In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to create that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller, in this journey into possibility, and for a very long time, I have had the name of Philip Carr-Gomm on my list of possible people to talk to. And then he invited me onto his rather wonderful Tea With a Druid, and it isn’t always that we make real, heartfelt, electric magical connections over zoom, but we did. And so I became less shy because Philip, for most of the time that I’d been aware that the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids exists, was the chief druid of Britain. He led said order, which was, and I think still is (but forgive me if this is offending anybody in the Druidic realm) the foremost of the druidic groups in the islands of Britain, which made him pretty big in the firmament in which I swim. So I hadn’t got round to sending him an email, and then he sent one to me and we met and here we are. There is a full bio in the show notes. I have a bit of a cold, and it feels as if my voice is about to give out, so I’m not going to tell you all of it, but I will let you know that he began studying Druidry with Ross Nichols, who was the founder of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids when he was 16 and was then initiated at 18. He went on to study the psychosynthesis form of psychotherapy and also sophrology. And no, I didn’t know what that was either, but I learned a bit in doing the reading ahead of this conversation and you will learn more.

Manda: He’s written a huge number of books. He’s designed two oracle sets, one for plants and one for animals, and he’s written the text for a couple of tarot sets as well. He has done all kinds of inspiring things, but what I really wanted to let you know is this is quite a long conversation. We got to where I was thinking of winding down, and then we touched on the nature of will and intent and honing will and intent. And effectively, this is the practice of magic, and I don’t think I’ve used that term ever on the podcast. I spent an entire year teaching the Intention Intensive on the Accidental Gods membership, and I don’t think I mentioned it once, but it feels like this is Timely. So the last 20 minutes or so of the podcast, we shifted into a completely different gear. I loved it, I hope that you do too.

Manda: And I got one quote wrong. I thought it was Israel Regardie who had defined magic in terms of the application of will, and actually it was Crowley, heaven help us. The science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will was his definition of magic, according to Wikipedia. And I’m sure it’s right. I remembered it from my early twenties, and reading the kinds of things that Philip was practising at that time. So before my voice gives out completely, this is a wide ranging, deep and I think very timely conversation. So people of the podcast, please do welcome Philip Carr-Gomm.

Manda: Philip, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you this rather bright and sunny December morning?

Philip: Hello, Manda. Lovely to see you. I’m in Lewes in Sussex and it’s a lovely sunny day, actually, after a wild storm has been sort of whipping through the trees here over the last few days.

Manda: Exciting. Yes. I discovered how much horses really don’t want to be inside; mine have got the choice of being in or being out and as soon as the wind started, they’re like, no, we need to be on the hill. We are not standing in a stable that might come down on our head; millions of years of evolution tell us this is really a bad thing to do. And I thought of all the horses in the world that are stuck in stables and don’t have the option to leave, and are standing there trying to self-regulate while all of their innate wisdom is saying, no, you need not to be in here, it’s not safe.

Philip: That reminds me of being in an earthquake when I spent some time in New Zealand and there were various earthquakes and tremors and so on. And one’s instincts are to run out of the building, because why would you? And yet that’s absolutely not what you’re supposed to do.

Manda: What are you supposed to do in the event of an earthquake?

Philip: You’re supposed to stand under a doorjamb or under a beam.

Manda: Oh, the solid bits. The things that are less likely to collapse.

Philip: Yeah. But it’s very hard to override your natural instinct to run outside.

Manda: Standing under a doorjamb while the earth shakes, the buildings will fall on you.

Philip: Because the reason why you don’t run outside is stuff flies around and buildings fall on you, and tiles come off the roof and so on. Yeah.

Manda: Okay. As everything falls apart, I think the thing that probably won’t hit Britain is earthquakes. But we can never be sure. I think many more very big storms are likely. So there we go. Right, on that happy note, I came to know you first when you were leading the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, which you did for quite a long time. So in your very mixed and very interesting spiritual path, and it seems to me that you’re one of the few other people I’ve met who whose life has been shaped by their spiritual path. You began first learning what it was to be a druid in modern 20th and then 21st century islands of Britain. Tell us a little bit about how you came to that and your experience of it.

Philip: Yes. So I was born in London in 1952. So only seven years after the war ended.

Manda: Yes. Still in rationing.

Philip: Yeah, yeah, still in rationing. And lots of bombsites, that was the sort of thing in London. Bombsites. And then I was just the right age for the sort of late 60s, early 70s, the whole flower power thing. And so that was was lovely and exciting. It all started, really when I was 11 and I read a book called The Life of the Buddha, which was a very lyrical, beautifully written sort of book. And that’s what sort of turned on the lights in the house, I think. And it became the most important task, it seemed to me, that the quest for enlightenment was quite clearly the most important right goal.

Manda: Had you been brought up with any spiritual structure?

Philip: None at all. No, my parents were agnostic, but they were surrounded by people who were interested in spirituality funnily enough, in alternative spirituality. Because my dad ran a magazine, a history and and future magazine, and so there were always interesting people turning up at the house. And one of those interesting people was the old chief Druid, who was Ross Nichols, who my dad knew as a friend, but also he ended up working for him. He had what was called a crammer in those days, which was a, I don’t know how you’d describe it, a kind of tutorial establishment.

Manda: To cram people for exams.

Philip: Cram people, yeah. Winston Churchill was their famous pupil. It’s when kids don’t get on at school, their parents would stick them in a crammer. So there’s no sport, no downtime, it’s just all cramming for exams.

Manda: The imperialism of the school system. I’m reading Pedagogies of Collapse at the moment, which is all about how we need to shift education, so that lands very deeply. Anyway, your dad started working for the chief druid.

Philip: Yeah, yeah. And so I knew him from the age of 11 as well. So funnily enough, the kind of two influences of eastern spirituality and Western, if you like, spirituality appeared in my life at the same time. And so I met him when I was 11 and then I became from sort of 11 to 16 that I was interested in Buddhism and Theosophy.

Manda: You might have to unpick Theosophy for us.

Philip: Oh, Theosophy. Theosophy was kind of a universalist belief developed by a lady called Madame Blavatsky, who who was interested in the perennial wisdom tradition, really. But my dad also knew a guy called Christmas Humphreys. Wonderful name Christmas Humphreys, who was a QC and also founded the London Buddhist Society. So there were lots of great sort of influences to hand on the coffee table in our house. And then when I was 16 I got into photography and I had a darkroom in our house, and the old chief Druid asked me to come and photograph the ceremonies. And then I would go to his house with the contact sheets, you know, those little strips of contact sheets.

Manda: Black and white, or were you doing colour.

Philip: It was all black and white. And, you know, he would look at these little contact sheets and say, I’ll have five of those ten by eight and three of those in half plate. And it was a sort of excuse really for us to spend time together and for me to become fascinated Druidry and the Druid path. And so I started training with him essentially when I was 16. And then he I asked if I could be initiated and he said, no, you have to wait till you’re 18 and we have to cast your horoscope. And for a 16 year old to wait two years seems like an eternity, doesn’t it?

Manda: Yeah. That’s a serious percentage of your lifespan to that date.

Philip: Yes, that’s right. So I had to wait two years and then I was initiated on Glastonbury Tor when I was 18.

Manda: Goodness. And your horoscope said that was okay.

Philip: I was apparently passed through. Yes. That’s right.

Manda: It would have been hard if it had said no, wouldn’t it?

Philip: Yes it would have been awful if they’d looked at the horoscope and said, oh no.

Manda: That’s not going to work.

Philip: That’s not going to work, yeah.

Manda: Did you ever look at someone’s horoscope and say, no, that’s not going to work when you were Chief Druid?

Philip: No, we never took up that practice.

Manda: All right. That’s a whole aside. I’ve been talking to someone who’s an amazing astrologer recently, so it’s opened up my astrology gateways again. But let’s leave that. Okay, so you were initiated at age 18. And what can you tell us about that? Because it seems to me that finding refinding rites of passage that work for our culture is something really important. And you’ve been through what sounds like a rite of passage.

Philip: Well, I suppose looking back, the only way I can describe it is I mean, from a commonsensical point of view, it was crazy. Because on the one hand, I was leading this life, you know, a 16, 17, 18 year old in hippie London, we were all smoking pot and sitting around listening to music and enjoying the 60s, and having a great time. And all my friends thought I was mad because why would I go off to hang out with a few seemingly ancient people, who were probably younger than I am now, you know, they were, I don’t know, in their 60s or something. And sitting in rooms with half a dozen elderly people in a sort of overhang from a sort of Victorian occult group, if you can imagine that. So we would do rituals and ceremonies and meditations and so on. And on the one hand, a part of me found it incredibly frustrating because it was so out of tune with the spirit of the times, really. And the sort of pay off, in terms of the altered state of consciousness you would get, was no match to LSD or pot, you know, it just wasn’t the same.

Philip: And yet I persevered. And it was only years later, I mean literally probably decades later, as I started to write books in my 40s and 50s, that I realised that what had happened is he’d given me, an analogy that came to me at the time was a sort of a necklace of diamonds or pearls or something. And slowly over the course of the following 30 years, I discovered one of the diamonds and said, oh, yes! To give you an example, he said to me you should really study Jainism, and he gave me a copy of this book whose name escapes me for the moment, but a massive great tome on the Mohenjo-daro civilisation. Very heavy going and I didn’t follow his instructions until probably 20 or 25 years later. And I became absolutely fascinated by Jainism. I started attending a centre in London where there were two Jain nuns who I used to take classes with. And I studied Jainism in quite a lot of depth.

Manda: So can we take a little step down that rabbit hole and tell us what it was about Jainism that fascinated you and presumably still does.

Philip: Yeah. There’s a way in which when you take two perspectives or two approaches and hold them side by side, something very magical happens. So in other words, if you’re interested in Buddhism, if you take Jainism and hold it next to it, it’s so similar and so very different. And I realised it one day after having breakfast with a guy I’d got to know who was so similar to me and yet so very different. He was a psychologist who’d spent some time travelling. He spoke French, as I do and so on, and we had very similar life paths. Yet he’s utterly different to me and I, and I was going away from the breakfast thinking, this is such a satisfying relationship. This is so nice. And I suddenly got the image of two Lenses and that it creates depth of field. That if we only approach something from the lens of Buddhism, or the lens of Druidry, it’s…

Manda: Like having a telescope instead of binoculars.

Philip: Exactly. Exactly right. So if you have if you have a viewpoint that isn’t so vastly different that it makes your eyes spin, you know. Because I’ve tried that as well. I’ve tried diving into stuff that feels completely foreign to me, you know, like I’ve tried watching Fox News. I’ve tried climbing out of the bubble and listening to, I don’t know, or GB news or whatever it’s called. Anyway, we could name names, couldn’t we?

Manda: And yes, we could, but let’s not. But things that are not normal stuff 

Philip: Things that absolutely feel incompatible. And it’s just like putting on the wrong pair of glasses, the way you get that awful feeling. Whereas if there’s a slight similarity but a slight difference, you get this depth. And I was talking to a friend about this, I was saying there’s this interesting phenomenon. I found it in this friendship with this friend. But I’ve also found it in studying Jainism in relation to Buddhism. What is this? And she said, interesting you say that, because I was on a retreat with a Jesuit nun who was the most amazing woman, and she said in the retreat that she had found that people who study two spiritual paths often seem to have more depths than people who study just one. And I was telling this story to a Buddhist friend who’s also a druid. And I said to him, why do you kind of bother with Druidism when you’ve got Buddhism? I mean, surely if you’re looking for water, you just drill in one place. And a huge smile came over his face and he said, well, I’m a hydrologist, and I can tell you that if you drill for water, you drill more than once.

Manda: In many places.

Philip: Yes. That’s right. And so the analogy absolutely doesn’t work, Philip, you know.

Manda: But taking it out of the metaphor, because I’ve met Christian druids and I’ve also within the shamanic field, there was (possibly apocryphally) a bishop in New York who was also a shamanic practitioner. And so people find other things. I still don’t quite get my head around it, because I think what I get is Buddhism has a science, a really clear science of internal processes, worked out over three and a half, 4000 years, written down by people whose sole concern for the entirety of their life was watching what happens when you are really still and watch your internal processes. And that’s invaluable. I don’t necessarily need to take on board a lot of the cultural stuff that hangs around it, but the process is amazing. And and I am very recently practising feeding my demons, which has come from Tibetan Buddhism and I think probably arose within the Bon tradition, which is of shamanic pre-buddhist Tibet. And it’s utterly opening doors that I don’t know how I would have opened otherwise. And it feels safe because it’s got 3500 years of people really focusing on this going, yeah, this bit works, that bit didn’t.

Manda: So for you, what works when you practice Druidry? And at some point I would like you to explain to people who don’t know what that is, what it is. But also Jainism, and I suspect there are people for whom that is also a foreign concept, and Buddhism and the other things. What what are the lenses through which it allows you to see that Druidry alone would not have given you?

Philip: Yes. I mean, Jainism is an approach that I suppose involves stripping away, letting go, letting go, stripping away. And Druidry is an approach that involves really appreciating and opening to the richness of the embodied life. So they’re very different in that respect. And it’s somehow that interplay between those two very different approaches that helps me, I would say.

Manda: So is Jainism similar to other eastern mystical spiritual traditions? Are we heading for non-duality in that way of I am completely at one with everything? Is that the letting go of everything except the oneness? Is that where we’re heading?

Philip: Strangely enough, I mean, as as with all religions and spiritualities, there are lots of different interpretations. I can only speak for what I’ve picked up and the particular articulations that I’ve happened to have read about and heard about and so on. But some people will say that Jainism is actually dualistic, not non-dual. So that’s a really interesting aspect of it too. And so for instance, to give you a sense of the sort of nuances; Jainism, one of the beliefs is that we retain our individuality even after the attainment of moksha, of liberation.

Manda: Oh that’s interesting.

Philip: So somebody will say, but surely we merge into the one light and they say, yes, but the one light is made up of many different candles burning. So it’s very interesting to allow these different perspectives.

Manda: And until we get there, there’s no way of proving it. It’s all a belief system.

Philip: Well that’s right. And you know, I suppose in a way I have to evoke the sort of concept of past lives. Because at an intellectual level, I can critique Jainism, and there’s perhaps a reason why it hasn’t achieved the level of popularity, if that’s the right word, or just recognition that Buddhism has.

Manda: Which is what? Why, do you think?

Philip: What are the reasons why it hasn’t? Well, just for those listeners who aren’t aware of what Jainism is, Jainism is a religion that claims to be pre-vedic, which is interesting in itself. And the kind of jury’s out on that, I think from a historical perspective, there are good arguments for suggesting it really is, going right back to the Mohenjo daro civilisation, Pre-vedic civilisation. And its Shramanic. The main teacher, Mahavira, was living at the same time as the Buddha and in fact, the stories are so sort of similar that some scholars in the early days, in the Victorian times, thought that people had confused the two and it was just one thing, actually. Hindus claim that Jainism is a part of Hinduism. Jains claim that they’re not, they’re separate from Hinduism. They’re the most literate group in India. They have the oldest libraries. The oldest written records. They have a tradition of yantras and of mantras. Tantra was involved in it as well, and strangely, they tend to be the most wealthiest group in India as well.

Manda: With all of the letting go 

Philip: Well, all of the letting go. Yes, they’re the jewellers and the bankers and…

Manda: And there’s no internal contradiction in this?

Philip: Well, it’s a world that you dive into and it’s got contradictions as I suppose everything does.

Manda: Yeah. Because Christianity claims also to be letting go. And then the Christian church is the wealthiest entity on the planet.

Philip: Exactly.

Manda: Well, it was until Musk came along.

Philip: And just to finish the little thread that I started talking about, reincarnation, you know, previous lives; is I’m not entirely sure why I’m so drawn to Jainism. So the only thing I can invoke is the possibility of myself in a previous life. Because I think I embarrassed Professor Paul Dundas, who wrote the best introduction to Jainism. I used to go to the school of SOAS, the School of Oriental and Slavonic Studies, they have a Jain conference every year. And I used to go to those and I remember effusing about his book to him and him looking sort of rather surprised, because I just devoured his book. And in fact, I’ve read it twice, and I just powered through it and it all made sense to me, and it all sort of switched on all sorts of lights and all the rest of it.

Manda: We’d better find the book, put it in the show notes.

Philip: Paul Dundas, the Jains. But I have a feeling that other people might pick it up and think, well, what’s special about this? You know, I don’t know.

Manda: I still am not clear what is the core tenet of Jain belief besides letting go? Is there one?

Philip: Oh, let’s think. Core tenants. Well, there are three core beliefs, they apparently originated the doctrine of ahimsa. Harmlessness. Gandhi was very interested, very influenced by Jainism.

Manda: That’s all I know about Jains is that they kind of sift through building materials to make sure there are no ants there before they build a house 

Philip: Yes. It’s almost kind of obsessive. I mean, they will wear Covid style masks, for instance, in case you inhale an insect and kill it. And there’s one sect of the Jains who are naked, the Digambara. Skyclad. That’s where the term skyclad that’s used in Wicca and paganism, it comes from Jainism. And the reason it’s in Wicca is because Ross Nichols, my teacher, was really interested in Jainism, and he was a friend of Gerald Gardner and used to talk to him about Jain. So, Skyclad worked its way into Wicca through Ross Nichols from Jainism. So the Digambara sect will be naked, but only the men. The women are clothed in white. And another thing that interests me is what you might call the pathology of religion, the psychopathology of religion, because it’s so peculiar. So you get these ridiculous situations where they say you can only gain illumination if you are naked, so completely physically unattached.

Manda: So women are never going to get there because they have to wear white.

Philip: So women can’t, yes, because they’re clothed in white. Because otherwise they attract the attentions of people and all the rest of it, and it’s not safe for them. So then I think it was the 16th or 17th century, a scholar came up with a concept where they started a sect where they allowed the women to undress just before they died, so that they could gain illumination, so they developed a workaround. But this particular sect wasn’t popular. And it’s so Monty Python, isn’t it? I mean, it’s so Pythonesque 

Manda: Terrifyingly so.

Philip: But one of the things that that really struck me, There’s a photograph from from the 1950s of a Jain saint, Acharya, who is dying. Because they have the concept of voluntary death, where you can choose to die; euthanasia. You can choose to die by fasting if you’ve fulfilled your obligations to your family and society and all the rest of it.

Manda: And either gender can do this, any gender?

Philip: Yes. As far as I believe, yes, it’s called Sallekhana. And there’s this extraordinary photograph, if you can imagine, taken from a balcony, looking down on an elderly man sitting meditating naked. Surrounded by about a hundred naked monks and then 200 naked nuns. They always accepted women into the brotherhood, the sisterhood, the the community. So the nuns are there, but they’re all clothed in white. So it’s this extraordinary photograph, and he’s dying in public, in front of everybody, meditating. Very powerful. And his name was Ocean of Peace. And I thought, you know, this is either madness or not. There’s something rather beautiful in it, which I can’t quite explain rationally 

Manda: And there is a kind of divine insanity, there is that I suppose I’ve let go of everything that we have incultured ourselves to consider what humanity is, because we need structures that keep us alive I guess. But it sounds amazing to me.

Philip: It is. There’s something very beautiful about it and touching, I think.

Manda: And to be able to cross the boundary from life to death in full awareness, seems to me a really useful thing to be aiming for and having someone model that sounds astonishing, frankly 

Philip: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So the Indian government, for instance, some time ago, they passed a law about euthanasia, not allowing euthanasia. But then the Jain lobby got them to reverse the decision so that Jain’s could carry on practising sallekhana.

Manda: Jain’s could still do this, right, because it’s a different thing. If I can meditate while I’m dying and choose to do this, it’s conceptually very different. Gosh. Okay. So we still haven’t really explored what Druidry is for people. We know a little bit about Jainism, and I will find that book and put a link in the show notes. Tell us your experience of what Druidry is and and how it manifests in you and in the world.

Philip: Well, one explanation is that Druidry is an indigenous, pre-Christian shamanic, if you like, spiritual practice of these islands. In other words, Ireland, the British Isles, western northwestern France. And it achieved a kind of, during what you might call the classical period of Druidry, where the classical authors, the Greeks and the Romans wrote about them, where if you can imagine this kind of tribal, probably goddess centred, nature worshipping very different in different regions of this territory. It kind of consolidated and followed the path that seems to be the usual path of human societies, where it starts to rigidify and become hierarchical and all the rest of it, until when the Romans are writing about them, they are an established order of bards, ovates and druids and so on. And then Christianity comes in. And the Romans tolerated it because the Romans, despite the stories of Boudica and so on, which you know of course, the Romans generally tolerated cults because that was their cunning way of…

Manda: Folding them into the empire.

Philip: Folding them into the Empire, yeah.

Manda: There was a while when to be a singer or a druid was punishable by crucifixion, though, early in the occupation.

Philip: Well, what happened is, according to Ronald Hutton, the historian, there were three times when the Romans cracked down on Druidry. One was Boudica’s rebellion. Two other times I’ve forgotten where they were but basically they pushed back. So the Romans pushed back.

Manda: Yeah. I think the first 20 years of the occupation, if they knew you were a druid, you were going to die very slowly.

Philip: Okay. But when Christianity came, it had a different agenda. It had a monopolist agenda. So by about the sixth century, Druidry was wiped out, but not wiped out really. It was a sort of absorbed into the culture. And for some reason the image of a big old wooden door slowly closing is what works for me, with stuff sort of slipping through. And of course, the Christian clerics were fascinated with paganism. They wrote the old stories down. So the oral tradition was sort of captured in the old tales, and sure, they were embellished and Christianised and so on, but we have glimpses from the old tales that the Christians recorded.

Manda: And the old tales are like the Mabinogion.

Philip: Like the Mabinogion. Exactly. And of course, there are little scraps from archaeology and so on. And then there was a period of a thousand years. So this is why we don’t have an indigenous culture as people in other…

Manda: We don’t have a lineage in the way that natives to America or Australia or Africa or even the Sami have 

Philip: Exactly. We don’t have that. But what we do have are these kind of roots deep in the soil. And then if you take a spiritual perspective, we all know, those of us who have some kind of experience of these realms know that time is very different to the way it appears 

Manda: Yes. And the gods are still there. It’s not that they went away.

Philip: Exactly. So what if all this stuff is coming to us from the future and not the past, you know? And what if the voice of Druidry is whispering to us not from the past, but from the future? They were picking it up thousands of years ago, the voices of nature and of the woods and the trees and so on, and we can pick them up again. And so I kind of always urge people not to think of Druidry as sort of something in a glass case in a museum, trying to kind of understand it from a historical perspective.

Manda: And trying to recreate rituals that we think happened 2000 years ago with no basis in any kind of reality that is anything other than basic fantasy.

Philip: Exactly. Right. Which is why the order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, for instance, that I have worked with for so many years is not what’s called a reconstructionist group. You have Celtic reconstructionists. So there’s some druid groups like that, but I think it reaches kind of crazy. For instance, I didn’t want to endorse a book that talked about that, because they were taking pieces of evidence, like the lead plates they found in bath in the springs? Sort of curses and prayers and wishes and things carved. So they were suggesting as a practice carving stuff and then throwing them into springs.

Manda: On lead?

Philip: Hopefully not lead. I can’t remember, but I was shocked by it. I think this is so silly, and don’t do that. We don’t want to pollute springs.

Manda: Especially not with lead.

Philip: Especially not with lead, God, no. I know the people who run chalice well in Glastonbury and every so often they have to drain the wellhead and clear out all the crystals that get dropped in by people, you know.

Manda: Okay. So it’s a living practice. And the tenets as I understand it and I want you to correct me if I’m wrong, feels to me very shamanic. I think the distinction is probably semantic, but we’re connecting to a living web of life in whatever way it presents best to us and our practice and our process then, is guided by the connections that we make to the more than human world. Would that be fair 

Philip: Yeah, absolutely. 

Manda: What’s extra that I don’t know about?

Philip: Well there are kind of bodies of lore, I suppose you could say. So there’s tree lore, stone lore, star lore, plant lore, animal lore. So animal lore, for instance, Stephanie and I, my partner, worked on the druid animal oracle about 25 years ago, and put animal lore in.

Manda: It’s beautiful. And then a plant oracle as well and a tarot set. I will put links to all of those in the show notes, because it’s heading up to that winter holiday where you want to buy presents for people and they’re beautiful.

Philip: Thank you, yeah.

Manda: Is this lore that arose in your connection to, say, the red kite and the hawthorn on the hill? Or is it Lore that you’ve drawn from other sources?

Philip: Well, there’s this extraordinary resource which is the Folklore Society’s library, which unfortunately has been archived. You can still access it, but you can’t browse it. The animal oracle was really interesting, you know, I went to the States and Jamie Sams’s medicine card had just come out, you know, Native American. And I bought these for Stephanie and I brought them back and we looked at them and strangely enough in that there’s Native American lore, but there’s also sort of classical Greek lore and Old Testament lore and all the rest of it, which I found slightly strange. And Stephanie said, you know, you could express Druid lore with cards. This hadn’t occurred to us. Oh, wow, that would be lovely, you know, we could do that. And a lovely artist friend who creates beautiful artwork, Will Worthington, he agreed to do the paintings. And at that time the Folklore Society library was in London, and I could just browse and I was allowed to take ten books out at a time. Can you imagine? Because I’d been at UCL, I had a right to do that. So I was carting ten books a time back on the train to Lewes and then we’d transcribe material and so on. So it’s drawn from folklore. By the time we did the Plant Oracle, about ten years later, I thought I’d do the same thing. I went back there and to my horror, the whole library had been archived, and they said, well, you have to fill in a card and give the book title.

Manda: You can’t just wander along and let something speak to you, which is the magic of books on shelves.

Philip: Exactly.

Manda: Something leaps off and goes, me, me! You have to read me!

Philip: Much harder. But synchronicity helped us there, because we went about it in a different way. And one day I was brushing my teeth and I looked into the garden and I saw a small guy with a long white beard sitting by the pond on our lawn. And we had a herbalist we used to rent this little garden house to that we had. And I remembered her talking about Britain’s expert in indigenous plant lore, and I thought, I wonder if it’s him. And I went down into the garden and I introduced myself and it was. I’ve forgotten his name now, but he did a BBC series on indigenous plants in Britain. And I had the most wonderful conversation with him where where he just helped enormously in this.

Manda: So the gods are looking out for us. This is what gives me hope. When the world looks like it’s going over the edge of a cliff, accelerating faster towards the edge, is we’re being given so much help from the more than human world, in whatever way it is able to connect to us.

Philip: Yes, yes. I have a phrase that I’ve used in a book I wrote called Lessons in Magic, which is ‘you’ve got friends’. The friends are there. You just don’t know who they are, but they’re there. Yes. This idea of invisible friends.

Manda: So how would you, paraphrasing Lessons in Magic, which I will also put in the show notes, for somebody coming relatively new to this who desires to open to those friends, what kind of avenues do you find work best? Because it seems to me we’ve got to move to this at scale now. Doing it in small groups is great, but we need to take a lot of the 8.5 billion people in the world with us on this journey. How would we help people to do that?

Philip: Oh gosh, what a big question.

Manda: Well, we could read your books, obviously, but.

Philip: Well, I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it, how things have changed in in 50 years. So when I was starting on this path, and I was going along to these little druid meetings in a room in West Kensington, you know, when I was 17, 18, the way things were spread was literally through roneoed sheets of paper and word of mouth, you know, talking, going to classes and so on. And then you had the possibility to distribute stuff in the mail and through magazines. Do you remember when when people read magazines? I’m not sure people do anymore, you know. And then we had the internet. I have a friend who I was talking to about this problem of the internet. I was reading an article in the Guardian today about the research that’s come out, about the effect on the brain of attention spans being messed around with.

Manda: Basically everybody has ADHD now.

Philip: Yeah, yeah. But it’s actually physiological, you know, it’s affecting the brain physiologically and you know, it’s very serious. I also got a letter; if you have stuff published by big publishers, the CEO sends a letter once a year. So I got a letter from the CEO of Hachette Publishing, huge publisher yesterday, and in it he talks about the stats on kids and basically kids reading for pleasure. The stats are going down and down and down and down. And he said, although publishing is doing very well, the last few years have been a really good years for publishing, the long term conclusion one has to make is that this isn’t going to translate long term, because people just won’t be reading books.

Manda: And Neil Gaiman, years ago at some big meeting, said that he was talking to the people who build prisons in the US, because they have to predict how many prisons to build, how much accommodation for people that you’re going to hold in perpetuity. And he said, how do you know? And they said, well, the number of young men who are going to end up in prison is inversely related to the number of kids between ages nine and 15 that are reading books. The more they read books, the less likely they are to be in prison. So we just look at those numbers and we predict, based on that. This is not good, because reading books switches on your capacity to empathise. You have to put yourself in the perspective of the people in the book, and that enables you to see that there are other viewpoints than your own. And I don’t think playing computer games or whatever else they’re doing, TikTok, anything, is going to do that.

Philip: It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? In that article, it quotes the ethicist of Google, I think it was, who resigned…

Manda: Tristan Harris.

Philip: And he talks about how their succeeding in reaching down into the lower brain, the race to the reptilian brain.

Manda: The race to the bottom of the brainstem.

Philip: Which is what you see in the clickbait, you know, the way outrage and so and so owns 

Manda: Yes, because outrage is addictive. 

Philip: So your question was, how do we counteract all this? And perhaps it’s riding the dragon. One way we could do it is to not engage with the internet, to not listen to your podcasts, because you’re using the internet, I’m using the internet.

Manda: Yep. This is going out on the internet.

Philip: Yes, exactly. So another friend of mine used this phrase riding the dragon. I was talking to him about it and I was saying, what do you think about this? Because a part of me wants to reject it all and just never use social media. But another part of me loves engaging, you know, tea with a druid every Monday on YouTube. And I love the feeling of being together and meditating together with a whole bunch of people around the world and so on. It just feels wholesome and good. And yet I’m using the technology that is also damaging people’s brains. So what do we do? The only thing I think we can do is, is try in our tiny way to be a force for good in the world and do exactly what you do, is introduce and talk about good stuff that has a positive effect. And you must have had experience of this. I mean, I did tea with a druid every Monday for four years or something. Then my mum died and it took a long time for her to die. It was a very, very intense period and I just needed time, so I stopped tea with the druid and I thought, you know, I’ve done it for four years maybe that’s enough. And I went and I spent two months in Ireland just not engaging with stuff and just recovering, really, and having a long retreat. And at some moment I went down into the courtyard of the place where I was staying, kind of in the middle of nowhere, and there was a little cafe there, and there was this guy who recognised me as I walked across.

Manda: From Tea with a Druid.

Philip: And he said I understand you need a break, but I do hope you’ll come back, because I suffer from really severe headaches and when I listen to tea with a druid, they go away. I don’t know what it is, but they just go away. Please will you keep doing them? And I was astonished! So they do have an effect, however much one might want to minimise, they do have an effect. Even if it’s a tiny, just a few people here and there.

Manda: And the point of complexity is you don’t know what the ripple effects are.

Philip: Well, exactly. I remember listening to one of your podcasts and you talked about, you’ve got a lovely way of talking about that sort of network of almost like neuronal connections.

Manda: Yeah the mesh of the web of life. Yeah.

Philip: The mesh. And sometimes I kind of beat myself up and thinking, why haven’t we sold up here and gone out and started a commune in the country so that it can be a sort of a physical node.

Manda: A Shamanic monastery! I keep wanting that too. Or a Druidic monastery, they’re going to be very similar, aren’t they?

Philip: That’s right. Yeah. Exactly. And maybe one day that will happen. But I think creating these nodes is perhaps, you know, we can only do what we’re sort of built for. I feel I’m kind of built for this work and so I do it.

Manda: Thank you. Okay. So if somebody listening felt that Druidry might be a path forward, then you’ve got books out there that could help and then they can find local groups. Is the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids International or is it British Isles only?

Philip: I mean, it’s huge. When I started there were literally about a dozen elderly people who I hooked up with when I was a teenager. And now the order has about 35,000 members. It’s all over the world. We have 300 groups. There were a lot of Facebook groups and private Facebook groups and public Facebook groups. And we don’t like Facebook. And we’ve managed to start a thing called The Druid Hearth, and we’ve made it members only so that it’s a safe contained space. We’ve been working with a software developer in Kiev, in Ukraine for the last year, and he’s built us the most beautiful site, which has magazines in six languages that you can read, live streamed workshops, 100 special interest groups.

Manda: Goodness. So it’s a kind of druidic version of Facebook in a way, or it’s a multi-venue space.

Philip: Yeah, a multi-venue space. You can hook up with friends and then you can join groups. So we’ve got a mental health professionals group that has 400 people in it who are psychiatrists and psychotherapists and so on. And we’ve got all these different special interest groups and all sorts of stuff going on. It’s really quite extraordinary. And then we have a training program. We have lessons in six different languages, and they go out online or also by post as well. And then we have gatherings. We have big gatherings in Glastonbury twice a year and gatherings in camps in America and New Zealand, Australia 

Manda: So there’s a fellowship that one can join. And it seems to me that these communities of passion and purpose, as well as our communities of place, are going to be really important. So I will put links to all of that. Great.

Philip: Thank you. Thank you.

Manda: So let’s move on a little bit because you have been involved with Sophrology, about which I knew precisely nothing until I started doing the reading for this episode. So I’m kind of guessing most of the people listening will probably be similarly ignorant, though I might be uniquely ignorant. That’s not unusual. Tell us a bit about Sophrology and what it is and how you found it and and where it goes. 

Philip: Yeah, absolutely. Well, sophrology is a sort of embodied mindfulness practice that was developed by a Colombian Neuropsychiatrist, who died recently. And he really came to it because, again, in the 60s, he was trained as a psychiatrist. And as soon as he started working in a psychiatric hospital in Spain, he found that his job was administering ECT electroshock therapy to patients, profoundly altering their consciousness. And the obvious struck him, which is, hang on, I’m changing people’s consciousness and yet we’ve had no training in what consciousness is, what different levels are. I’ve done loads of autopsies and examining bodies and so on, but nothing in consciousness. His wife was a yoga teacher, so he took a sabbatical in India for a year and then ended up in Zen monasteries and all the rest of it. And he came back and he developed a system that has all the features of mindfulness, but if you can imagine mindfulness including certain very simple body movements, so you’ve got body scans that include body movement and visualisation and breathing and so on. Because the thing with mindfulness is that the attrition rate is very high. It’s hugely popular. You look at apps like headspace and so on, but the attrition rate, and by that I mean the the fall off rate, you know, people start practising and then they…

Manda: Last about a week and then they just find good reasons not to do it next week.

Philip: And then they just never go on the app again, you know.

Manda: And there’s a thing I think in Western culture now is having downloaded the app means you’ve done it. So okay, I’ve got this app so now I’m meditating. And the fact that you’re actually not doing it doesn’t Land. There’s bits of the brain that have just got a big tick in the box and that’s good and then I’ll download another app next time I feel a bit off balance.

Philip: Yes, it’s a bit like when you’re suffering overwhelm and you finally do the common sensical thing, you sit down and you make a nice list of everything and you prioritise. Then you have the cup of tea and actually you haven’t even begun to deal with it, you’ve just organised it. But it feels pretty good. So Sophrology has a lower attrition rate. And the reason why nobody’s heard of it is because it became very big in the French speaking world, strangely enough, rather than the Spanish speaking world. He taught a lot in France. It just took off in France and in France there are sophrology magazines, there are training institutes. Every small town will have a Sophrologist. And it’s a rather interesting example of where psychiatry or mental health concerns interact with other concerns. So for instance, if we were in a little town in France and your son or daughter was super nervous about their driving test coming up, you might say why don’t you go and see Anne the Sophrologist down the road? She could help. It’s used for pregnancy, it’s used in cancer.

Manda: So it moved into the culture. Isn’t that interesting? Things can move into cultures that are good.

Philip: But fascinatingly, it never moved across the barrier. For some reason I’m interested in things that aren’t completely successful. It’s like Stephanie said to me, why? You know, when I became interested in Jainism and then I became very interested in naturism, you know, and Druidry as well, all these things that aren’t, aren’t big, aren’t popular 

Manda: Aren’t mainstream.

Philip: Aren’t mainstream. Jainism is like that, it’s not mainstream, it’s like lots of people don’t know about it. And I’m kind of interested in that and articulating it. And likewise with Sophrology. And because I happen to speak French and I was married for 17 years to a French lady, so I’m very familiar with French. So I was looking for some embodied work to do, because I trained in Psychosynthesis. And the one criticism that I had of my training, which was a criticism that we all had as students and as therapists, was that it’s a talk therapy to a great extent.

Manda: It’s head mind 

Philip: It wasn’t sufficiently embodied. And I’d been running retreats for years up on Iona mainly and I wanted to find a modality that was embodied. And you know the way synchronicity works, I just happened to be in France at this wonderful Druid, Orthodox, Celtic Christian monastery in the forest in Brittany, where I spent some time, I was doing a retreat there. And I met a Sophrologist and then another Sophrologist. So I had these two incredibly long conversations with Sophrologists, and I decided to train in it. And I’m so glad I did. And I’ve sort of woven that into what I do now. Yeah.

Manda: And again, could you give us a flavour? Because we were talking last week to Dan McTiernan, who practices and teaches embodied permaculture, which seems to me it’s anything that brings you into your body. There’s a limited number of ways you can do it. It’s a bit like driving horses, it’s basically the same all around the world because a horse is a horse and how would you get it to pull things? And our bodies are our bodies. So could you give us a flavour of some of the movements perhaps, or the breathing or something that people could take away as a concept?

Philip: Yes. Maybe if I described one of the key ideas. Most people are familiar with body scans, where you scan the body like that in awareness, moving it down. In sophrology what you do is the body is divided into five zones, and those zones correlate with the way the nerves are distributed in the human body. And as you do sophrology work, you start off with simple body scans, but focusing on the zones so you get to perhaps work on it in more detail.

Manda: Can you tell us what the five zones are?

Philip: Well, the head, the neck and shoulders and upper arms. So you’ve got the neck and the upper arms and then you’ve got the armpits and the lower arms, which are a different zone, and the chest. And when you look at the spine and the way the nerves are distributed, you understand why.

Manda: Yes. Radial nerve and I guess ulnar nerve.

Philip: Something like that, yeah. And then you’ve got from the diaphragm down to the pelvis, the genital area, the third zone. And then the fourth zone down the legs. The fifth zone is the entire body. So you can come back to the whole thing to sort of integrate it all. And then you do a process and you do it over time. So it’s a process that you can follow. You can do it as a sort of one off, a bit like having a psychoanalysis. You can you can take a sophrology journey where you do this and it takes a number of months. Like Rolfing; you can do a Rolfing where you basically get sort of stretched and manipulated all over as a process and then you’re done, kind of thing. Or you might come back to it a few years later. So in that you, you spend time focusing on the skin, and then on the muscles, then on the skeleton, you know.

Manda: Right. So you’re going from the outside in?

Philip: Yeah. Outside in like that. And you work with tension and release. So if you imagine sort of folding that in. So if you imagine doing it at a very basic level, if you imagine doing a classic body scan, and then when you’ve done the body scan, you’ve got down to the soles of your feet, you become aware of your whole body. And then you breathe in deeply. And as you breathe in, you tense all your muscles up and maybe stretching your hands above your head and squeezing, scrunching every muscle as you hold your breath. And then you breathe out and you release, relax, let go. And you go completely floppy like that. And you do that three times, for instance. That’ll give you a feel for it. And then you’ll tend to drop from a sort of beta brainwave state to an alpha state, you know. So if you can imagine, it’s things like that. I have friends who are teachers who teach mindfulness in schools and they say it’s a huge problem because the kids find it hard to do every day. But you build in some stuff like that, where there’s a tension release and there are various body movements as well, and so on. And then you add in some visualisation and so on.

Philip: But like all these systems, I find it’s almost like you dive into a system like Sophrology, like Jainism, like Druidism, like everything. And you then get to the I don’t know whether it’s the edges, or you get to a part of it where you say, oh, hang on a minute, this is a bit strange. Or I don’t like this or this is too limiting or, you know. And so with Sophrology, the reason why it didn’t cross over the language barrier is it gets very French, is the only way I can describe it, which is perhaps unfair to say that. But it gets very Cartesian. It gets very intellectual. It starts developing its own specialist vocabulary. It gets very highfaluting and in an  unnecessary way, I feel. And it becomes too rigid. And so I think we’re on such an evolutionary path of development, all of us, in exploring these things, that we need to feel empowered to work with these things, but in a way that feels right with us. There’s this book I’ve done called Seek Teachings Everywhere. Somebody said to me, I didn’t know you studied Sikhism. And I said, no, it’s not Sikh teachings everywhere, it’s Seek Teachings Everywhere!

Manda: Yes, I’ll put a link to that also because I’m reading it and it’s glorious.

Philip: Oh, lovely. And I think we can mix and match. You know, I start the book with..

Manda: Recipes for cocktails!

Philip: Cocktails, yes, I think cocktails are okay from a spiritual point of view. Metaphorically.

Manda: Yes, yes, I haven’t I haven’t drunk anything for over half my lifetime. It was kind of interesting looking at all the potential. I had no idea that people drank cider and lager together.

Philip: Oh, God. Yes, yes.

Manda: And put blackcurrant juice in it. Oh God!

Philip: Yes, yes, I should stress that I’m using it as a metaphor, not as an encouragement to drink.

Manda: You are, indeed. And then you start with Druidry and Dharmic traditions and one tree, many branches and it’s really interesting. And you’ve got your own website, but you’ve also got The Art of Living Well, where you do have some introductions to sophrology. So I’m guessing you’ve got the bits that you can merge in with whatever else you’re doing.

Philip: Yes. So what I’ve done is, you know, I love creating online courses, because it’s sort of like writing a book in 3D, in which the audience participates. It’s quite extraordinary because you get the feedback and then you can tweak stuff. I have a sleep clinic because I’ve sort of specialised in working with insomnia.

Manda: Yes, you have a book on that too. You’re very prolific in writing. I’m very impressed 

Philip: And, you know, people will say have you tried this gizmo or that gizmo? And I’ve got a section at the end of that online program of gizmos to help you sleep, so I can go back in and add it in. So it’s sort of organic and living, you know. 

Manda: Right. Yeah. As opposed to a book which is published and then unless you persuade the publisher to do another edition, that’s it, it’s just actually set in almost stone for forever. Okay, we’re nearly at the end, but I’m thinking I don’t often get the chance to talk to someone who’s immersed in multiple spiritual traditions and bringing them alive in real time in yourself. And it seems to me, people listening to this podcast will know by now, that I’m following the concept from Francis Weller, and then updated a bit by Bill Plotkin. That our culture, the Western hegemonic, destructive culture that created the superorganism of predatory capitalism, got locked in some kind of trauma probably ten, 12,000 years ago, separated off from the web of life. Created a narrative that says we are separate; scarcity, separation, powerlessness; that we need these pillars of hierarchies where we elevate the dark triad and think this is a clever thing to do. And every other culture, the connected initiation cultures around the world, know themselves to be an integral part of the web of life. And we have forgotten that. And that Druidry, and I’m guessing Jainism and the other things that you follow, like shamanic practice, like any genuine spiritual path, will reconnect us to the web of life. I think a lot of the militaristic religions are designed to keep us separate, so I’m not including those in genuine spiritual paths. Genuine spiritual paths for me bring us into full connection with the web of life. And some of the non-dual concepts seem to me also to be separate, in that they get into a space of non-duality that is in denial of…

Philip: Strangely detached, yes.

Manda: It is very detached. I Find it quite disturbing. And I apologise to listeners who think it’s the epitome of wonder, because that’s your choice and that’s wonderful. But I want to be in the mud, in the trees, in the stones, in the rivers, listening to the living web that is part of who we are. So with that as my basis and my first question is, would that be a basis for you too? And my next question then is it feels to me and I said this already in the conversation, that helping people to reach that level of connection, helping people to grow up out of what Bill Plotkin calls our perpetual adolescence. He thinks that for us, this culture is just locked in early adolescence. I would say some aspects of it are locked in toddler and are throwing now nuclear missiles in the way that kids throw toys out of the pram. And this is not useful. And still, the basis of all life is the energy that we are. Oscar Quesada said consciousness creates matter, language creates reality, ritual creates relationship. We are consciousness creates matter and if we are to move away from the fear and tribalism and competing outrage and all of the things that our current culture has produced, we need to find ways of helping people to understand first that this is useful, and second, how to do it, at scale, quite quickly. So I’m wondering first of all, how does that land for you? And then how would you recommend that we help people to do this at scale?

Philip: Well, the way it lands, what you’ve articulated probably in about five minutes, is quite extraordinary. And I want the transcript of that or the clip. When this goes out, I shall clip that articulation over those last few minutes, because that’s absolutely stunning. And it’s absolutely what I believe and what I feel. And so I feel completely aligned with what you’ve just said.

Manda: Thank you.

Philip: As regards your second question, how do we do it? I think probably the term ‘at scale’ throws us off. Because that keys in, for me anyway, it throws me off, I should say. Because it keys in to almost my fear or desperation or desire to be of help and to make an impact. It evokes, gosh, how can we do this quickly to reach enough people?

Manda: Okay, this is too big and too scary, and then we can’t do it.

Philip: Yeah, yeah. And then we can’t do it. You know that lovely phrase of Bayo Akomolafe who says, you know, the times are urgent…

Manda: Times are urgent. We must slow down.

Philip: We must slow down. And that so works for me because I was gardening outside a few years back, musing on my fairly perpetual kind of drive to do stuff, and thinking why are you so driven? And this sort of better, deeper voice came inside and said what you should take as a mantra is you’ve got all the time in the world. Because of course, my drive was coming from, you know, hurry up, we’ve got to do this at scale fast. So for me at any rate, I need to sort of reverse that and say, we’ve got all the time. Somehow things are working out more perfectly than we plan it. From my rational self, when I look at the world, watch the news; not when I look out of the window, because of course, when I look out of the window, I see trees and sunshine and then I walk into town and it’s all very fine.

Philip: But when I watch the news, it seems so clearly a mess. And despite that, I have hope. And I feel that things are working themselves out. That the story is so grand. The evolutionary wave, evolution is so powerful that the image I have is of an enormous wave, which also has sort of planks in it, you know, sort of debris. And I don’t want that to sound callous, as if human tragedy and suffering is just planks floating in a wave. Of course it’s not. But in some way I do have hope. And so I think all we can do, each of us, is be true to ourselves. If we can find through whatever spiritual work we’re doing, whatever kind of psychological work we’re doing, insight and so on, somehow find what it is that we are called to do, and then to do it. It’s almost like that’s all we can do. Does that make sense?

Manda: Totally does. Yes, yes. Connect to the web of life, ask what do you want of me and respond to the answers in real time, is all of the law basically, as far as I can tell.

Philip: And of course, a lot of people will say, well, I don’t know what to do. I feel lost or…

Manda: That’s the hard bit.

Philip: Yeah, that’s the hard bit. And so that’s I guess, perhaps, dare one say it, I don’t know, where people like you and I come in? People who are presenting this material. Because people will listen to an idea. You see, one of the reasons why I like articulating ideas and exploring ideas in conversation and so on, and writing, is because one idea can absolutely fire you and help you to get on track. It’s not that we need Hollywood prescriptions of massive changes. Sometimes one thing can just get us on track and help us, you know? And then from that, everything flows. Because if we believe that consciousness is causal to physical reality, then something very strange is going on with all the awful stuff in the world at a level of consciousness. I mean, that raises this interesting question of what’s happening in the world of consciousness? But it also offers the invitation for us to work in consciousness too, you know?

Manda: Yeah. Yes. If everything arises from consciousness first, then it seems to me how we curate our consciousness, how we are, and this is the basis of every spiritual practice, also, the genuine ones; is that being and being connected. And actually the L word of we need to be in love. And that’s really hard, partly because love has lots of different meanings and, I don’t know, I love gooseberry pie is a different kind of love. But it’s finding that. I find raw, wild compassion to be a more useful set of language for me.

Philip: That’s nice.

Manda: Because it means more than love does. And being that, feels to me at the moment, finding that inside is really important. And then being that in concert with the web of life, which has a slightly different feeling to it, seems to really matter. But yes. Over to you.

Philip: Well that raises you see, the interesting question at the heart of the mystical experience, is that experience of love, as you say. Oneness and love. But as well as beings, we also do. And will is at the heart of our capacities, too. That’s why Psychosynthesis interests me so much, because it places a lot of emphasis on this. And so the question arises, you know, we have these mystical experiences and insights and feelings and so on. But then the question comes, well, what are you going to do? And we have this capacity to will in the world as well. And that tends to get underemphasised in spiritual training, or it can be. All the stress is on the mystical experience. That’s why magic interests me as a concept. So I have this understanding that there’s the mystical impulse which is to achieve union, but there’s also the magical impulse, which is to actually act in the world, to do in the world.

Manda: What you are calling Will might be what I call Intent. Exactly that, that we hone our intent and we set it out. Oh, I think we just started a new podcast, but let’s really go down this line because this I find really interesting, because there’s the whole manifesting movement. Which leaves me quite cross and I have to try and remember compassion, compassion, compassion, because otherwise I want to throw things at the wall. I read something, I think Jamie Weil and one of his very interesting blogs that he sends out. He and his wife live in Colorado, and he’d been to a men’s group, which he found quite challenging, and that’s a separate conversation. His wife had been to the local we’re all ladies together, and we’re going to set our intent. And the woman who was leading it was setting hers at manifesting a private jet now, because she really deserved that. Yeah. Thank you. Okay, so people not watching the video, Philip just put his hands over his eyes. I was incandescent. So if you can manifest a private jet,  you could also be working on, I don’t know, small things like world peace?

Philip: A new hospital wing. Yes.

Manda: Or ending predatory capitalism, changing the superorganism. And no, you want a private jet. And yet it’s very likely that this woman has by now got a private jet. Because actually, if you do learn how to hone your intent and I think for me, a lot of the work then is addressing all the other parts of ourselves that are going, no, you don’t deserve that. No, you can’t have it. No, that’s too big of an ask. And all the bits that compete to tell us why that’s not possible. If we learn how to bring all of ourselves into alignment, I have an image of getting all the chariot horses at least in the same field, if not harnessed up to the same chariot heading in the same direction. Then human intent is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. But what we’re doing with it is manifesting private jets. And imagine if it wasn’t the purview of Western industrial capitalists who want more stuff. So I’ll stop ranting because clearly I’m very triggered. Over to you of what is will for you and honing it? Because this is the practice of what we call magic. For me, I think it was Israel Regardie who said, you’ll get the quote right, but it basically is the application of intent is what magic is. Talk to me about this. Open it up for me.

Philip: Okay. Well, so, like all these things, the way we talk about something as if it’s one thing… You were talking about love. And I once had a book title, a book I wanted to write, was called 42 words for love, because I read somewhere that in Sanskrit there are 42 words.

Manda: Please write it.

Philip: I’ll try. And likewise with will, you see? So Assagioli, who’s the psychiatrist who developed Psychosynthesis, which I trained in, is really good on will. And he talks about what you have to do is look at it and analyse it. And essentially you have good will, but then you have bad will. I mean, people talk about bad actors, bad will.

Manda: Bad faith, bad will, yes.

Philip: Good will, bad will, you know, skilful will which can be used skilfully for bad intent or good intent. Then you have transpersonal will. You know, may thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So, in other words, when I’m looking at intent, what is coming from my ego, if you like, from my own personal desires? And it’s not like there’s something wrong with that necessarily, but you need to really question that. I mean, that thing about the private Jets, there’s a whole little sort of meme of televangelists who ask for donations for private jets. And if you ever want to shriek a bit more, just Google that and watch the little YouTube clips of televangelists asking people for millions of dollars for their own private jets. It’s really quite peculiar.

Manda: Also slightly antithetical to what I understand to be the foundations of Christianity.

Philip: It’s very, very peculiar. And it makes compulsive viewing, I have to say.

Manda: I think it would be very bad for my blood pressure!

Philip: So it’s a bit like the experience of love, opening to the reality of love as a mystical experience, when it’s not tempered with understanding, leads to the kind of abuses you get. You wonder how come people who are so ‘spiritual’, and yet they are… This is what happened in the 60s as well. Everybody turned on to love, took acid and smoked pot and was loving everybody.

Manda: And it wasn’t always consensual. And even if it was, power dynamics were influencing what was happening.

Philip: Exactly. So it’s not as simple as discovering that at the heart of your being are these two capacities to love and to will, you know. But if you can develop the capacity to love and the capacity to will in a way where you’re also integrating the shadow, you’re also coming to know yourself, so that the sources of energy that you’re plugging into, of love and will, aren’t then getting distorted by your subpersonalities that are evolved from trauma; that have desires or behaviours that are problematic, that they’re not being even strengthened by that. So it’s a whole work, if you like, from my understanding of it, is that we need to work psychotherapeutically with getting to know ourselves and working with who we are, you know, the classic ‘know thyself’ dictum. And gaining that level of self-knowledge. And for me, psychosynthesis happens to be a great way. I mean, there are all sorts of ways of doing it of course, now. Because otherwise you get the spiritual bypassing problem, where you avoid all that and you try and plug into the mains, as it were, and then you get the problems.

Manda: Okay. So we could practice magic, we could learn to hone our intent, but we have to do the inner work in concert with that, so that we’re using our intent in service to life, basically, not in service to whatever wounded part of ourselves needs a private jet to feel better. Because we have watched the richest man on the planet send rockets into space, and it still didn’t heal the wounded parts inside. And if anybody needed to understand that more boxes from Amazon is not the answer. The fact that the guy who currently seems to be running the US is on once a fortnight ketamine to combat depression, should be quite clear that the predatory capital model is broken. If you can have more money than any other human being in the world, by several orders of magnitude, and you’re still needing ketamine for your depression, means money is not the answer.

Philip: Yeah. And what’s going to be interesting in the coming years with what’s happened in the States, is we could see the way the future is unfolding as somebody got hold of the script. You know, ever since 9.11 really, somebody seems to have got hold of the script for humanity and is writing a really bad B-movie 

Manda: Yes, I know. I keep looking at this going if I sent that to a publisher as a possible book, they would’ve said, no, don’t be ridiculous. That can’t happen. Oh, look it did! And the really scary thing now if I’m trying to write thrutopian novels, is anything that I write now is going to be obsolete by publication. It’ll take me a year to write, it’ll take a year to edit. Earliest it could possibly come out is going to be mid 2026, probably 2027. And it’s going to be obsolete. And it will have been supplanted by things that I could not possibly imagine. It’s quite terrifying.

Philip: Yes. You know that phrase ‘you couldn’t make this stuff up’.

Manda: You couldn’t make it up.

Philip: Is what Stephanie and I sitting in front of the television, we say that every evening, you know. Yet there’s a lovely haiku by the poet Basho and the only line I can remember is ‘and yet…’

Manda: Oh, fantastic. Yes. Time is not linear. I think we have to remember this: time is not what we think it is.

Philip: Time is not what we think it is. And if you believe that at the heart of reality is love, and that at the heart of reality is meaning, as it were, by definition. Somehow, despite all evidence to the contrary, we have this conviction; if you’ve had mystical experience, you have this profound conviction that life is meaningful, that life at its heart, is good, and is coming from a source of love. Somehow in a way that we absolutely can’t understand with our rational minds, this is all part of this plan. So the madness that we’re witnessing. And I suppose it’s easy to criticise that approach and say, well, that just will provoke a kind of fatalism.

Manda: It’s I think it could do.

Philip: Everything’s cool, man, you know, somebody with a joint in their mouth saying it’s all OK. It’s profoundly not okay, you know….and yet…

Manda: And yet we can still find the practice of being and leaning into the service of life. Because we can’t do anything else, I think.

Philip: You can’t do anything else. And a friend said to me, when I was articulating this idea, he said but of course, that’s a delusion on your part.

Manda: A belief that is not provable. And another word for that is a delusion. Yes.

Philip: For me it’s an experience. And it may be because I’m deluded. It may be because I’m sort of temperamentally optimistic and even natured. That’s my temperament. I’m just lucky to be a sort of a happy, optimistic person most of the time; that’s kind of where I’m at. And it may be coming from a delusion, but deep down, I don’t believe that. I believe I’ve contacted…Which is, I guess, what everybody does who has firm convictions.

Manda: Yeah. This is the nature of belief, is that it’s solid. But it gives us a route for action. And if anything that we believe to be true, if we adhere to the concept that consciousness creates matter, for instance, which is a belief system, but that one’s quite easy to test. I think this is the thing; that you and I exist in a world where we have seen that honing one’s will or one’s intent can have actual real world outcomes, and that changing who we are energetically shifts the world around us. And it does it in ways that would appear to be miraculous, actually do appear to be miraculous. Things happen that are not explainable within what we consider to be ordinary reality. And we know that this happens. We have observed this. And therefore, I think the belief systems that we build may not be accurate, but they are actionable. They give us an action route to take. And that’s really vital in the breakdown that we’re seeing. The system needed to die. The system is currently being hit by very large sledgehammers, by people who would not necessarily take it the way that we feel to be leaning into life; but they are breaking apart a system that needed to go.

Philip: Maybe, yes. So maybe from the screenplay point of view, maybe it has to be this way; maybe they have to be smashing, messing stuff up more quickly than would otherwise occur, you know? And I think you’ve homed in on a very interesting point. I talked about this belief system I have inside, this belief I have inside based on experience. But then, exactly as you said, the way my life has unfolded has confirmed it. In other words, you know, we could have a whole conversation about all the extraordinary, miraculous kind of synchronicities.

Manda: Maybe we should. That would be a good conversation for people to hear. But not now. But yes, it has enabled you to get to…

Philip: To where I am. So, you know, all the things that have happened and all the things I’ve achieved have been as a result of working from that place in consciousness, and things have unfolded accordingly. So that confirms the belief. Well, I must be onto something, because you know.

Manda: Yes. We could take this so far. We need to stop shortly. When I get to that, and this is actually where I come from, so I’m completely in alignment with that. But I’m also aware that when I have conversations with people who hold almost antithetical views to me, they have a similar experience. And their belief system is as rooted. Fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalists of any stripe, they have very similar narratives.

Philip: That life conforms to whatever they believe.

Manda: And I wonder where that takes us. That their belief is so powerful that around them reality..

Philip: Constellates.

Manda: Yes. Which is what we’ve just been talking about. That’s how you get the private jet. Yeah.

Philip: And that fascinating work they’ve done on expectancy theory, where the best predictor of when you’re going to die is when you think you’re going to die. So that people who generally have a mindset that they’re going to live into their 90s are likely to live longer than people who constantly tell themselves they’re going to die in their 50s.

Manda: Yes, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I saw my own gravestone in a vision when I was 26, and if I’m still alive the day after that, which is roughly ten years from now, I’ll be extremely surprised. Quite happy, but extremely surprised. So yes, exactly.

Philip: And likewise, even with exercise, somebody has written a whole book about it. I mean, it’s so fascinating that what we believe tends to manifest in that way. So that it’s not so much the amount of exercise you take, but it’s what you think about the exercise, whether you think you have enough of it or not. So if you think you’re not getting enough exercise, although you’re pounding away on a bicycle.

Manda: Right. Your body just goes, oh, well, that was pointless. I do remember reading a study where somebody told domestic servants in the US, so people who basically spend their lives hoovering and sweeping, that this was actually great aerobic exercise and that they were doing the equivalent of a couple of hours in the gym just by doing their daily work. And all of their stats improved; the blood pressure went down, their heart rate went down, and they lost weight, and all they’d done was tell them that that’s what they were doing. Isn’t it interesting? Yes, this would be a definitely a whole other podcast. Let’s have that podcast sometime on the nature of magic in the world. That would be fascinating. But in the meantime, is there anything you wanted to say today to listeners as we head into the Solstice, the dark time of the year, when we sit down and we reflect and we bring ourselves in and we’re quiet. Anything from a Druidic point of view or any point of view?

Philip: Well, I don’t know exactly when the podcast is coming out, but it’s coming out around the solstice time. So we’ve been through this period in the northern hemisphere of going from Samhain to the winter solstice. And Samhain is the time of death, of the complete shedding and letting go and all the rest of it. And the winter solstice is the time of in the Druid framework and pagan framework is the time of conception. You can see it as a time of birth. It’s interesting; both death and birth are not discrete moments. So really as we enter the dark half of the year, letting go with the harvest, the two harvests of Lughnasadh and then the autumn equinox, and then the final letting go at Samhain. And then birth; you have the winter solstice, and then you have imbolc, and then you’re sort of birthing into spring at the spring equinox and so on. But there’s a way in which you look at this wedge of time that we’ve just been through, Samhain to the winter solstice, and you think, well, what does that represent? Well, if Samhain is death and the winter solstice is conception or birth, then this is the inter death state. So we’ve been in this zone or this time of where we’ve been discarnate and we’re about to incarnate again into the new year. So that’s a kind of nice way of thinking. And I read somewhere recently that The number of days is apparently 49 days between Samhain and and the winter solstice, which is the time in the Tibetan Book of the dead of the Bardo, of travelling in the in between life states. So that’s rather nice as well.

Manda: So we’re between the worlds.

Philip: And as people are listening to this podcast, you’re coming down into a new incarnation, beginning at the solstice.

Manda: Yeah, the seed just being formed.

Philip: Just being formed and dropping into the womb. And then Imbolc, the time of birth, you know, Candlemass this lovely time in February when the first flowers come up. So it’s a magical, magical time to really treasure and to be open in one’s heart and soul, really 

Manda: Fantastic. That’s a glorious place to end. Philip, thank you so much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I have loved every moment of this, it’s been really enlightening. Thank you.

Philip: Thank you Manda I’ve enjoyed it hugely as well. Thank you.

Manda: And that’s it for this week. I hope you are as moved and transformed and uplifted as I am. It was such a pleasure to talk to Philip. To experience the depth and breadth of his intellect and the greatness of his heart. It shines through. If you only ever watch one video, I would watch Philip because there’s something truly alive and magic about the spark in his eye. About the way he’s able to think across and through and into really complex concepts and bring them out, with life and humour and a sense of personal humility that is really very inspiring. Or at least I found it so, and I hope you do too. And as we head into what is, in the Northern hemisphere where I live, the winter solstice, the time of reflection, I think it’s really worth considering what we do with our intent. What we choose to be. Having choice, having agency, seems to me to be one of the key concepts of what makes us human. It is entirely likely, I think, that a lot of other species are self-conscious and have a sense of agency, and we simply deny that to them. Every single behavioural study that looks into any species, pretty much without question, discovers that they have a greater sense of emotional breadth and depth, and a capacity for memory, and a capacity to take agency and to need to take agency, than we ever knew before.

Manda: But we are human, and we know that being, belonging, and a sense of meaning are integral to feeling whole. And if we’ve got that sense of meaning, then understanding how we hone what Philip calls our will, and what I would call intent, and the two are pretty much indistinguishable; is part of what we’re here for. And it’s not just setting intent for something that we want that we think will make life easier. It’s more a setting intent to be in heart mind through the day. Those of you working through Accidental Gods will know this one by now, and it may even feel as if you’ve heard it many, many times before. But there are many people listening to the podcast who are not a part of the Accidental Gods membership. You are very welcome to join us; please feel free to do so. And if you do what you will hear time and time again until it very likely feels as if your ears are being cleaned out with the idea, is that we need to settle into our heart minds. Our head minds need to end up being in service to our heart minds rather than the other way round, So that what we do, how we move, who we are through the days comes from that.

Manda: And it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice to get there. Trust me, I know this is a moment by moment practice and it’s not easy. But I think it is essential now. Philip very wisely stepped back from the idea of how do we do this at scale and in time. And he is right that racing for those is likely to crush us. Nonetheless, I think each of us, if we were able to embrace that sense of now is the time and we are the people. And that may be a cliche, but that does not stop it being true. Then we could begin to bring to every day the sense of magic and awe and wonder that allows us to step out of the whole model of the superorganism that is barrelling towards the edge of a cliff. And yes, time is not linear, but there are aspects of it that can behave in quite a linear fashion. So I think putting anything off till tomorrow is probably not a very clever thing to do. So let’s go for it people, eh?

Manda: 2024 may end up being the year we look back at and think it was the last time there was anything approaching what we used to think of as sanity. So let’s move forward and build a new version of something that works much better than what we used to think of as sanity. So there we go. We will be back. I’m talking to Chris Bache; I am so looking forward to that. We have a bunch of really magical people all in a row. So wherever you are in the world, I hope you are warm and safe.

Manda: And while we are here, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot of the podcast. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for this week’s production. To Lou Mayor, whenever she gets back from holiday, for the video. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for wrestling with the tech and for all the conversations that keep us going. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand about the nature of magic and how we can use it in the world, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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