Beyond Dichotomy Substack: https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/
For those who want to delve deeper: https://communityphilosophy.substack....
Note: These conversations usually take place approximate 5 to 8 weeks before they post
Join the Substack: https://lovephilosophy.substack.com/
Go deeper with Community Philosophy: https://communityphilosophy.substack.com
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TRANSCRIPT:
Any Human Power: Shamanic Thinking & Thrutopia with Manda Scott
Manda Scott: [00:00:00] love for me, the, that aliveness in my heart space and be going out into the world to, to the whole of the web of life is intrinsic to who I am and to how I am and to how I want to show up in the world. The energy with which we show up in the world is probably the single most important thing that defines how the world works. And it's a choice. I choose. I could go out into the world and be in horror and despair quite easily, or I can go out into the world and look at a tree and go, God, or, or the chickens or the red kite or the hill or a concept.
And it doesn't mean that I don't also feel outrage and despair and horror and I cannot believe these things are happening at things around in the world. But the textures, the weave if you like, of my personal energy is gratitude, compassion and joyful curiosity that, wow, that's amazing.
I wonder what happens next.
Andrea Hiott: [00:01:00] Hey everybody, it's Andrea doing a little intro for the talk I had with Manda Scott, who is an amazing person
And she's the person who introduced me to this idea of thrutopia. So it's about writing, writing instead of writing dystopias or utopias. Writing through ways, paths, different paths towards the future. We talk about that a bit in the podcast, but you can see why this appealed to me. In terms of waymaking and. Uh, trying to understand intelligences as, as different ways. Um,
we just were meeting here for the first time and you'll hear, you know, we warm up to each other, just learning about who one another is, are, what's the right word for that, in the world.
But then we get to this wonderful Place together and find some really [00:02:00] amazing resonances and common patterns and I hope you will check out her podcast Accidental Gods, it's beautiful. It's wonderful to hear her voice on the audio and It's also a wonderful place to explore a lot of possibilities for how we might reimagine all the many different sectors of Our societies, and it's an introduction to some incredible people all around the world who are doing amazing work every day and whether it's, through their scholarship, through their, what they're creating, through their actions.
Manda's really created this space of, it's almost like a school. You can listen to her podcast and really learn. About a whole new world. Some of you probably already know some of that world. Some of you like me will just be discovering it for the first time in the last couple years.
But either way, there's definitely something there, [00:03:00] for you. And also, Manda's a best selling author in fiction. And some really wild and beautiful books, which I haven't read yet, but they look wonderful. But I did read her latest book, Any Human Power, which is, um, similar to what I just said about the podcast,
it's opening new ways for us to reimagine, uh, the world we're in right now. And I won't say too much about it because we're going to talk about it here, but I just want to say thank you to all of you because you all come from so many different backgrounds. And for example, I know some of you see shamanic thinking here in the title and you think, Oh what is Andrea doing?
Because you know, you're schooled in a certain kind of philosophy or neuroscience where the word shamanic should not be mentioned. And, uh, for others, it's kind of the opposite. You're more interested in ways of connecting with the world that are lived and sensuous and some on, uh, not necessarily connected to certain methodologies of philosophy.
Um, [00:04:00] And I know the more computational or other kind of podcast can be a stretch for you, but . we're still figuring it out. I'm still figuring it out. We're all here in this together, trying to figure out how to communicate about all these different ways of being in the world, all these different.
approaches to thinking and thought and feeling and The main thing for me is just the love part that we're coming at it with At least the attempt to connect to one another to open our minds and our hearts and to look for better ways of Doing whatever we do and whatever field we're in because that feels like the way to have the best experience of life uh if we want to think of it kind of selfishly and then if we want to scale out and think about our Responsibility and to each other and to the living beings and to the incredible experience that we're having and that we're part of, then that seems also like something worthy of doing here together, uh, listening to each other's different [00:05:00] worlds, ways, perspectives, and feeling the love in it.
That's, that connects us, right? Even when we don't understand everything fully. In any case, Manda and I get into this a bit as we find our way together. And, um, I'm really happy to bring you this conversation. I'm really grateful for her work and her voice. And, uh, I hope you enjoy this and have an interesting ride.
And, uh, yeah, thanks for being here. Okay. Hi, Manda. So nice to meet you. Thanks for coming on the show.
Manda Scott: Thank you, Andrea. It's lovely. It's an honor to be here. Thank you.
Andrea Hiott: Well, I've only just discovered you and your work. So I have to say that up front that you're a bestselling author. You've written all these books that I haven't read yet.
I've only read the latest one. Only because I just discovered you. But I do want to say that off the top. So people know that you've done a lot in your life. You were also a veterinarian. You're now a podcast host, of an amazing podcast, Accidental Gods. But we're going to get into all [00:06:00] that, but just to start, feel free to say whatever you might want people to hear right off the top but I want to start with this idea of Thrutopia
Manda Scott: Let's also tell people I am not a veterinary surgeon anymore. No. I couldn't do that and everything else, um, but it's still, it's there as part of the holding of who I am. So, Thrutopia came about2021. I had a series of shamanic visions. We can go into that if it's not going to freak out your viewers, that I needed to be writing the book that has just been, or is just about to be published. And part of the understanding of that, I'd been writing historical novels for 20 years. And I had a vague idea that if I could show who we had been, we could see who we could be, particularly on the islands of Britain.
I
think we were what Francis Weller would call an initiation culture, a whole culture, an indigenous culture, until the Roman invasion of Britain 2, 000 years ago, at [00:07:00] which point we became a trauma culture that Britain then very successfully exported it around the world.
I'm not proud of this you can tell. and that nonetheless, I have a sense that we are in the dying days of the Roman Empire. Rome brought the trauma culture value system, that hierarchies of people with straight white men at the top, and then nothing else matters except that the straight white men feel relatively comfortable and gather all the wealth. and everything has been moving towards that ever since. And that That is taking us to the edge of biophysical crisis, it's taking us into a polycrisis that isn't just biophysical, but is quite spectacularly so, and we need to change this, and that we can change this.
Andrea Hiott: I like it that you already set it up as almost like a landscape or an orientation that was developed so that all these paths are sort of leading to the same place and the same place is not a place we really want to go.
Not a grand place. If you think about it.
Manda Scott: Yeah, no, exactly, [00:08:00] exactly that. Yes. And one of the metaphors that people use a lot is that we're all locked in a bus with the old white men that are holding on to the wheel, they've got their foot in the gas and we're going straight for the edge of a cliff and nobody really wants that.
I don't think even the old white men really want that. They're just pretending it's not there. And so the question is how do we turn the bus? And one of my great literary heroes is Ursula Le Guin, who said, We live in capitalism. Its power seems unassailable, but then so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can, by human agency, be resisted and changed.
And often the impetus to that resistance and change comes from art, and often our art, the art of words. And so we nicked that and used the title of the book as Any Human Power, for exactly this reason. Because I believe her. And then Amitav Gauche in The Great Derangement said, we may well hold politicians and bureaucrats culpable for their complete failure to act in what he calls The Great Derangement, but we may [00:09:00] also, future generations, may also hold writers and artists equally culpable because it's not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine different futures.
It's our job. And I would say politicians and bureaucrats who were capable of imagining different futures would not keep their jobs for very long. The system is designed to perpetuate the system. They are there because they're not going to change it. So it's up to us. And that kind of hit me as a bit of a, Oh my goodness, what have I been doing for the past 20 years?
Okay. Now, now this, this needs to happen. And I had the opening scene of the book and the thread and just go away and write the book. And at the same time, it needs not to be just me. So I set up something that we later called the Thrutopia Masterclass, because I had realized that I couldn't write the book.
I wouldn't have been able to write the book had I not also been host of something called the Accidental Gods podcast. And the point of the podcast is to bring us to the emergent edge of possibility where we can emerge into a new system. on the [00:10:00] understanding, systemic theory, that emergence into a new system, the new system is not predictable from the old system.
If it is, it's not a new system. But we can bring people to that emergent edge. And that emergent edge is one where we are holding very different value systems. So I intend, with everything that I do, to to bring us to that emergent edge. And accidental God says, you know, if we all work together, we can still craft the foundations of a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
I want our grandchildren's grandchildren's grandchildren to look back and go, my goodness, everything was barreling towards the edge of the cliff. And yes, they left it way too late, but when they really needed to, they acted. And they got, they got it right. They got it right enough, good enough. Yeah, well in the book you, there's
Andrea Hiott: a lot about this.
I mean, about, it's a family in many, even an expanded sense of family. And we really feel the generations and the responsibility and all that. But before we get into the book, which, uh, Any Human Power is the name of it. Let me just see if I understand [00:11:00] correctly. So you had written all these books for, you said, 20 years.
And they were successful and uh, on a certain path. Yes. building certain paths. And you started this podcast, which for people who don't know yet, uh, I think of it as you're presenting all of these new possibilities for changing those systems that you just described that people are sort of trapped in.
Even the people who are at the head of them, if they tried to change, they would sort of lose whatever they've worked their life to attain. So they don't change and all those systems, right? But you're in your podcast, interviewing people, talking to people who have, have like stepped out of that and see different paths.
And you're opening us to them in all kinds of realms from, you know, finances to, I mean, I found you through transportation through the Riversimple, but I mean, you really talk, yeah, you really talk to sort of everyone. So I'm just trying to set it up a little bit as, um, Because in a way you were telling stories before and now you're telling very different stories after the podcast.
But the podcast, or not after, it's still going on. [00:12:00] Thankfully, it'll be going on a long time. But, um, you're, you're setting up new paths, right? And some of them are called fiction and some of them are called nonfiction and so on. But this, uh, relates to this idea of Thrutopia. So maybe we can now talk about what that is, where that came from.
Manda Scott: Okay. It came from a paper by Professor Rupert Reed then was a professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, and he published a paper in 2017 in the Huffington Post talking about Thrutopia . He said, we don't need dystopias because we don't need any more people trying to frighten us with how things can go bad.
If that was going to work, we wouldn't be where we are. And we don't need utopias because there's always a bit of a jump cut. Oh, things were bad and then, lo, something happened and miraculously now we're all in a place where it's all beautiful and lovely and grand. We need to be able to see how to get there. And I love that because
Andrea Hiott: this podcast is a lot about either or beyond dichotomy and that's a way of not having the either or that you just described. So, and opening paths, which I'm, you don't probably know about my philosophy but it's all about understanding our cognition as paths.
[00:13:00] So it's wonderful. Yes.
Manda Scott: Yes, yes, exactly that. Yeah, creating new networks in our brains, creating new creative possibilities. And our
Andrea Hiott: action, you know, I mean, it's not just in the brain, it's an embodied act.
Manda Scott: Yes, absolutely. So it is exactly that. It's the way, if any story has a beginning, a middle and an end, dystopias have the bad endings, utopias have the good endings, but you can't see how to do it.
This is the middle bit. This is how do we get here.
Andrea Hiott: And it's through like T H R U, like through, like a through way or something. Exactly that.
Manda Scott: Yes. Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It's wonderful. So you discovered that in 2021? Yeah. He's, you're friends with, uh, the author has been on your show and
rupert Reed.
Manda Scott: Yeah, yeah. He's, yeah, he's a really cool guy. Yes, we get on really well. Yes. And so he said, when we set up the masterclass, I said, you know, don't quite know what we're calling it. And that's when he said, it's a Thrutopia here. Oh, wonderful.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Manda Scott: And, and yes, you can use that. And I think he and I have very slightly different concepts of what exactly it is because I'm not a philosopher, but.
But yes, that is that through line. Exactly that. Because if [00:14:00] people can see how to get forward, I think what part of the reason we're trapped in what I call the death cult of predatory capitalism is because we can't see there is any possibility. We're told there is no alternative.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, we don't know there's other paths.
Exactly.
Manda Scott: As soon as we can, I don't know a single human being who thinks the current system is working. They just can't see a way out.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it can be very scary and overwhelming and all of these things. But, so I guess I want to try to connect these new paths and your new paths and when did the podcast come into being? It's, it sounds like a transitional zone and I wonder what was already initiating this transition from the other kinds of paths you were writing, which are still wonderful, but these are different kinds of paths and how that relates to the podcast.
Manda Scott: Um, so I will edit the highlights. I had another shamanic event. And as a result, I ended up doing a master's degree in regenerative economics, which completely was not on my radar at
Andrea Hiott: all. That's the Schumacher, right?
Manda Scott: Yes, exactly. I've
Andrea Hiott: heard you mention [00:15:00] Schumacher. So I
Manda Scott: did that and, and that changed my framing in so many different ways.
Andrea Hiott: That's so cool. So you had already, like you were already successful in many different ways with the vet stuff, but then also with the writing and then you did another master's.
Manda Scott: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. Yes. Exactly.
Manda Scott: Yes. So you put yourself back into
Andrea Hiott: a position of learner. I loved it. I loved it. God, it was lovely.
Manda Scott: I was, I was old enough to be grandmother pretty much to everybody on the course, but it was
Andrea Hiott: really cool.
That's wonderful. I went back to school for neuroscience late. Right. So I understand. It's wonderful. Yeah. And.
Manda Scott: And I wrote my thesis on neuroscience, on the neuroscience of language, because I thought it was called Whispering to the Amygdala, the role of language frame and metaphor in the process of transition.
Yeah. Oh, you have to send me
Andrea Hiott: that if it's somewhere I want to read that. No.
Manda Scott: Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: All right. Anyway, you discovered all of this. So you're, yeah, that's fascinating.
Manda Scott: How does language work? And then, and then I thought I'd stopped writing because I was doing the podcast. I came home from that and edited Highlight.
We set up the Accidental Gods [00:16:00] membership group, which is endeavoring to bring people towards the edge of conscious evolution. And then I thought I'll do a few podcasts to explain the neurophysiology underlying the spiritual stuff that we're doing.
Andrea Hiott: So, all this regenerative literature, all these people you're talking to, did you, was that already part of your life before you did that Master?
Okay, so all that was like a wash of new worlds, yeah.
Manda Scott: I was probably reading stuff, but it hadn't occurred to me
Andrea Hiott: that
Manda Scott: I could talk to them every week.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, sure.
Manda Scott: It's a, you must know, it's, it's like you get to actually ask people that you really respect. Yeah. It's wonderful. The questions that nobody else seems to ask.
It's, it's
Andrea Hiott: fantastic. It's like research for me, but so that makes sense to me then that you had this curiosity, you went and did this master to learn and then this opened up all these new paths and sort of as your way of continuing that or exploring that you did the podcast, which has become, very successful, and you have a whole kind of community, around that. And did that then allow you to reopen to the writing [00:17:00] process in this way that Any Human Power emerged from? Well,
Manda Scott: I guess it did, but I, I genuinely thought I'd stopped writing. Because I didn't see, the publishing process is so slow, it takes so long to write a book and then get it out.
I know,
Andrea Hiott: I've actually done it, I know what you mean.
Manda Scott: And you can record this today, you can put it out tomorrow, and it's going to be slightly obsolete, but only a very little. And it
Andrea Hiott: stays, and everyone can just, they don't even have to buy it. They buy it if they want to buy it, they can do something good for someone, but they don't have to pay any money.
Manda Scott: Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so, genuinely. Um, it was a shamanic instruction. It was a particular, you need to come and sit on the hill at this particular, for an hour, every evening at dusk in a particular place and particularly frame of mind until further notice. Okay, I'll do that. And then within a week I had the concept for the book and then the instruction was now you need to write this book.
And I've been doing this work long enough not to argue with it, frankly. It's not my job to ask why, it's my job to ask what do you want me to do and [00:18:00] when I get a really clear answer, which this was. Then it's my job to do it. Can you tell me
Andrea Hiott: about that a little because you've said shamanic now like maybe three times and so I feel like we should unpack that a little bit.
Like what's what's that? When did that come into your life? That sounds like it's been around or been with you a
Manda Scott: very long time. Um, yeah, very briefly. It's been around since my childhood. And then I. found ways into training when I was still a vet student. There were, there was beginning to be the capacity to train in the UK.
There was a very short window, narrow window, and within which indigenous peoples from around the world, but primarily North America, were told by their gods and guides and spirits to That they needed to teach the white people or we were going to destroy the world. And it was very, uh, not everybody agreed with this.
And then about five years in, they realized that people were charging a thousand dollars to completely other random strangers saying, come for a [00:19:00] weekend. We'll teach you to be a shaman. Pay me a thousand dollars. I'll teach you to be a shaman in a weekend. And, and that just blew everybody's brains because always from Burdekin times, one of the old writers, Herodotus tells us that it was.
that people used to go to Mona, which we call Anglesey, the island just off the west of Wales, to train. And it was between 12 and 20 years training. And they would go there from all around the known world, train, and then go back to their people, their villages, their tribes. And these people are going, hey, pay me a thousand dollars, I'll teach you in a weekend.
And it's, you know, you can't do that. Really, you can't do that. So, so then. It's painful.
Andrea Hiott: Oh, it was
Manda Scott: horrible. And so then a lot of people who had been giving very freely just stopped. Um, but those, there were not all, and those of us who were already, I was really lucky that I was in that gap when they were really coming over to the UK and just teaching us.
And the Bodhica books arose [00:20:00] totally out of, My shamanic experience. I can tell you the story if I like, if you like, but it takes, I can't do it very tightly. I could try. If you want
Andrea Hiott: or I mean. It's, um, or we can, no, let's just go on. It's, it's, I mean, maybe,
Maybe that would be a whole other podcast to talk about those books and I haven't read them, so, but, uh, that is, that does open me to understanding better this book because, I mean, I, I don't know about shamanism so much.
I, I've definitely, I'm aware of it and. We, yeah, I won't go into my history, but, um, in the book, there's a lot of this interstitial. So here's a question. Did you write a, did you write a book as a complex system? Yeah. Totally. Well done. Thank you. You're the
Manda Scott: first person who's got that.
Andrea Hiott: Okay. Yes. Totally. Yeah.
Manda Scott: Yes. And I had a lot of help. You know, the point about shamanic practice is that the, the, the real edited highlight is that this reality is a tiny fraction of all possible realities [00:21:00] with training. It's possible to enter the other realities in order to ask for help. And then most of the time of that 12 to 20 years is learning to differentiate between my ego projections, my wants, my fears and what's actually coming through.
Um, and I've been teaching enough 20 years and there's nothing like teaching something for really sharpening up your practice and keeping you, you know, doing it.
Andrea Hiott: Oh yeah. We learn what we teach for sure. Exactly.
Manda Scott: And we, we teach what we most need to learn.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly.
Manda Scott: And, and I, I'm far from an expert at this, but I, enough that I know really when I need to pay attention.
Um, and so yes so I think it's not too much of a spoiler to say that sitting up the hill, the scene that I got was the first opening chapter of the book where there's a woman lying on a bed. Her grandson, 15 year old, is at her side and he says, you know, when you come home, can we go and sit up the hill and watch the crows go to bed, which is what I'd been doing.
And there's a crow outside the window. Yeah, yeah. There's a crow outside the window. This is a crow's feather. Ah, okay. [00:22:00] Yeah, there's a lot of
Andrea Hiott: crows. There's a lot of birds. There are crows. And trees. Yeah.
Manda Scott: Yeah. And she says, yeah, I'm not coming home. I'm dying. You do know this. We've talked about this. And in the ensuing conversation, he says, you're the only one who really gets me.
I do not 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 happens next, but if you really need me and you call, if it's possible, I will come. And we all feel the gods pausing their labor and look down and go, okay, that was a promise. You were helped.
Yeah.
Andrea Hiott: And we also get the sense that it was not a Freudian slip, but it just happened like it wasn't like she'd planned this. And then we, we feel like, oh, this is going to set up something that we. Yeah.
Manda Scott: And she, then she goes, oh my goodness, what have I done? And then she does. Yeah. Yeah. But let me, let me stop for a second,
Andrea Hiott: because this is fascinating.
This, you're already, I asked about complex systems and, Like these scales and nestedness and all of this is part of that, um, and also the thrutopia. So here I think we can relate it a bit because, um, so we were talking about how we're on these linear paths. I don't think I said linear, but these paths, the system that we're in right now is very linear [00:23:00] based and we assume these dichotomies and it's like the person who's at the top assumes they either have to keep doing what they've been doing or they're going to lose everything.
And, you know, it's like a line. And with complex systems, we have. Uh, we're, we're still trying very hard to learn this, but how to learn how to think multi dimensionally and realize towards any goal, there's multiple paths and you can even switch them and, um, and connecting paths with other people, you create new paths and all of this.
Right. And this is what I meant by your book. Yes. Yeah, you're showing this in your book, right? And it starts with this moment of complex systems, um, and the shamanism I think relates here too because of the life death. So we're already in that interstitial area of life and death but not either or because the woman who's not very old actually, but she's she's dying and then her young grandson is there and he Can't deal with it.
And then, not too much later, we see almost the opposite of that,
so I guess you did that consciously in a way of, of creating this, or is it just that your thought [00:24:00] process now and your way of being due to all this, uh, learning that you sort of, you know, Approach the world in those complex systems way. I wonder about that.
Manda Scott: I would, I would love to claim that, that I understood all that.
I only realized that the complex system thinking when I'd done it, sitting on the hill, the bits that I would, I was given were that scene and The, so she is, after she's died, she ends up exactly as you say, in the interstitial space between the lands of life and the lands of death, which is a place. One of the features, one of the functions of a shaman is the psychopomp, which is to lead the, whatever the essence of, of the newly dead safely to where they need to go so that they don't impact on the living.
And so I had a familiarity with that between space, um, but she's caught there. She can't move on to where she needs to go next because of this promise. And then she's. The crow takes her into the void and teaches her to split the timelines. And that is a shamanic concept. So I was, [00:25:00] and, and the point about this is with, with extreme skill and extreme danger.
And I really didn't realize that people might think this was a clever thing to do. I thought I'd made it really clear that stepping into the void is really, really not the kind of thing that you do without extraordinary amounts of training, please. Um, but anyway, We split all the possible, you can see an infinite array of possible futures, and she sees many of the ones where he does die, but the one you cannot see is the one where you take agency, because you haven't yet taken that agency.
So the implication, if you're able to stand in the void, split the timelines, is that there may be ways of shifting those futures. And so she she's then newly dead, quite shocked, given this, okay, now there might be something you can do. We don't know, but give it a go. Hey, you don't want your beloved grandson to die.
What are you going to do about it? And she has to figure out what she can do. And then the only other bit that I was really given was that she needs to do this twice more, um, for her family and for the [00:26:00] whole of humanity. She, There's one point where she sees all the ways that humanity as a whole could crash and burn.
And she knows by then that there is an implication that she could take agency and, and perhaps that might not happen. And that really is the principle of the book. There is still a, there is still a window. We could still do it, but we all need to move together.
Andrea Hiott: And as the book progresses, we begin to see this too as a kind of nested relationship.
So we start with the family and we start to understand that there's something about, um, The family itself, the community the family is in, the society that has a similar, um,
Manda Scott: It's like a Russian doll in a way.
Andrea Hiott: Exactly. Which is that complex system kind of, kind of, kind of thing. And I really like also that you have the birds and the trees are the connection.
So this also opens up, uh, ways of thinking of through ways or paths, um, that aren't necessarily like the human ones so that's a really beautiful thing too.
Manda Scott: Yeah, but this is also shamanic thinking. You know, [00:27:00] shamanic spirituality is the original indigenous spirituality of the pre trauma cultures, in which we know that we are an integral part of the web of life.
There is no distinction between human and more than human. And so that, it was in the Boudica books, it's in this book partly because this is how I think, and this book The Boudicca books arose out of my shamanic practice more than anything else. I got to the end of those and I went, you know, to what I go to and said, right, what do I do now?
And they went, it doesn't really matter, write what you like. You know, what's important is your teaching. No, no, tell me what to write. No, it doesn't matter, write whatever you want to write. You know, do this and this and this. But this is the first time I said, okay, now write this. And, and so it arose through and from, and every day I'm going, okay, I need help with this guys.
This is a really complex book. And so a lot of it is just instinctual dreaming. And for me, there is no distinction between human and more than human. And exactly as you said, I am so impressed that you are getting this and so grateful that somebody in the world has got it, [00:28:00] who isn't basically one of my students.
Part of the problem of the linearity of the. way that we have got ourselves to where we are is this idea that the hegemony of the head, that we can think ourselves out of this problem and all thinking is linear. You know, the whole concept of geoengineering, which just, the only thing you can say about that is that the law of unintended consequences is 100 percent guaranteed to apply.
This idea that we're going to seed the clouds with sulfur to make it slightly brighter, and then it will reflect the sun and then we can carry on with business as usual, not worry about it. You want me to list the ways this could possibly go wrong, that you haven't thought about, and all the ways it's going to go wrong that we don't even know until you've done it and then it's, you can't undo it.
Bizarre, linear thinking, and this concept that, that we will ever know the answers. that we can't, we think in linear ways. Exactly. We think in complicated patterns [00:29:00] where everything is predictable. Instead of complex. Yes. And the world is, it's hyper complex now, but we are an integral part of the, the extraordinary mesh of the web of life.
The visions that started the podcast, one of them was of viewing the earth, that the kind of iconic picture of the globe of blue and the pearl and the blackness of space, but all around it. Mesh and mesh and mesh and intercrossing was these very, very fine threads and at every crossing point was a node of consciousness.
And some of those were human, but most of them were not. And the integrating that, this was one of those ones that wasn't quite as obvious and clear text, but trying to understand what it meant is what led to Accidental Girls Membership and then the podcast and, and increasing my practice to how do I really consciously integrate with that web, because then I don't have to, my head doesn't have to take responsibility for figuring out what to do.
What I do then is. You can
Andrea Hiott: integrate [00:30:00] as that web. I mean, I want to push back a little bit on some of what you're saying just so I can better understand because, how do I say, well, okay. So for example, when you were talking about the geo engineering, I totally get what you're saying that it's still in that linear way of thinking that we're going to just solve it by creating technology.
However, I also, In the book you embrace technology, in the book technology is very important. So I don't hear, it's not that we couldn't somehow do something technologically that would help. It's more that with it, within that linear mindset, right? That yes. Yeah. Okay. And also with the shamanism, because I think we should address it a bit because a lot of people who listen to this podcast are.
Well, gosh, there are all kinds of people. So some will get that and some will not. And, and I feel like that's a similar kind of, uh, space where people often think you either believe in these kind of, um, that you can have visions and that the world is speaking to you, or you don't or something. And I don't think that's either black or white.
I think we all have different ways of understanding that. Yeah. The world around us [00:31:00] is communicating with us, you know, um, and so I, I guess what I want to ask is you don't think we're trying to go back to some time in prehistory when everything was wonderful or something. It's not about that because it could sound like that.
Manda Scott: Oh God, no, we can't go back. And also, No, no, we can't. We can't. We wouldn't want to. We have to move forward. And I think technology is, it's part of who we are. Human creativity is astonishing. You and I could not be talking without amazing technology that didn't exist 10 years ago. And so I'm not anti technology.
I'm, I think we need a fundamental shift in our worldview. And our sense of what we're here for and how we function in the world and how we make decisions. I want decisions that arise from heart mind, which is intimately connected to the web of life. And then our head mind works out how to do them or decisions that are made.
If you don't want to go in for the belief systems, which is completely fine, is we need a value set that we can all agree [00:32:00] on. And however we get to that, I would suggest that most of us want to wake up in the morning and feel safe. and confident and have a sense of being and belonging. And if we take that as our value set and build out from that, how do we get there?
And I would strongly suggest that predatory capitalism is not the answer to that. If we can get to that root mindset that everybody agrees with, and then find ways that respect the whole of life, not just human life, but all of life, or even agree that we need to respect all of life, then we can use the extraordinary creativity of humanity.
Any of the technology could be used, but it's coming from a place of how do we create a flourishing future that works for everybody within an ecosphere that's actually still alive, not How do we tweak a few things to control everything so we can carry on making money?
Andrea Hiott: [00:33:00] I love it that you talk about it being what I would call a mind shift or a cognitive shift, but it's could also be a body shift. This gets to being and doing a bit, this idea that what's really shifting is, I think it's related to these paths, but that's probably because I, this is part of the work I do, but understanding that, we can share values and, we can support and get to those values via different paths, not only one path.
I mean, there's a way in which we're trying to open up our conception of self, which we could talk about as opening up the way that we think or our worldview, as you said. And I think this word that you just said, heart mind, is kind of trying to smush that together being and doing, not even smush it together, but open it up as, as a multi dimensional, um, non binary thing.
So could you talk about HeartMind?
Manda Scott: I can, but I don't, I I've just released a whole new program on Accidental Gods on, on YouTube. Oh, just on that? Really? Okay, well we can just direct [00:34:00] people to that.
Andrea Hiott: Okay, so for
Manda Scott: me the three pillars of the heart mind are gratitude, compassion and joyful curiosity and actually getting to the point where those are our foundational affects.
Gratitude. Gratitude. Compassion. Compassion. Joyful curiosity. Okay. Oh, I love when Zoom does that. Joyful curiosity is, and all three of those. That's beautiful. If we can get to a point where we are living such that, and it's a physical, for me, it's a physical feeling.
My heart space feels vibrant and alive and, and, you know, I work on it with an image of a fire. You don't have to. Um, it feels like a blazing furnace and it completely changes my way of being in the world energetically. There's a lot of work with the HeartMath Institute on particularly on gratitude feeling, but the three, three components for me are mutually reinforcing and all essential.
And the point is for me. So at the teaching that I have, there's head mind, heart mind, body mind.
Okay.
And at [00:35:00] the moment in our culture, head mind has this total hegemony where we can basically, we are, we are a head that happens to be attached to a bunch of other physical processes that we ignore until they go wrong.
And our heart mind is, is utterly irrelevant. We are told by the dominant culture that, that coming from this space of heart based awareness, which I would say is
capable of moving fluidly through time, that, that this is not valued. The only thing that's valued is, is the linear, linearity of logic.
So
how do we reframe ourselves at a physiological level so that our decision making comes from what I would say was heart mind and then our head mind's job is to work out how to do what our heart mind has decided.
And it's a much easier way of living. And I think the reason I've just done this is This new program is that when we get [00:36:00] totally into HeartMind, that's when the connection to the web of life happens. And we become, it's impossible to not live in the moment. If you're living in a place of complete gratitude, compassion, joyful curiosity, you are in the moment.
You're not, my, one of my earliest teachers said, we tend to live in bitterness or regret of the past and fear of the future.
And
we never live in the present and every spiritual path tells you, you need to live in the present and in the present, time is very fluid, being is very fluid, reality becomes a completely different thing.
So, so for me, heart mind is, and it frees our head minds up. I think a lot of the trauma and angst and despair in our current culture is because our head minds, our heads, our logic, cortex, whatever we call it, thinks it has to have the answers. And we look at the world and realize that individually and collectively, this is not happening.
This is wonderful. How do we move beyond it? Yeah. Does [00:37:00] that make sense? I just,
Andrea Hiott: it's interesting to me because we come from different, um, you know, we have different paths towards a similar place or something and, or there's a lot of similarities and then there's also these very different kind of worlds that we're in.
And so for me, what you're describing sounds like sounds like embodied cognition and phenomenology and trying to, I mean, but that would be too kind of abstracted, but, um, there's, there's a way in which we're, like you said, um, heart, mind comes when we're present, but it's almost like it's there and we're trying, we've gotten too caught up in, in noticing our own thoughts and thinking they're real to feel it, isn't it?
So there's this kind of coming into the body and being. wider and expansive, which is already possible. What does that make sense to you?
Manda Scott: Totally does. Yeah, totally. I'm just so awed that you, you're exactly what you're saying. You've got the same space. You just came from a different route. At college, I got so cross with the phenomenology teacher.
It was really not very compassionate. Just because I [00:38:00] thought, so you needed some old straight white academic bloke? to tell you about something that indigenous peoples have been doing for 300, 000 years and then it becomes relevant. But that doesn't, you know, it's the way into making it relevant. Yeah, but that was probably
Andrea Hiott: that person's way of discovering what you discovered.
You know, like I think that's part of what we're trying to do too, is understand that we all come at it from different ways, but we hopefully can meet together in this space if we can. If, I mean, it goes back to that. If we start to understand that there are many throughways or many paths or many ways or to the same place So and that becomes interesting and a portal because like when I I just discovered you and I already sensed Okay, there's a pattern there that I resonate with and even though it was from very different place.
I thought okay Let's try to figure out how these I know the pattern, but how did you know she get there and it opened me up to so much. Right? Yeah. If I had just rejected it, like, oh, she's not doing what I do. It's not embodied cognition. It not, no, absolutely. Yes. Then, and I would, I'm
Manda Scott: not proud of me in college.
I should have, you know, [00:39:00] absolutely. Exactly what you're saying. It doesn't matter how we get to here. It matters that we are here and then it matters that we join together and work out how, what, what are the, not what are the steps, but how do we figure out what the steps would be. We need to kind of go upstream of ourselves.
Yeah, we need each other
Andrea Hiott: for sure. This, uh, in the book, let's get back to the book for a second, because I think we can, I was talking about being and doing, but also I, I, you know, you, you do classes about, um, gosh, dreaming your death awake. Is that right?
Manda Scott: Yes. Okay.
Andrea Hiott: So we were talking about life and death and this thing and being and doing, and I feel like in the book, you're, you might even say it at some point, there's there's a kind of edge work going on.
Where you're like pushing to the limits in a way, um, or people are going to their edges in a way. And that relates to complex systems in a way too, cause you, then you get to another node somehow and you find other edges. But
there's violence in the book, too, and there's, you know, death is not an easy thing, so. We're not talking as if everything is okay, but these are hard [00:40:00] issues for us as humans. It's, like, is expressed in the beginning of the book with the Grandson. He's really thinking about, how's he going to live when he loses someone?
We all know that feeling, and you, you have this wonderful thing with the technology where, um, There's a violence to the technology or there's also nested layers of violence because something happens. I'm not going to go too in it but they're using technology in a social media sort of way and there's something that happens then and it seems it's in this virtual world but then very quickly it becomes a violence.
Where you post something or you send something out and it's interpreted in a certain way that people don't understand it. Like maybe they've come from a different path and so they're reacting in a way that you can't control.
It does feel violent and in the book it manifests as actual kind of something violent. So I don't know if even that's the right word, violence, or how it relates to all this, but I just want to put that out there and see what, like what comes to mind for you.
Manda Scott: So the first thing that comes to [00:41:00] mind is I, I love that you get to edge places because I think shamanic practice Exists in the edge places, in the liminal spaces.
Yeah, I like that word liminal. I just was teaching this last weekend and we spent the entire time, the very first thing that we did. I'm leading and I get to this place and I encounter something and I say, the students need to be safe. And oh my God, it's good. No, that's not happening. Okay, we're leaving then.
And they went, no, you can't. And, and then I checked in and said, so is it dangerous? I need them not to be in danger. And they went, no, it's okay. It's not dangerous. And we were in that space that I had never really explored. That liminal virtual space between not being safe and yet not being in danger. And so the edge places, the edge places are where everything is alive.
And so the violence you're talking about in the book starts off as toxicity, you know, social media toxicity, and then explodes into actual real world violence, [00:42:00] which I wasn't necessarily expecting. You know, a lot of this, but I'm not one of these people who plots and then writes. I just explore what's happening and it's okay.
Um, so And then, then how are we going to deal with that, guys? So, but
Andrea Hiott: I think I wasn't expecting it either, by the way, reading it. So, I think that's good when you write like that because then the reader is Yeah, yes, you've not
Manda Scott: signalled it because you didn't know where it was going.
Andrea Hiott: No, exactly.
Manda Scott: Um, we need, I want this book to feel real.
It needs to be embedded in where we are. And I am 100 percent certain that the evolution, the emergence to a new system has to be non violent. I think the use of violence to solve problems is of the old paradigm, and the new system, that will not be the case. So if we're using, and everybody who's ever used violence to try and change the system has ended up.
recreating the old system, because that's what violence does. And I think it's an inherent part of our trauma culture. [00:43:00] And I suspect, I really, I think it's very likely that if we do get a global movement together, and I'm watching the student encampments and thinking, my goodness, you're actually doing, it's not arising from the same motivations, but.
You're doing and I, I've been trying to, I drove into the middle of Wales yesterday to deliver a box of 10 books to go to the Cardiff encampment because first of all, thank you. And second, I think you'll find this quite a lot of resonance here. And I had a friend in the Netherlands who is a lecturer. was going to take one to an encampment at her university and she mailed me and said they bulldoze it at three o'clock this morning.
Oh shit.
And then the next day she sent me a picture of, and it looked, I said, is this the bulldozing? And she said, no, that's the barricade the students have built. And the bulldozer is going to have serious trouble getting through that. So the, so the encampment is back up. So, so. If, and so if there is going to be a global movement, the only thing the establishment knows what to [00:44:00] do is to exert violence.
And then the quest, one of the many, many questions of the second half of the book is how do we hold true to a value system that says we're not going to be violent. We're going to move at the pace of trust and we're going to build trust and we're going to use, we're going to create social media that bridge instead of creating divides.
Give me the incentive and I will give you the outcome. And the current incentive for social media is to make already rich people obscenely more rich. And the best way to do that is to create online outrage. What happens if we don't want to do that? What happens if we want to build social media that actually help people bridge across divides?
How are we going to use, what social technologies will help us to bring by then large numbers of people into confluence and how are we going to do that knowing that some of those people are going to be in there with the express intent of destroying what we're doing and yet not allow ourselves to fall into witch hunting and distrust.
Those are, you know, I think those are [00:45:00] going to be real questions. And I wanted to model a way of approaching them. Does that answer the question that you asked? Yeah, it
Andrea Hiott: does. There, um, I think what I hear you saying is, um, so part of the book is at least how I see it, learning how to kind of inhabit different positions, even if it's only an imagination at first, towards being able to see these different paths in the way that that I'm saying.
And I guess what I was trying to get at is it's not an easy process, and I, as a teacher, and even when you're doing with the shamanism and so on, and what you just described with that edge work, these aren't easy processes always, and what we think of as violence has many scales and nestedness.
to it too, and whether it's individual or whether it's group or, and there's, it's something I don't know how to talk about yet, but there, you know, in the book, let's, there are a lot of, um, cracking opening, cracking open kind of moments that [00:46:00] aren't, that's what death is in a way, or that's what a lot of these, these shocking things are.
And I guess what I hear you saying is we're going to open the space to that. But we're gonna try to do it in a way that's, anchored it as a word, I think, in the book that comes.
Manda Scott: And grounded. Yeah. And ground it.
Andrea Hiott: And then in the second part of the book, that makes sense because you kind of, then it turns to, I don't mean this literally, but I was thinking of this book I liked a lot as a kid called Sophie's World.
Do you know that book? It's basically, it's a book about a girl who gets a letter saying, who are you or something. And so she's trying to understand it. And what it really is, is, um, you don't know it when you're reading it, but it's a pretty much like, uh, an intro to philosophy book. You basically learn about all kinds of philosophies, but you're just, you're just You know, in the story of the girl, yeah.
Yeah, cool. So I thought about the second part of the book especially as almost like, you've, with Accidental [00:47:00] Gods you've learned all these new ways, uh, I would call it, or thrus, ways or whatever, paths, and in that part of the book you're giving them to us through the book, I, I probably didn't recognize half of them, but.
Even sometimes some of your guests appear, for example, the River Simple, which is what, you know, yeah, Douglas, I think Rushkoff is there. Yeah, there's, so they come literally there sometimes, but I also think a lot of that thought and a lot of what you're doing in that podcast comes through there almost like a Did you see it as kind of a, a way to help teach and learn?
Manda Scott: Oh, totally. Yes. Because I think the podcast has a certain audience, but it's, we're talking to a particular bubble. The thing about a thriller is it reaches much, much wider and, and so for a lot of people, these will be completely new ideas and there is nothing. Okay. So Ray's catamaran I made out of nowhere, but I built it up, you know, it's got, it's got the same engine as the river simple cars.
I don't see any reason why it couldn't exist. Yeah. Everything else. is happening somewhere in the world. [00:48:00] All that I've done is bring them into one coherent movement. Even the, there's a point where some of the characters put forward three suggestions for political change and, and I didn't make any of them up.
I just brought them all into one place.
Oh, okay.
Um, so, you know, it's from that point of view, it's not original, but that was part of it was deliberate because I wanted to be able to have this conversation and say, guys, this is happening. This is not me sitting in my room, imagining stuff. Every single thing here is happening somewhere.
Just let's bring them all together and have a kind of weaving between them so they have a coherent impetus behind them.
Andrea Hiott: That speaks also to this layering that happens that we've already demonstrated in our own lives in a way where you, this embodied learning or the way that cognition isn't only a very small part of what mind is or what embodied, I don't think of mind as in the brain, but Disembodied mind is something you're aware of.
So I think also like through our creations we learn [00:49:00] without having put our attention on what we've learned. So in a similar way I was asking you about if you're writing complex systems almost in an embodied sense. I think you've taken in so much of it that it's now patterned you in a certain way or patterned your actions.
In a certain way, which I noticed, it's, you, there's something about the book too that's helping people to maybe change those patterns or develop, find new patterns or open up to, open up their repertoire of possible patterns without them having to think about it and read it like as if it's study.
Exactly.
Manda Scott: Cause you know, you and I might read, I don't know, Kate Rayworth, Jason Hickle, whatever. People don't, most people, and yet fiction. Is, it's a way of reaching people and we are a storied species. Everything we've done for 300, 000 years has been based on stories. We tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other.
It's what we do. So if I can tell a story where people can identify with somebody in the book and feel them moving forward and we do stuff because we're [00:50:00] inspired. We don't do stuff because we think it's going to be easy. Nobody climbs Everest because they think it's going to be easy. They climb it because they can imagine standing on the top and feeling absolutely.
Wonderful. And so if I can create that sense of look, here's a, here's a future that's different. It's not what we're all imagining about, you know, Mad Max and the road meets Handmaid's Tale. It's different and it's doable. And you would be proud to leave this to your kids. And here's actually how it could happen.
Let's just make it happen, people.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think that's, very important and also speaks to this other dichotomy of We think of things as, and this, this is a hard one, but you know, fiction or nonfiction or thrutopias, I think, is it presented as, as fiction, um, at first it was like, you know, the stories we're telling literally the way that we're writing and, and creating, and it's so important,
I don't think we realize how much, um, our TV, our books, um, all this even [00:51:00] media really does what we were just talking about that layering of showing us what the paths are and we're walking these paths and we don't even know, we haven't chosen them, we don't even know we're walking them, we don't know there's others.
Yeah, yeah.
So fiction is so important, uh, for that, but also, um, the podcast is non fiction. It's people's real stories about their real life. Um, things they're doing in their life that are also narratives. I don't know. How do you, do you hold those at the same time? Do you try to distinguish between them?
I don't.
Manda Scott: No, I mean, I think it's a really good observation because I, the world that we live in, you, you must know, you know, framing and metaphors, And there's so much about language. I was speaking yesterday for my podcast with Osprey Oriel Lake, who's written a beautiful book. I think you'd love it. Called the stories in our bones.
And she talks, I think it's for me, it's going to be the braided sweetgrass of this decade. And she talks about language and about English is a, is a language of to be, [00:52:00] and, and that defines our separation from the world. I am this. as opposed to that. And there's a lot of indigenous languages are much more fluid and much more verb based.
And so we are presented with a world in which there are fictional stories that somebody made up and you read stuff in the newspapers that is true. And yet I'm sure pretty sure about now people are realizing that they're seeing videos online of things that are happening around the world and reading the stories in the newspaper.
And actually there is a complete mismatch. And so Everything, and I have a vision, so Theriotopian for me it's anything, there's a Theriotopian poetry book just been published, it can be non fiction, it could be a blog, it could be a TikTok video, I don't care, whatever it is that's helping us towards a different future.
But I think also, I, I really want. Everyone who writes, particularly fiction, movie scripts, TV scripts, imagine if we woke up tomorrow and the producers in Hollywood or [00:53:00] Netflix or wherever could not get a script except one that was imagining a different way forward. No publisher could get a novel, you know, crime novels, romance novels, whatever genre you want.
They were all going, you know what, the system is not serving us anymore, here's a different one, let's imagine the way forward. Because everything else is propaganda for the old system. I had a friend who used to write for one of the very long running British soap, television soaps, is that right? Yes.
Andrea Hiott: Soap operas, I guess, these days is what we call them.
Okay,
Manda Scott: yep. And he used to write the characters taking out the recycling. It wasn't big, radical stuff. And every single time it was written out. And eventually he went to the producers going, what's wrong with taking out the recycling? And, and I quote him verbatim, they said, our income depends on people wanting to have a new granite worktop in their kitchen every year.
We are not giving them a suggestion that they could keep the old one. It's really deliberate [00:54:00] propaganda. Everything that is written that supports the old paradigm now, as far as I'm concerned, is propaganda for death cult. Let's not do it. You know, if anyone who's listening to this is a fiction writer, please stop writing the existing system.
It is not serving us.
Andrea Hiott: Gosh, it's so hard. It's so hard to think about how to do that, though, in the way that we've been talking, because it's not like, it's not going to help if we just say, stop. You can't write like that anymore because there'll be protests and because people don't understand that what you were saying is I mean Actually, it's not about shall we
Manda Scott: unpack that
a
Andrea Hiott: little bit tell me Let me say this and then you can say what you're saying.
It's messy, but that's good. Um, The person who's writing is going to need is to need to do it from an embodied place. That's
Manda Scott: yes
Andrea Hiott: authentic for them How do they get to that place and a lot of it is not like It's not that what they want in the same way that the destination that they want can still be the same.
It's just about envisioning a different path to it and that [00:55:00] already exists. So if they could only become aware that it exists and that actually they can feel better and get more of what they actually want on that path. Then it's going to happen, maybe very quickly, but that's the shift I see, but now that's kind of messy.
You tell me what you. No, no. That's
Manda Scott: exactly what I just said. I mean, that's what I was trying to say. Only you said it better. I'm not saying we would tell people that they can't. I'm encouraging people to listen to Amitav Ghosh. It is not the job of politicians and bureaucrats to imagine a different future.
That's the job of artists and creatives. It's our job. It's our duty. We are facing near term human extinction. Do you want to keep writing crime thrillers? where everything carries on exactly as it was, or do you want to do the internal work, which is hard. I'm not suggesting it's not hard. There were days when I got up and said, I just can't do this.
But, but, I'm a white Western person. I have acres of privilege and I feel it's my, you know, being uncomfortable, frankly. is if I'm a bit [00:56:00] uncomfortable but I'm doing something that actually might change everything, let's go with the leaning into the discomfort and see where it takes me and where it takes me.
And have you found that this
Andrea Hiott: gives you a different sensuality or a different um, does it expand your, does it expand your sense of what the body is and what sensuality is. And is there, because I, I feel like it's not, it is a lot of hard work, and it's, but there's something that's, that happens, at least for me, I don't know if it is for you, but that, it is like a practice, and I don't know, there's some kind of way in which there's, there's something there's something to it that changes the way that you are in the world.
Manda Scott: Yes. Absolutely. Totally. Yes. Yes. I probably wouldn't have said it like that, but that's what I was trying to express when I said that my heart space feels different. My way of being in the world feels different. My sense of myself as part of a, a much, much wider community, that connection to the [00:57:00] web of life, which I think, you know, you'll know there's a lot of talk.
We could look at punk seps drives, but maybe we don't want to get that geeky, but there's the, the kind of dopamine hits that are short term and you always need a little bit more to get the same effect and they're, they don't. They don't create proper networks, they just sing across the brain and you have that little moment of zing.
And then you
Andrea Hiott: need more. And then there's the serotonin mesh. That is,
Manda Scott: that is self supporting and reinforcing and has duration. And I think living in that serotonin mesh, I think, is what would, for me, define what Francis Weller calls an initiation culture. And this constant seeking after dopamine is what absolutely is the hallmark of our trauma culture.
And I think that the shamanic practice has given me that sense of connectedness, of being and belonging. And then that is what feeds the book. You know, there were mornings I got up and thought, I can't do this. But what my practice is, is to go, [00:58:00] I need help. And then the help arrives and, okay, yes, I can do it.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean I can't do it. It's just hard.
Andrea Hiott: That's powerful. I was going to ask you about how, because as I was talking, I didn't, I was expressing it as an individual thing, but I also meant within the group. the complex system that's close to you. I didn't say it like that, but so you've started this community, Accidental Gods, in the podcast, in the book, and you have classes, and I don't know if that's similar to the way the 20 years of your life before that was, or if that's been different or, because that's also a kind of practice that can be very uncomfortable and putting yourself out there, going to the edge, teaching, learning, not getting to be some, where you think you're a guru, you know, always balancing, um, Yes.
What about that? How has that changed or has it changed? Yeah, yeah. It's
Manda Scott: constantly evolving. Um, but that, I think that's, That's part of the nature of this kind of work, exactly as you're saying. Every time you sit in [00:59:00] circle and lead a circle, there's exactly that balance of let's just park my ego somewhere else because it's not useful in this circle.
And, and, like my writing, my teaching is very much, I will just stay balanced in the moment and ask what's needed just now. I don't, I don't prescript any of it. So it's always got that edge place sense to it. But that's where, um, That's where the aliveness comes. And so there's the community of people who've been, I've been teaching for 20 years now.
So I've got 20 years. I've recently, I now have an apprentice. And so that's taken my, I now have to explain not only now we have, this is the structure. We do have an actual structure, but, but everything within it is really fluid. And I discovered this weekend, we were talking to the guy who runs the center and he holds courses with his Buddhist master.
And he said, I have all this structure. And then he changes it on the fly. And Lou went, Oh, do I do that too? Yes, I probably do. I'm so sorry. And exactly that, you know, this is the structure, but we're going to abandon it if it feels like that's what the circle needs. And so I now need to teach the, here is the iceberg, this is what [01:00:00] the students see, and this is all that's going on underneath, and now we need to try it.
And, and so, so everything is always changing. Everything is always growing and the mesh, exactly what you're talking about, that sense of connectedness of, of the web of life being utterly alive and utterly present in the moment is always changing. There's a metaphor in horse riding, which I'm sure probably didn't arise there, which is you're peeling an onion and it's still growing from the inside out.
And that's exactly where we are. And, and this, this partly what gives me hope that there is still this window to turn the bus is we're getting so much help. Would we be getting this kind of really explicit help if there was not, if we were just driving ourselves over the edge of a cliff? I mean, that's a belief system and I would be doing what I'm doing anyway because it's there to be done and I'm not going to, you know, if we go over the cliff it won't be because I didn't try hard enough.[01:01:00]
But I think there is still time to turn the bus.
Andrea Hiott: I definitely think so. And you know, someone can go listen to your podcast and you get a feeling of that. And there's so many wonderful people in the world doing amazing things with good intentions. And we forget that. And people who are learning and we're all learning, I mean, nobody's some mastered this, of course, because that's kind of what we're trying to do is realize we, we all need each other.
Like you said, you couldn't do it when you got out of bed. So you asked for help. That is such a hard thing to learn. How to do, but also it's so amazing when we can learn that other people are also our power and we're the power of others. That's what I was trying to get at with that idea of self changing.
And I think a lot of people on your podcast, um, they all are at least trying to connect differently in that mesh or have a different idea of what self is and what the connection with all these people around them forming something can give in in a new way [01:02:00] that they can't give alone, which is very different from that linear mindset so there's that kind of opening. Yes. Does that make you hopeful, too, when you, I mean, your book is ultimately very hopeful, so.
Manda Scott: Thank you. Yes, I mean, it's intended that, yeah, and I'm writing the sequel, seven person writer. Oh yeah, I
Andrea Hiott: figured that it was, we now need to know how it's going to happen.
Yeah. Yes,
Manda Scott: and I, I'm expecting there'll be three, but who knows. Um, and I think, have you ever read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wainwright? Well, I
Andrea Hiott: have it now. I, it's a very important, new. One of those shifts, right? Look at it this way, historically. Yeah,
Manda Scott: totally. Everything is different.
And I think one of the things that really struck me there was, um, the man whose name I can never pronounce, Cadir, Cadir Ronca, or something of the Wendat, who we used to call the Huron, who lived in cities, I didn't really, and who went to France and came back and was completely shocked by, you know, this is pre revolution France and you have kings and you have people starving on the streets.
And you have this bizarre hierarchy where God [01:03:00] tells the Pope, who tells the archbishops, who tell everybody, who tell the men, who tell the women, who tell the children. And he said, nobody tells me what to do. How does this happen? But also, if somebody is starving in our people, everyone is starving. And if someone has food, everyone has food.
And That wasn't that. Yeah, that was, it's not quite within living memory, but it was within recorded history. So I think a lot of what we're doing is rediscovering our birthright. I absolutely do not think we go backwards. We are moving forwards, whatever we're heading to this emergence into a new system is humanity in a different place.
Our, I believe we are born expecting that serotonin mesh of connectivity, of being and belonging, of being part of a ch a tribe that cherishes us. And that supports our growth and gives us, Weller says the difference between an initiation culture and a trauma culture is that in an initiation culture there are contained encounters with death.
And the containment is held by the shamans, the [01:04:00] elders, the land, the ancestors, the people, the web of life. And that by being taken to the edges of death, we discover who we are. We discover how to ask for help and that that help will come and how we as individuals can shine. And then we have that sense of respect, which is another serotonin.
You know, it's, it's part of what we need is that sense of pride in what I do and that I respect other people and I'm respected in my turn for what it is that I am good at. And we are born expecting that and then we end up in a culture where none of that is really on tap. But it could be.
It
could be.
And so part of what the book is doing is opening doorways to that being at least a possibility and something that we, what happens if we have that and all of our current technology? Where would that take us? I have no idea, but I think it would be really exciting to find out. Yeah,
Andrea Hiott: we can't imagine it, but it's, We can kind of imagine the orientation of it.
And I think that's, [01:05:00] there's a reason why complex systems has become such a thing we all use and understand across disciplines in a different way over the last whatever years, because I think what you just described, there is some way we're all in many different ways trying to understand how to open up, uh, what the self is and what we think of it, what we think we are, and in so doing, we open up.
Um, what we want and desire and the values to go back to what you said at the beginning. And once we start doing that, the shifts are, it's really like a transformational, it's very transformational. Um, we can't imagine how it would
Manda Scott: all change. I think it's, it stops being linear incremental and it becomes exponential and tipping points happen and we don't know where the tipping points are or what the critical mass is, but we can be pretty certain that they exist.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, and it's hopeful that we want that. I mean, that we've, that, that we're sort of turned on by these new patterns and moving towards them and, and seeing things a little bit more [01:06:00] clearly. But there's just two things before, before we go, you know, the book , it's very interesting.
I mean talking about all of this, something that I think is very hard to apply it to is, When we think of politics, we could go to economics or politics, you do talk to a lot of people on your podcast about these things, too. And of course, it's incredibly important. It's very different.
I mean, I live in the Netherlands, which is one way you're living in a different world there. And I'm from the States, which is a whole different world. So like none of these are exactly the same political system. And
Manda Scott: but within the guidelines of a particular frame,
Andrea Hiott: there's the orientation, right? The patterns are very similar.
Um, so just very briefly in the book, we, it, does it, it kind of ends up that the revolution might actually come through something like voting or something like actual choice. Yes. Or it might not. Or it might not.
Manda Scott: We end at the night after a general election where everything has changed. So I genuinely believe we need to work peacefully.
I, I work a lot with Joanna Macy's [01:07:00] Three Pillars of the Great Turning, are you familiar? So holding actions, systemic change, shifting consciousness. And by the end of the book, we have something of a divide within the movement and part of them want to make change through the existing system, which has been significantly shifted.
And another group is going to go and set up and do what Audrey Tang did in Taiwan and fork the government. And so part of the new book I want to do is exploring what happens when they're forking the government, because they've got a completely separate, but very obviously legitimate group of people who could be making governmental decisions, decisions about governance in a completely different way and with a completely different frame.
At the moment, all three nations that you mentioned, the US, the Netherlands, the UK, we have governance by consent and at the point where we remove that consent and decide we'd want different shapes of governance. We could do it. And then, you know, the people in [01:08:00] Washington or Westminster or wherever they are in the Netherlands just become a small clique doing their own thing.
And we just go, you do what you want to do. It doesn't matter. We would need a different economic frame also. But I am also. really believe that current fiat currencies are imposed by violence. And so one of the other things I want to explore is how do we create a way of sharing, exchanging, storing, and accounting for value that is not predicated on implicit or explicit violence.
And, and these are big things and you have to carry people with you. This is not the kind of question you could ask at the beginning of a book or nobody would read it. But by the end of a book, at least it's open as a, oh, I wonder what, if, So the second book, I don't want to write a book where you have to have read the first one to understand the second one.
So it's proving quite interestingly mind bending to, to start with. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to get a decent amount under my belt before the new one comes out. Um, [01:09:00] where, how do we, how do we ease into that, but without having to relitigate everything that's gone before? But yeah, we really is a scaling
Andrea Hiott: of what we were just talking about with the when I asked you about, I sort of started with the individual of this embodied sensual, different feeling of what life is, which is very hard to describe , the phenomenology of it.
But then, you know, that's actually a group or a You know, family is, is a really real anchor of this book and it's a, it doesn't have to be family in a traditional sense, but just the family and this anchor and this, that you can ask someone for help, that that exists. Like if we can, I feel like a lot of this community that's maybe building with Accidental Gods and the people you talk to and the work a lot of us are doing in completely different ways.
It's trying to create that space where we can be here for each other.
Manda Scott: Yes.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah.
Manda Scott: And, and one of the things that I ask on Accidental Gods, I haven't got an answer to yet and you might have, is [01:10:00] how do we build the umbrella that connects, I didn't know that you were going to take us here. I am so excited that you are thinking in the ways you're thinking and now we know.
But there will be dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of other people around the world. That neither of us knows about, but if we could all connect, and we're all zoomed out, we all have, you know, our time microtomed. How do we connect and find the common values and share ideas without imposing on each other?
And I don't have answers to that, but I think it's necessary. And I think it's one of the things that if we could create social media that was designed to To build bridges and to share instead of dividing people that would become a lot easier.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah, I think we're doing it in a way and I think it has to do with this having these kind of conversations.
A lot of people are doing this now on many different scales and levels and for a very, for a [01:11:00] reason that is that embodied to me. That's the thing that I'm trying to describe, and it isn't, it is like communities are forming that are really there for each other in a different way, and um, I think it has something to do with that.
I don't know how it all gets sorted and kind of comes together actually I was talking to Ian McGilchrist and he was telling me that he has someone do all his social media because he can't stand it.
And I was thinking, well, what if we all had someone doing our, , like what if we were tied and meshed and webbed in that way where we were promoting one another? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. There's something in there, but I don't know what it is. And it isn't, not necessarily social media, but some new way of thinking about what, uh, what we're doing with technology maybe.
Manda Scott: And I think, you know, again, I'm an enormous fan of Audrey Tang in Taiwan. They, they had a general election, I think, in January, and the People's Republic of China was definitely going to come in. And they did what they call pre bunking of creating videos two years in advance of this is how fake videos are created.
And this is what they look like. And this is how you can [01:12:00] tell if they're not. And part of the way that we tell is that you create networks of people you have actually met. Mm
hmm.
So that you can trust the people in and then the algorithm, if you go, look, I think this might be a fake video and all your friends go, yeah, it looks fake to me too, the algorithm will learn and then it will come and go, hey, this is very similar to that video you thought was fake.
You think this is fake too? And, and they're also building social media where explicitly the comments at the margins that are designed to inflame go nowhere and there is kudos and likes and. extra happy things that happen when you build bridges with people on the other side of any divide. And then they get groups of 10 of people that the algorithm says, these are 10 people who all think differently about whatever the topic is.
And, and they can have tens of thousands of these. Because social media, because technology, bring you all into a Zoom room, equivalent. And again, how can you build bridges until you've found a way that all of you have found something you agree about with whatever this topic is, and then you tell us, and we will implement [01:13:00] that in our governance structure.
This is happening in Taiwan. It could happen anywhere in the world. I didn't
Andrea Hiott: know about that. That's very exciting. It's really interesting. It's really exciting. And there's the possibilities of that. Just imagining a blockchain that's like trust based, you know. Yes. Yes. It's possible. I mean, it's absolutely possible.
Yeah.
And even being able to, if you're part of a group or something that you really trust in that, that small group being itself the resource or the reservoir of that social media. And also this, as you're talking, the We're trying to understand that it's always dynamic and changing and, understanding that what we're using is a static representation of something that's alive and processual and changing.
I think that little tiny thing, we just, we assume the map is a territory all the time and
Manda Scott: yes, but it's alive and, and this is alive. This conversation is alive just now. It's, it's glorious. So impressed. Thank you.
Andrea Hiott: Well, to end, I have to come to this word love. [01:14:00] Um, There's a beautiful thing in the book, you talk about weaving a lot in the book, and we've talked about the mesh, and we've talked about paths, and all of this is like a similar feeling, and I think you say something like, the threads of love, or the threads of love will weave your path.
So, you know, this is love and philosophy, and beyond dichotomy, and it's a million things, but I wonder about that word. In a way, we've been talking about it the whole time, I guess. But, how does it resonate with you and how do you, do you, do you talk about it? Do you not talk about it in terms of all this that you're creating and doing and putting into the world?
Manda Scott: Uh, yes, I talk about it. I have just come out of therapy. We've talked about nothing else for about an hour. We're not going into that. Um, So, Three Pillars of the Heart, Mind, Gratitude, Compassion for Self and Others. I think it's, it's a bit like in England, there's only one word for rain and I'm actually Scottish and there's about 150 words for rain because we get quite a lot of rain.
Oh, wow. Um, and I'm exaggerating a bit, but not by much. [01:15:00] And, in Rome, even in Rome, you know, height of the drama culture, they, I think they had nine different words for love and we just have the one where you have compassion, um, and adoration. I put. You know, it's, where our language limits us, but love for me, the, that aliveness in my heart space and be going out into the world to, to the whole of the web of life is, is intrinsic to who I am and to how I am and to how I want to show up in the world.
And we could get very esoteric and talk about energetics and that. Again, it might be a whole other podcast, but I think the energy with which we show up in the world is probably the single most important thing that defines how the world works. And, and it's a choice. I choose. I could go out into the world and be in horror and despair quite easily, or I can go out into the world and look at a tree and go, God, or, or the chickens or the red kite or the hill [01:16:00] or a concept.
And I think it's absolutely fundamental and it doesn't mean that I don't also feel outrage and despair and horror and I cannot believe these things are happening at things around in the world. But the textures, the weave if you like, of my personal energy is gratitude, compassion and for me, joyful curiosity that, wow, that's amazing.
I wonder what happens next. That is the disconnect that frees my brain up from thinking it knows. What happens next, but getting into that space of I have no idea what happens next is what brings the world into that sharpness of anything is possible, and I am in the moment balanced waiting, but it has to come from that grounding of compassion and absolute gratitude, which I think, you know, I think love for me is, is that melding of those three.
And, and then I am in love with living. And if I am in love with the process of [01:17:00] being alive, then I am fully alive and I am doing whatever is my best expression of that love. And this book is that, and the podcast, and the next book, and everything else. Does that, does that make sense? That's wonderful.
That's
Andrea Hiott: beautiful. And I really feel it. I think it really comes through in your presence. I think that word presence is, is important and I mean it on this complex system, multiple level that we've, we started everything with that, there's this layering, there's this, , vulnerability, there's this amazing strength, there's this desire to learn.
one senses it for sure in what you're doing. So I just want to, Send you gratitude for that and tell you also the joyful curiosity is definitely a state you help people to reach and um, with your work. So thank you. Thank
Manda Scott: you. Honestly, thank you. This has been the most inspiring conversation.
I'm so glad we met.
Andrea Hiott: Me too. Me too. Truly. I already felt it before I met you in person here, if you can [01:18:00] call it in person, but truly it's a wonderful meeting. So thank you. Thank
Manda Scott: you. And I hope your listeners and viewers are similarly inspired because that would be rather wonderful.
Andrea Hiott: Yeah. Me too. So we send them love too already.
Manda Scott: Yes. Totally. Thank you everybody for being there.
Andrea Hiott: Yes. Thank you. Have a beautiful day. Or evening.
Manda Scott: Yes.