Alan Moore on Reclaiming Our Imagination from the Authoritarian Overlords

You're on Team Human, conscious intervention in the machine. A spell cast with words creating new possibilities for thought and action. We can transcend human limits by unleashing the powers of our collective imagination. I'm Douglas Rushkopf and I'm on Team Human. Playing for Team Human today, writer, magician, shaman, and creator of alternate realities, Alan Moore. It's never too late to write a new story. I'm Douglas Rushkopf and we're all on Team Human. I'm delighted to introduce you to our newest supporting sponsor, a team human enabler in more ways than one, Groucho. Groucho is a platform that answers the most common question we get at Team Human. How do I find the others? Well, this is it. Go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman, share your interests and aspirations, and Groucho's curators will hand assemble a real dinner club for you. You meet twice a month in order to establish some lasting friendships. Groucho takes care of all the logistics. The thing I like is that it was built by artists not tech pros. People who wanted to recreate what they got from artist residencies curated intentionally and with time and space to connect. That's how the founders met their own best collaborators, friends, and even life partners. So check out mygroucho.club/teamhuman for 50% off the first month. That's mygroucho.club/teamhuman. Find the others. Alan Moore writes stories that transport readers into other realities. Realities which then go on to influence or even replace apparently fixed worlds in which we live. Like James Joyce or William Butler Gates, he writes prose that transcends our three-dimensional logic and generates place gates for the readers' souls. From transcendent comics like From Hell, the of extraordinary gentleman and providence to novels including Jerusalem and the Long London series beginning with The Great When. Moore has been blending history, magic, and the occult into extended yarns that have settled into the cultural consciousness like a shared imaginary, a set of reality tunnels. So, richly rendered that visiting them feels like traveling both to another dimension and to a forgotten but all too familiar dream. It's my honor to introduce you to a psycho-historical wizard on the front lines of the battle for the future of team human, Alan Moore. We're going to be, yeah, Douglas. Most of the talk to you. Oh, it's so good to talk to you. I was just remembering when Terrence McKenna saw your, what was it? 1984 Swank thing. And it became with the Spud, remember the Spud that fell off him. He lit up like nothing else. But that's another story. I'm just honored to be with you. I've been following your work for 40, 50 years. As a writer and a magician and a cartographer of what you'd call "ideaspace," you understand that our stories don't just describe our world, but they cast it. So, what I'm hoping you can do is help us understand this practice and maybe more importantly than how we might transcend our current logic and reclaim the imaginative sovereignty that's going to be required for us to write a better next chapter of the human experiment than the doom that our would-be overlords have in mind for us. Well, at first say that writers and creators should probably think more of themselves and think more of the craft that they are practicing. I believe that if you are involved in any act of creation, any purposeful engagement with the phenomena or possibilities of consciousness, then that to me is magic. If you're in simple, I believe that what we have to do, or at least what I feel compelled to do, is to reinstate the artist, the magician, the musician, the writer. We have to reinstate these at the centre of culture, not at the top of it because I don't believe in hierarchical arrangements. I don't like vertical arrangements. I'm much more comfortable with horizontal arrangements. So, we need to position magic, I believe, at the centre of culture and we need to connect magic with art. I think that both parties would benefit from practically the same thing anyway, but I think it would be better if artists thought of themselves as magicians and if magicians thought of themselves as artists so that they actually had some product from their magic excursions that other people could see as well. Once we've done that, we could connect up art and science. Again, there's an awful lot of overlap already and then the most difficult but impact of a scientific perhaps impossible might be more the word, but we connect up science with politics so that we could have evidence-based government. But that is the most important and perhaps the most unlawedly stage in the process. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't keep working towards it. Right, it's almost a mandala you're describing of articulation. That at the very centre is sort of the magical thought, then the art and artifact, then the more explicit explanation for that in science and finally the articulations through politics and live action. Yeah, that is something that I think could work and it's also that I think I could contribute to. I mean since I've been a teenager, I wanted, I remember reading Timothy Lairies, the politics of Exit, and obviously perhaps it's a book that hasn't aged particularly well. I don't know, but at the time, I remember him saying that the people shaping human consciousness were the underground cartoonists, the rock musicians and the drug dealers. At the time, I thought I'd probably haven't got what it takes to be an underground cartoonist or a rock star at this point. But I was thinking I am not, I don't think that I am best used in physical conflict because, especially not at the moment, but I've always thought that I could probably do more by using my art to modify human consciousness because I think that that is basically what art is for. It's our way of modifying our own thought processes and our own perceptions, but I thought that I could possibly, if I pursue that vigorously enough, I could maybe have some kind of effect by doing that. So it seems to me a way that I can actually act upon the world in a useful way. And if I think if more people felt empowered by their abilities, if they felt less like the entertainment and more like artists, I mean, I know that I've said this before, but I really are a film nostalgic for the bardic tradition, not that I was ever experienced it in any way, but in the bardic tradition, yeah, if there was a wizard or a witch, some sort of sorcerer, and you got on the wrong side of them, maybe your hands would lie funny or something like that, but not that big a deal basically, but if you offended a bard and that bard plays a satire upon you, then that would not only destroy you in the eyes of everyone else, perhaps your family, in your own eyes, but if it was a good enough satire, that would destroy you in the eyes of people who hadn't even been born yet, people in generations time. Artists were scary. back then. They were respected and that's the kind of world that I'd like to get back to, where artists have the respect that I think that they deserve if they are committed artists. Because artists and creative people are working at the rock face of meaning, of being, and obviously, looking at some of us, it tightens it out of us a bit. We don't necessarily end up in the best psychological shape, you know, but again, that's no reason why we shouldn't do it and we shouldn't commit ourselves to it. Right. I mean, it's often I found myself over the years feeling guilty for getting to be a writer, artist, and doing books and comics when, you know, my friends around the front lines doing the social justice work and how could I waste time and energy on this. But I think what I get from what you're saying is that if the artist is true to their core soul integrity, then they are doing a truly great service to the collective. They're speaking, speaking, writing, you know, their truth to whatever the power structures are, you know, in a way that's potentially destabilizing to whatever the oppressive forces are and liberating to what is. Yeah. Well, I mean, of course, it's always difficult to know how much what you're saying is actually penetrating or getting through to your public. But sometimes, you know, there are occasions when I can, I can think, yes, that perhaps was me that influenced that. I know I'm very often, but so it's a nice feeling when I do. Yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. And you're not doing whatever they call it, you know, the spiritual bypassing or retreat or it's not, art is not a luxury. Art is when we put it at the center of the mandala without art, I would argue we don't even exist without the magic. There's not going to be anything that we are in my worldview. We are generating this thing that we're living in. So you get rid of us. You're going to have nothing. Well, I mean, it's inarguable that the universe that each of us perceives is our universe. We are the God at the center of it. And so we should be. This is anarchism. It's the belief that everybody should be responsible for their own universe. Admittedly, that is not something that could happen overnight, not after thousands of years of being weaned onto authoritarianism. But I believe that that was our original growth site. I believe we had a couple of hundred thousand years of it wasn't called anarchy then because we hadn't got anyarchy to to get rid of. But during the hunter-gatherer period, we got bought, and arguably that was the happiest period of youth and existence. Before we came up with agriculture which involved coming up with settlement and property and then leaders who did more than just, I mean, originally I think that leaders were, it was just a job like Plummer or Charmin or Hunter. It was just, that was your job. You didn't get a bigger crack of the whip than anybody else. You were sort of everybody did their jobs and everybody shared until at some point when communities got too big and the leaders could say, "Look, you ought to be giving me at least a little bit for doing all this work." Then eventually it got to a point where they could hire goons and at that point they were increasingly difficult to get rid of. Here we are. They could build legal and economic systems that reinforced this pyramidal understanding of the world. When you have central currency, it's very different. It's a very different model. I've been researching a lot lately about the difference between these pyramidal civilizations that are optimized for extraction and savings and acquisition and the horizontal civilizations that you're talking about. Because people couldn't save money, when they had enough, they optimized for leisure, optimized for their time and ended up with cultures instead. I was talking to my family, my close family, where I was neurodiverses health. I was talking to, I think it was probably my grandson and also my daughter. We were talking about how apparently neurotypical people, either the vertical social arrangements, hierarchical social arrangements, they feel more comfortable if there are people above them and people below them and they know where they are. Neurodiverse people tend to find the more horizontal social arrangements. I was thinking about this and I came up with I think is a brilliant solution that we should medicate the neurotypical. Because it's them causing all the problems. Just leave us to get obsessed about tiny details and things like that and we'll be perfectly happy. That's great. It could also be that neurotypical people respond to hierarchical education in a concilatory way. They adapt to it, whereas we, diverse people are less likely to do that. But I want to get to the, for a moment, if we can't, to the craft of writing. I know you've spoken a lot about it, so I don't want to recreate all of that content. But I'm particularly interested in writing as spellcasting and one way in which I've experienced it in your writing is the way you create place, the way you create spaces. So everything from Northampton and Jerusalem, whichever one talks about. But for me, even the preface to Harvey P. Carr's Cleveland did the same thing, this understanding of place as these, that's why I talked about it in the intro. This way of I'm somewhere completely new, but it feels like that dream that I forgot that I had, that it, when you write about space as opposed to many others, you know, great writer, William James or Henry James, and people write about space in a great way. But I feel like I'm, or, or, or any of the great novelists, I'm learning about a new place. When you write about place, I feel like I'm remembering a past life or something like this, like it feels like home in a weird way. So I'm wondering, are, are you exploring these spaces as you places, as you write about them, or are you creating that? Do you know what I mean? When you, when you walk the streets of Long London, do you feel like you're a cartographer discovering a preexisting dimension, or are you an architect laying the bricks as you go? It's, I'm glad you asked this question, Drs. Because it's something that has been online, increasingly. And I'd say that the answer is to some degree, both. I have to say that I am creating it because the implications of the exploring it are a bit strange and a bit far reaching. So however, I don't want to deny that, because one of the feelings that I've been getting, particularly on these Long London books, is that I am undilibrately trying to augment history. I'm trying to take these marginal events and characters and to write a more fantastical, but I believe a more credible and persuasive story to fill in the spaces between these sections and rumours and facts. And I have been while writing it, I've been thinking, coming up with all of these, this pantheon of Arcana, these joint symbolic beings that only exist to symbolise and just signify it. Coming up with all of them, I'm thinking this, this sounds great. I'm really impressed, despite myself, with these figures that are emerging. Is it possible that I am in some way writing about something that's true? And I think I am that I don't think I'm writing about something that happened. I'm thinking, I'm I'm writing about something that is true even if it didn't happen, which I believe is something that Chief Brueh says in the introduction to "Once or Ever the Cook is Ness". This is true even if it didn't happen. And I've been thinking, so where is Long London? Does that exist? And I thought, well, yes, of course it does. It's a it's a platonic ideal of London that is in everybody's minds. It's the it's the imaginable space of London, the physical London is founded on. We are all founded upon a landscape of insubstantial ideas. That's what the material world is built from. We are living inside our unpacked imaginations. So yes, of course, in a sense, Long London, this symbolist territory, that that's real. So what about all of these mysterious dual ways then for which people can enter it? Are they real? Yet in a way, but they're in your head or at least they're in my head and hopefully in the reader's head once they've absorbed that language, that prose, the inner way if I am perhaps the answer is that in terms of I am doing some construction work on Long London, but it's in the reader's head, perhaps rather than mine, what I am doing as a writer is exploring this place that I have found in my head. And I am trying to to map it in sufficient detail so that the reader can then go through an entrance in a back alley or something like that in their own mind. It's a lot like this is a writer that I don't particularly care for, but CS Lewis. I remember when when he was asked why did you write a story about a fantastical world that is accessible through the back of a wardrobe and he said because it's true. And I know exactly what he was talking about. And so yes, in a sense, these art, fictions, all of these things, they are dual ways, they give you access to a world, it just depends on how rich a world that is, how informative a world that is, how useful a world that is. But I mean, like the thing of space and place, I mean, I've come to think that there's perhaps not much more than place in fiction because everybody, all of the characters, all of us, we grow out of the places that we inhabit. And at the same time, those places, they grow out of us. We are influenced by the places, the streets we walk all our lives. And yes, we will go on to influence those streets, but it's like the important thing to me is to, I just believe everything. It's like I was saying about artists earlier on. That sort of, I believe that they should see themselves as musicians. I want to reenchant everything. I believe that everything has become massively disenchanted. I believe that when we walk down our streets, we see ourselves as soliters walking through a bleak and meaningless industrial landscape. If we could see those places with all of the richness and all of the color of their history and meaning, then it would be an Arabian night's marvel. You know, and we would be wonderful creatures for inhabiting it. Mm-hmm. I mean, you said somewhere in one of the interviews I looked at that, that any point on the map, you said, any point on the map can be the center of the universe if you observe it with enough intensity. And I'm like, fuck, right? So in a digital capitalist age that we're living in, that I'm critiquing, that despatializes and flattens everything where we're basically nowhere and everywhere at the same time, then the act of writing one of these specific but transcendently enchanted locations. It's a way of re-anchoring the human soul in a space of agency where we're creating the reality as we're walking through it. Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, what I have to say, I should put my hand up here and say that I've always been interested in place, but I didn't achieve anything but the focus that I have now until I discovered the writings of Ian Sinclair. Ian Sinclair in Blood Heat and the Suicide Bridge and all of his work since then. He gave me a new way of looking at place, which I've tried to pick up that ball and run with it. And we're very different writers, but that's that set. I don't think that I almost had a disagreement with Ian, where I was saying that I believed that any spot on the planet could yield an immense richness of stories and marvels. And he said he wasn't so sure that he'd just been investigating some nearby towns, or he wasn't very impressed by catering. And he was saying that, oh, Peter Burrow, he was saying that he didn't really feel until he got to Northampton, that sort of he couldn't fail the energy. So I don't know. I would be very reluctant to disagree with Ian because he knows more about this stuff than I do. It might be that some places have more energy than others. I don't know. It's what the people bring to it though. The thing that I keep getting stuck within a lot of people are concerned that they're not acting on a global scale, that they're politics isn't scale is the word of the industrial age, as it's scaled as it's scale. And what I've been arguing on team human is what you do locally, the old woman that you sit with on the bench at the bus, the children that you tutor, the what you do in your town, in your exact from you outward, is the work. You know, that 99% of politics really can happen in the way we engage with each other. And the 1% can worry about, you know, this Iran war or whatever it is that they're doing up there. I agree completely. I mean, when in around about 2009, 2010, I took a break from rotting Jerusalem because I've just done the Lucha Joyce chapter and it had broken more brain. So I thought, what I need to do is to do something else for about 18 months, two years. So I did our beautiful but doomed underground magazine dog gym logic. And I remember in the first issue, we said, we are not local, we are not global, we are global. Because I believe that the local is the global, that we're all where we are. That's what you know, it's and I agree completely that sort of be nicer to the people around you and be warmer to them, be kinder, be more protective of them because at the end of the day, they're all you've got and you're all there got. So what we need to do in particularly in this current house guide is that we should form strength and community bonds in any way that we can. We should love each other. And we should fight for anything that tries to encroach against that. We should fight against it. So yeah, basically love and fight. This is what I think we could all. What tech takeeth away, it can also giveeth back. Think about it. We've handed our social lives over to platforms designed to keep us clicking, not connecting, turned human relationships into follower counts and reaction metrics. Our new favorite sponsor, Groucho, is a corrective. Founded by artists who want to flip the script, instead of atomizing us like a social network, they connect people in real life. Human curators place you in a local club with people who compliment your interests and your journey. Share evenings out with your club twice a month until real connections take hold. Then the people at Groucho place you into a new hand assembled club for the social fabric to grow. Groucho wasn't built by tech bros, but artists who wanted to recreate the serendipity of their own art residencies, where they found lifelong collaborators, friends, even life partners. So come on team human, let's find the others. Go to mygroucho.club/teamhuman for 50% off the first month. Do with it. Do you think we also need, I mean, if spelling is spelling, right? To spell, to is to cast a spell. Then if we're currently living in a, let's call it a bad spell of the extractive systems and power hierarchies, might the remedy be more complex and more human vocabulary for us to use? We should always be careful with language, because language is constantly evolving and it does determine how we think and what we can think. Basically, I'm on the maximalist, the more words the better, you know, sort of never use three words if six people do. Because I follow, I think, George Orwell's dictum with his view speak in 1984 that if we limit the vocabulary that people are using, if we boil it all down to a few words, then they'll be able to think less and imagine less and they will be more manipulable. However, if that's true, then surely the converse is true. Surely if we actually try to extend our vocabularies, perhaps invent some new words if we feel like it, as a royalty, you can't do that that often, but sort of, but, you know, the English language is immense and there are all sorts of ways that we can put it together. Probably an I/O, because the I/O will be probably going for the most probable end to a sentence. Whereas we can do better than that. We can, hopefully, imagine things that have never been imagined before. And in this way, we can extend our consciousness. I mean, if by limiting language you can limit consciousness, then by extension, by expanding language, you can expand consciousness. When I used to be a member of what I called the psychedelic left during my teenage years, I'm not sure whether the psychedelic left actually existed or whether it was something that I perhaps imagined during an acid trip of some sort, but if the psychedelic left did exist, I remember that my early, it was basically based upon the out-of-huxly idea of, let's turn on people. Let's elevate people's consciousness and that will solve all the world's problems. I thought, yeah, that sounds as likely to solve the world's problems as anything. So yeah, that sounds like a good idea, but my original plan was so LSD in the reservoir. I was only a teenager, you know, so I very quickly realised, no, that's a terrible idea. That would be horrible. That would be like something out of a wrongless posh. That would be dreadful. Don't do that. But what if you were to use royalties? That's legal. It's acceptable. It doesn't do so much potential damage as LSD, but it could be a lot more transformative because with royalties, there is a conscious intelligence directing the trip, if you like. So that has been my strategy to use language as a kind of psychedelic drug amongst other things. That sort of if you tickle people's neurons in the right way, you can get all sorts of effects. You can really get through to people. You can get through to their dreaming self in some ways. I mean, I'm doing all this purely by blowing the growth in the dark and saying what happens, but it's an experimental procedure, but I'd like to think that that was what was happening. Yeah, it's an experiment in consciousness for sure. I mean, there are a lot of great writers, but most of them don't do the thing that you do, which is show up in their dreams. Once you've started reading a few chapters, your reading life, well, for me anyway, my reading life and my dream life become the same. So I'm giving, which is just fun. It's a fun place to be. So then just like a trip or something, but then I wonder what is it like to be writing as spelling? I mean, I don't, it's not like I take acid before I write, but I definitely put myself in the state of mind. I'm trying to induce in my readers while I'm writing. I mean, do you do things before you write? Do you do banishing? Do you go into a state or are you just sit down? I, the ritual element of my magic has probably dwindled as the central area of my magic has become more all-provisive. It's basically magic is everything. It's me getting up in the morning. It's every moment, every photon that hits my retina. Every sound that tickles the tintana remo is, it's everything. Human experience itself is magic. And I'm at a different stage in magic now than I was when I started. I mean, that was more than 30 years ago. Right. So you used to do workings and things like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because I think probably when I was starting out, I needed something. I needed experiences of the coin that I had back then, which of course, spectacular. In order to convince me that there was something valuable there, once I heard how to view far work displays are most convinced that yes, there is something valuable there. Then I didn't really need the far work displays anymore. I didn't need to conjure or talk to demons. I just needed to understand what demons were and to have that within my consciousness. It has all come down. My magical practice these days is all focused upon the writing. And I don't really need to do very much at all. Couple of joints on a cup of tea. Although I do find that perhaps just for various reasons of finding that these days, I'm doing most of my writing at night. Say something between say 10 o'clock and two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning. That's a lovely time to write. I remember when I first started as a cartoonist in the late 70s that I was a little bit more worried about. I would be working at two o'clock, three o'clock in the morning. It's not just that it's quieter than, but it's that everybody's mullings have shut off. I know there's more bandwidth. I feel you can't hear anybody thinking. I know. You weren't sure that you could until it stopped. Exactly. Yeah. If there's a, I've always, there's like a mental highway up there. Everybody's thinking and it's all congested with all the thoughts of working and calculation of people. And then at night, it's like, oh, there's free lanes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, it's perhaps a bit like songbirds and the ionosphere that sort of in the evening when the ionosphere is going up, oh no, it comes down in the evening and it goes up in the morning. But that's why songbirds, there's a brilliant point where they can bounce their song off of the ionosphere and it will have a much greater resonance to it. So maybe it's a bit like that, but writing at those times, you're going to get, you're going to be a better songbird, you know? Yeah. And there's the space then to out to going back to the word maximalism, which I love you using because I've been admiring maximalists now, particularly in America, even people in their homes who don't reduce themselves to this sort of pottery barn hotel reality that everybody's aspiring to, which feels so, you know, flat and fascist and boring, that people that are maximalist are, yeah, you might have to do more dusting, but it's, it's dimensional. You know, they're building, they're building worlds. And so I appreciate that as an approach to writing as well. And actually, you don't even have to do the dusting, you know, you can just write it more. Right. You know, incredible off-call artifacts all over this room that are lost in the eyes of dust. It's sort of magic doesn't mind. You know. Magic is not about keeping a totally house, you know, or at least I hope it's not because that's not how I've been practicing. Right. And I'm also interested. And I admire completely the, the, the idea of immersing so much or of becoming so magic conscious that there's no distinction between magical practice and life. It just is what it is. But then I wonder, as someone I've been doing, working two or with Ganesh and with an archangel named Anyhow is an interesting. And I would feel, um, don't they want our attention though? Do they, are they bummed if we're not specifically engaging? Well, the way that I feel about these entities, which may be parts of myself that I have not accessed before, or they may be independent creatures that sort of are outside me, or they may be those at once, which is probably what it feels like. Right. But what I feel is that a lot of people, when you hear them talk about magic, it's clear that they want magic to like, to do something for them. That they want magic to get them a girlfriend or get them a lot of money or to like really, really punish that person who was main to them at school. That is a misunderstanding of magic. Right. Um, it's not what, it's a bit like John F. Kennedy said. It's not what magic can do for you. It's what you can do for magic. And for magic that that is, it's, we are not, why do we assume that we, that all of these entities, which are far more marvelous and complex than we are, why do we assume that they're just hanging around, waiting to do our bidding? Uh, no, no, it's that we can be useful to them. If we are very, very lucky, and if we put our heart into it, then we can be useful to them. And so, and it's a great way of calling, it's delegating upwards or I just think of it, you know, sort of, so when I actually do a bunch of bad murders or something like that, I can always say, no, actually it was, it was the gods who taught me to do that, you know, it's, uh, now I think that we should just listen to magic and see what magic wants. Because I'm certain that what it wants is benign. And in our best interests. Right. Or, or blissful. I mean, uh, you know, I was just talking with David, David Haskins about, about magic and, uh, magic and bliss and magic and, and, uh, not decadent so much as pleasure, you know, and, and pleasure, pleasure as a great political attractor. You know, it's like, oh, we're having more fun. You know, and that's why you should, that's why you want to join our side. Well, I mean, everything, everything in the world, everything around you and me now, um, it all emerged, all of culture emerged from shamanism, everything, uh, all arts, all writing, dance, theater, music, all of these were originally part of shamanism, along with science and medicine and everything else. And then everything gradually was hollowed off. Uh, every shamanism was dismantled and, um, originally, first you got say, um, when you've got settlements, you could have, and people didn't have to grow their own food anymore, then people could specialize. So you got priesthoods who took away the direct contact with the deity that was at the center of shamanism. They hoiled that off. And then, uh, little bit like, then you got, of course, those well-known bastards, artists and writers who turned up and took away shamanisms, role as the dispenser of visions. Now we shifted from an oral tradition to a written tradition. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so all of this took away from, and then it bent your body in eye science. You've got science and medicine emerging from magic and a lot of many children decided that they didn't want anything to do with their creepy, weird parent and trying to get them sectioned off to a maximum security nursing home or something. So you've got all of this, the only thing that, and it, of course, by 1910, magic had really only got the inner world and all of the theatrics. And then Freud turned up and using a vocabulary of terms that had been commonplace in occult parlors for more than a century. He came up with psychomanalysis and took away that last, and leaving only the hollow theatrics basically. It sort of, but the one thing that they didn't take from shamanism was the ecstasy that was at the centre of it. It was an ecstatic communion with all of being that everybody was through the shaman and through his performances, his or her performances. Everyone was sharing in the shaman's vision. And so that ecstasy was right at the centre of society, but right at the centre of culture of everything. Now, once you've got settled societies, you can't have ecstasy because you're not going to get people turning up at the conveyor belt on time if they're having an ecstatic vision. So that's what I would like to see. I would like to see magic reassembled. I would like to see it be big enough to take on everything that it once was and importantly to have that ecstasy at the centre of the experience. Right. And to do that though, I mean, as I just had a conversation with Brian Eno about art, it has to be non-applied to anything but for its own sake. It's even a great Talmud story where these rabbis are arguing about what's the most important reason to read Torah? Is it to remember our history or is it to act ethically into the future and they're arguing and then the old whatever rabbi it is finally says, "What the heck is this?" The only reason to read Torah is for this reading of Torah. It's like for at least not. You read it to read it. You know, and that's the magic thing. Then magic is, I hate to put it like this, but magic is like a character. It's like its own thing. It's like to do something for magic is to do something for this and as you've described it even, this, this, it's like a, it has a personality. It has a nest to it. It has a, it's specific, not generic. It's, you know, it has a flavor. It certainly has a personality. This is not a neutral technology. This is not like electricity that can be used to power a hospital or to electrocute a man with a mental age of knowing in Texas. Absolutely smart. like that. Magic has an agenda and it has a personality and it certainly has a sense of humour, which is really lucky when you think of all of the clowns that have postured in magic to nine across the centuries. It's really good that magic does have a sense of humour. You know? Yeah. Well, speaking of clowns posturing at magic, I mean, you, one could, well, you don't even have to argue it. Someone like Donald Trump and a lot of his cronies there, invested in a particular kind of magic in that sort of Norman Vincent Peel, Power of Positive Thinking. Yeah, which is not magic. It's a kind of an acquisitive materialist. It's a psychological trick. It's that obviously, if you go into something thinking, yes, I am really confident that this is going to happen for me. As opposed to going into it thinking, oh, this is not going to work out as it things never work out for me. It's much more likely that the first person is going to succeed because that's just how it's not really, it's not really what I would call magic. It's just a psychological tactic. Yeah, it's always better to feel confident. Of course, it is. But it's like this manifesting thing, which has been around for a long time. With that, I mean, apparently a lot of people think, I have now got the universe on sort of signed up to the universe as if it was like Amazon. And now the universe, I just have to sort of manifest something and the universe will give me whatever I want. Now it won't. And when it does work, that is because purely because your psychological mindset is more receptive to success. Right. It's almost as if magic, it's not anathema to it, but it's a different order than the explicate order. It's like it's a scientific. It's occurring in the implicate order. It's occurring in more in the unrealized quantum. I mean, that's part of why I've got such problems with AI is AI is trying to make everything explicit, you know, through probability to render it explicit and reduce it down to the heaviest, densest, unflexible, immutable, realized dead finish, whereas real writing, what we're doing is the opposite. We're trying to create as much as possible that liminal opening, imaginative, participatory, unrealized, how much ambiguity can the reader tolerate and still be in your world? Yes. I did. I mean, I was thinking about, I'd read, I don't know if this was a real I/OI or whether it was somebody perhaps satirizing I/OI, but it was an I/OI great production of the Charles Dickens memorable opening sentences for a title of two cities, which was the Tollins were average. Perfect. That's basically it, right? To remove the dimensionality and create the real, exactly. Exactly. And that's why when going back to the idea of magic having these qualities, the sense of humor, this thing, I mean, you know, to the materialist, a thought or an imaginative moment, it's just like a ghost in the machine. To you as an artist magician, the idea space is this legitimate dimension. You know, that thoughts are real and dream spaces are not just worthy of our exploration, but they are instant, for instantions of consciousness. Yes. Yes. And they are, I mean, obviously, well, at least from my point of view, we are all amphibious in the sense that we live in two worlds at once. Right. We live in the physical world that is around us, that is apparently around us. And we also live in our internal world, which I suggest is bigger and possibly more important. And yet we can navigate the physical world with relative ease. And we don't seem to think of our inner world as being a territory that we need to explore. We think, oh, this is just us. This is just how we are. I think if we thought of it as a territory and perhaps if we ventured further, we might find that there's a few surprising things in here. And people in there, you know, there's no whole new internal family systems, which I enjoy because they're like, oh, I'm all these people. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of, yeah, I mean, I think, but regarding the mental states, I think we are probably, hopefully, progressing towards a point when we realize that all of us, all of the different mental states, they're in all of us to some degree or another that we're either all crazy or nobody is. And it's just a matter of degree, things like that, that these are all realms of consciousness. And they all probably have wonders in them. I mean, some of the things that I mean, now that people with autism are actually being given a measure of respect and sort of empathy, then it turns out that a lot of autistic people are kind of brilliant in their areas of focus. They can do extraordinary things. Let's welcome everybody back into the human fold. You know, we probably need everybody to get through this. And let's not exclude anybody at least not for what they are for what they do, possibly, you know, because there are some people in the world at the moment who are frankly destined. And yes, I'm quite happy about excluding those from the human fold, but everybody else come on in. Are there, are there, are there common qualities to all of the kind of dream alternative spaces? Something about them feels similar to me, you know, just as magic sort of has a sense of humor and rewards you at the beginning. And we understand there's a thing. Is there a sort of common shamanic principles to all of these alt dream spaces? I think there may be, but they are, they manifest, they can manifest very differently. A lot in terms of say, soggy drugs, I feel very, very comfortable, I'm tighting them for a long time, but I feel very comfortable with social, social in mushrooms. They certainly down to the ground. And they feel appropriate to magical practice in this country. It feels like there is, you know, there is a tradition here. Whereas trying things like say, Salvia, or things that are probably part of the shamanic traditions of other countries and other cultures, I found that I really didn't get on with them so well and I didn't find them. There was nothing in them that I recognized. There was nothing that sort of spoke to me in those experiences. And with magical experiences, I only had a very, very limited experience of the inoki in system. It was just basically putting a toe in the water to see if the water was there. But that had got a very different feel to Kabbalah. It didn't feel like the same entities. It didn't feel like the same universe. I think that we have potentially, I don't think, but multiverse exists in the scientific sense. And I think even if it does, we'll never be able to tell whether it does or not. And it's probably a stupid idea because it's perfectly fine infection. It's a wonderful thing in fiction. But in reality, it almost negates truth, negates any achievement or any act because whatever we do or don't do in this world, there are a billion other offices that are doing it or not doing it. So everything becomes, but I think that in terms of our mental states, yes, there is potentially a multiverse inside our minds that we can probably have access to potentially infinite number of spaces. I don't know, but certainly a much greater range of spaces than the ones that we traditionally inhabit mentally. Right. But I do like the assertion that there's something going on here, that there is a thing going on that's being negotiated, that there is a, we are here. We are instantiated with lots of possibility. I mean, for me, a lot of the problem has been, as I become more aware of what is going on here, I see so much pain and suffering and grief and creatures consuming each other and attacking each other. I feel like I'm in, especially on mushrooms, like I'm in this swirl of, of uncomfortable metabolizing for so many beings. And I'll occasionally see, you know, Robert Anton Wilson in there, or Genesis P. Orage saying, this is all ridiculous, trying to help me see that humorous quality of magic that this is silly. It's like the discordian church, like when you, you, you, you're own, you know, early devotion to, to glycon, you know, which is the sort of joke almost as if we could pass through that humor and really, and really ground in that, it won't seem as, as, as awful. Do you, do you engage with, in some ways, the horror of it all? Um, not really with the horror, of course, on the horror writer. Um, or at least that is part of my remit. So I have thought about horror and at the moment, it's difficult not to think about horrible things sort of, because there are so many of them about in the world. That is, that is probably not, I mean, I can get a pulled by the horrors in the world without mushrooms. And generally, my experiences with psychedelic drugs are much more, they're in it and inclusive that they tend to focus the world in a way for me. They tend to focus the world in a way which is much more benign and much more calm. And it doesn't denoy the horrors that are happening in the world, but it seems to put them into a context that sort of, um, is more constructive perhaps than just cringing in horror, which sort of is obviously completely understandable. But sort of, um, perhaps if we saw things in a different way, that sort of, uh, we might have a more useful take on the situation. So no, I think that sort of, uh, for, uh, I've always found psychedelic drugs, although I don't, I don't really use them much anymore. Um, hardly at all. It's more the roi ting is, um, makes them a little bit superfluous. I've, um, I've got a thing in the lightest book, my two main characters, Grayson, Dennis have early in the book, um, been given some purple highs, acid, which they've not yet taken. But I'm sensing that probably by the end of the book, they'll find it perhaps a bit redundant after their psychedelic experiences in the great when. And that is kind of how I myself am perhaps feeling at the moment. Um, I, I think that psychedelic drugs are a, um, a huge, a usually useful tool. Uh, and I'm really glad that after, um, research was stopped in the 1960s, um, that now it has been resumed and people are starting to realize, just the wonderful things that are in there. Uh, I think that's a good thing. But personally, um, yeah, most of my, uh, my psychedelic life is sitting behind the keyboard. And sort of, uh, it's, um, which is actually sometimes as colorful and as rewarding. And perhaps sometimes a lot more manageable, um, than psychedelic sites, you know, no, you know, you know, you'd actually, you could pick up the phone. If I, so, and still maintain, um, it's funny because it doesn't feel important now in some ways. I've been thinking a lot about retro causality lately. Uh, and experiencing a lot of retro causality lately, um, the sense that, that in some ways things I'm doing are, I'm keeping promises to former, uh, to previous me's, but I also feel like I'm not, it's, I'm not having premonitions, but I can feel the, the emotional or psychic waves of things yet to come coming back and they're, oh, shit, something now, something's coming, you know, you could feel the thing. Yeah, I mean, I, I, since I wrote Jerusalem, uh, I have had a different perception of almost everything. Now, when I am meeting a person who's talking to a person, I am more aware of them as a fourth dimensional shite that has, that is informed by both their past and their future because, of course, um, from the point of view of eternalism, uh, the past and the future and the present are all co-terminus. They're what happened at once. Um, there was a very good cartoon that I saw in new scientists just sort of been over a year ago. The cartoon is Tom Gold who, um, it was a two panel cartoon and in the first panel, you've got, um, a protest outside of scientific establishment. And the guy at the front of the crowd with the megaphone is shouting, what do we want? And the crowd are shouting back, acceptance for the block universe theory. And then the man is in the next panel is shouting, when do we want it? And the crowd is shouting back. The distinction between past, present and future is a stubbornly persistent illusion. Um, so I, I tend, yet I'll agree with you completely. We are, we are affected and shadowed by our futures just as much as our past. I think that, um, yeah, retro causality is, uh, which seems to be quite possible. Um, uh, but it needs some thinking about. Um, I'll remember in some of me and Steve Moore's earliest experiences with magic. I remember that after our first experience, which came on us out of the blue, we wondered whether there was anything to be had from doing a ritual asking if we could have our first experience on January the 6th, 1994, uh, which had already happened by then. So we were doing something to make something in the past happen, but we were putting it in a wider context. We were saying, can you make this happen on January the 6th, 1994 as the first step upon an upward path to illumination? Um, and, um, I think it, it seems to work. But it's a different, it's a different kind of magic though. It's a different kind of magic, which corresponds to the sort of the kind of activism I've been encouraging people do, which is less about, oh, I want to make that happen. And much more, um, I want to, um, engender conditions for different kinds of things to happen. Or I want rather than working on the facts on the ground as recorded by some historian, I want to work on how nice we were all to each other when that fact happened. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, not to say that everything's perfect as it is. But if we're doing magic for magic's sake, then we're not doing magic in order to fix the world and this whole and I've always had a problem with it my own sort of Jewish medieval tradition of Tikkun al-Ah, oh it's heal the world, heal the world is it, what the world's broken, world's not broken, the universe is just fine, you know, you're not going to, you know? Yes, I know exactly what you mean and I have had some brilliant experience of this at least in my mind, the other day for no particular reason I was happening to think so if I really could affect things action at a distance, if I really could with the power of magic, if I could kill people at a distance with magic, just saying, you know, if in some impossible other world I could do that, then would I have a moral obligation to kill the president of the United States? And I thought about that for a while and of course there's there's various reasons why you perhaps shouldn't do that, like that would make J.D. Bance the president of the United States so it's not going to be ideal either way, but what I mainly thought about was that no, I probably wouldn't because I think that probably as bizarre as this might sound, I think that Donald Trump might be here for a reason, I have never seen the left wing as galvanised before in all of my decades of existence, I have never seen such a thing that has united people against it to that degree and I also think that it is this right wing push that has been going on for the past 10 years, I think it is so violent and so aggressive that it can only be born of desperation, it feels to me as if they wouldn't be going all out, if they didn't think that the world that they have existed in is not going to be here for very long, that there's a new world coming and they won't necessarily have a place in it, they won't have their power and so that is why they are acting so outrageously and I think that this hopefully might break conservatism, might break fascism, might actually by showing people yes this is what you were voting for with your populism, this is what you put into power, happy now, I think that this might end up being quite a attorney point, more than you, I am incredibly naive and optimistic so you should take that into account but sort of I once did a tarot reading, Melinda was here and she was asking if I could do a tarot reading for America and I thought well I'd have to know it's birthday and I thought what did you law the fourth, obviously, so America is a cancer which means that it's the what Queen of Cups is the signifier so I did a reading and it was unbelievably good, it was mostly alchemical cards and it seemed to suggest that America was as an alchemical reaction, was going to work out fine, of course as with anything with the tarot it doesn't tell you the tonne frame that it's working in but I could see a case for saying that the period that we're going through now is the period that an alchemy is referred to as the negrado or the black crow, it's when the master in the crucible becomes black and putrid and when the alchemist themselves gives up all hope and dispairs of the outcome and realizes that there'd never been any good as an alchemist and that it's all nonsense and that it was a waste of time when they're at their absolute lowest debt and that is when you get the rubido, the red gold starting to emerge there has to be that black period before the gold emerges at least according to alchemy but alchemy has said some things that have proven to be true over the years so that's what I'm by seeing my alchemy. Right, exactly even if they're not making actual explicit gold, it's working truer on another level and the other beauty of that possibility is it means that our job now is again our job is to enable the collective imaginary. If we are moving from this world into another one, then don't you want to participate in dreaming that world up that we'll get to live in? That's part of the meta message of your work is not just the stories themselves but the act of participating in world building with you as a kind of almost dungin master that we feel and that's the illusion or the reality of your books is I'm building the world with you and then learning how to build worlds that I can inhabit and write my own stories about in my dreams. That's unlocking a very special collective human potential. You know what I've been calling team human but is really maybe what we're actually here for? Yeah well I certainly hope so and I think that imagination is probably our greatest tool. It is what has got us all this. Even the bad bits they had to come out of somebody's imagination so the power of imagination is enormous it's bigger than anything but imagination isn't a gift that is just bestowed upon some people. I remember the songwriter and cartoonist and all around brilliant guy Peter Blake that he used to be in Henry Cow back in the 70s but and it was a solo album he had a song called King Strut and it had some very memorable lines it said imagination as a muscle will increase with exercise. King Strut developed his by having dreams and telling lies. This is the thing imagination is a muscle exercise it use your imagination and by that I don't mean just watch and read imaginative fiction or fantasy because I think that if anything that is actually sad thing the imagination the fact that all of our imaginative needs are can be instantly met by one of the streaming services or you know the click of a mouse. I think that that makes for weak imaginations. I think that that possibly means that if that trend continues if people continue to be possibly entertained then their imaginations will possibly act or get out there and imagine something. Doesn't matter whether it's any good or not they imagine something and then try to imagine another thing and see how that gets just. It begins the beginning yeah but it's the path to power and to making things dangerous and fun and sexy and and ultimately collaborative you know because you find the other imaginations when you're when you're out there. Yes absolutely and I think if anything that is the future. Exactly that is the fucking future but you know getting you finding you both as a reader and now as a if I dare I say colleague in the in the the thought wars or the thought dances it's great to it's great to know you and be with you and to share you with with some other people I'm I won't even call myself a fan I'm a reader that's all I ever wanted to joke this was you know and maybe we don't have to decide between the dances and wars we can have war dances you know it's sort of you know that's true lovely thing here and thanks for everything and hopefully you know we'll talk again sometime Yeah, I'm always here at your service, anything you ever need in America, even if you just need a some candy or something sent. I'm more than happy to be your facilitator. And if I'm in the UK, I will definitely let you know I'm over. That'll be lovely. And so yeah, well, you know, best of luck with everything, Douglas, and best of luck with everything, Tane human. Oh, thank you. And and to you too, I'll be, I'll be watching and I'm going to be thanking David Haskins in a moment for having cajoled you into doing this. What? I'm sure. That's absolutely strong word. But thanks. And thank you for being on team human. Team human is listener supported. If you want ad-free versions of the show and audio or video, go to teamhuman.fm and click on support or go to patreon.com/teamhuman and become a supporting member of the team. You get access to our discord live premieres that we do of these of these special shows now, including an hour afterwards where we can chat together about what we just saw or anything at all that's on your mind. You get access to live events. And it's just a nice way to be part of this team. We appreciate it tremendously. It makes this whole thing possible. But whether you can pay or not, please come, please be here. We appreciate your attention, your support through your presence. If you want, you can click on whatever it'll like or hard or subscribe or something like that. To at least get the algorithms knowing that you're on team human. So thanks a lot. Doug this rush got the team human is produced by Joshua Chaptalin and edited by Luke Robert Mason. You've been on team human our last best hope for peeps.