#108 Thrutopian Dream: Manda Scott
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Michael Reiley: Welcome back to the show. This is Michael Riley. Before we begin today's episode. I just wanted to take a moment to say that if you would like to support this podcast and the mission of science and non-duality. Please consider becoming a sand member. In addition to supporting this podcast and the production of films, like the wisdom of trauma. And where olive trees weep. And also our monthly community gatherings. You'll gain access to our sand member library with hundreds of videos from sands 15 year history. Of conferences, webinars and courses. You can visit science and non-duality dot com slash join. Or find a link in the show notes.
Today, I'm in conversation with Manda Scott, an award-winning novelist and host of the acclaimed Accidental Gods podcast. Best known for the Boudica dreaming series. Her previous novels have been shortlisted for the orange prize, the Edgar Wilbur Smith and Saltire awards and winner of the McIllvanney new prize. Her latest novel, "Any Human Power" which we discussed today is a mytho political thriller, which lays out a Thrutopian roadmap to a flourishing future we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We discuss shamanic and dream practices. We unpack the concept of the Thrutopian novel, as opposed to dystopian and utopian novels. We talk about consensus reality, the role of trauma and initiation cultures, serotonin meshes and dopamine drips, and her vision for a post meta crisis world. All today on the Sounds of SAND podcast presented by Science and Nonduality.
Welcome to the Sounds of SAND podcast. Thanks for being here today.
Manda Scott: Thank you for the invitation. It's an honor to be here.
Michael Reiley: To orient listeners, could you talk a bit about your guiding philosophies and lineage that inspire you as a novelist?
Manda Scott: Ooh, as a novelist, I thought you were about to ask spiritually.
Michael Reiley: That too. We can talk about that too.
Manda Scott: yeah Lineage is As a novelist, that's hard. I read so voraciously and have done all my life. I would say what's rising to the top of my awareness is Alan Garner who's an astonishing novelist. He wrote a series of three books that were for young adults that I read when I was, single figures, eight or nine, and he wrote them when he was 21.
And even now the language gives me goosebumps. Some of it is absolutely amazing. The Weird Stone of Brisingham and the Moon of Gormrath, those were the two, and then he added the third probably about a decade ago. And he's written a lot of other stuff since that's just amazing. His autobiography is astonishing.
So he was probably my first introduction to the power of words that were not just story. The story was amazing for me as a young person, it's very Tolkien esque, and it was written just after the Hobbit came out, but before Lord of the Rings, I think. And it was the first one, there are elves in there, that are remarkably like the elves that we know from Lord of the Rings, but they're dying because of the Hobbit.
humanity's assault on the environment. Particularly they can't breathe. And so it not only introduced me to the beauty of words and what could be done with rhythms in a sentence, it also introduced me really, I was too young to read Silent Spring, but I really got that what we were doing to the world was not ideal.
And then around the same time, I read two others. I read last of the Mohicans. because it was, the BBC had done an amazing black and white series that is still the best filmic rendition of that book. And I raced off and bought the book with my first, I got a book token for my 10th birthday. And all the adults around me going no, that's way too old for you.
I said, no, please let me read this. And they did. And then a book called Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliffe, which again, opened my eyes to the fact that other spiritualities existed. It's, I re read it as an adult because I wrote something called Eagle of the Twelfth and realised how colonial it was, and how misogynist, and how patriarchal.
But I didn't notice any of those when I was nine. What I noticed was a young Roman man goes north of the wall, so into Scotland, where I grew up and, my whole identity was Scottish, so he's in the wild lands of the north, which is my country, searching for the eagle of his father's legion, because when the legions lose an eagle they cease to exist, and it's a great dishonor to his father to have lost the eagle and he's going to save his father's honor.
And he gets to the west coast, so near Skye, where I spent a lot of my time as a kid, and he goes to the seal people, and the priests of the horn moon god. have definitely got the eagle. And they're hiding it in what is essentially a long barrow, and there's a goatskin curtain across the door. And they go in, and they do whatever they do to connect to their god, and you never see it.
And I spend all of my life after that, I read that book, I need to know what's happening behind the curtain, I need to know how to connect. to the gods of my land. And all of my life really, since then, has been oriented towards understanding what could have gone on behind the goatskin curtain. So as a child, those three.
And then growing up, Ursula Le Guin, still Rosemary Sutcliffe for a long time. Moving on to becoming an adult Wolf Hall was hugely developmental. Mary Rennell and her. Alexander Trilogy. They probably, again, taught me what's possible when we explore the past as a lens on the present. And I did that for a long time until I realized that wasn't good enough and we needed to be exploring the present through the lens of the present and exploring what's possible as opposed to what's, what we're being given and started writing through Thrutopian work.
Michael Reiley: beautiful. And you hinted at this part of the question, but also kind of spiritual practices that influence you as a novelist.
Manda Scott: So my spiritual path is shamanic, and I phrase it like that because I am not pretending to be a shaman. I don't think people reared in our culture possibly can be, but we can use the tools of shamanic practice to connect with the gods and the guides and the spirits of our land.
And that was my quest, from that first early understanding that this was possible and that these gods existed. And I was incredibly lucky to come of age, I left, I used to be a veterinary surgeon and I left vet school in 1984 and moved south from Scotland, whoa, into England, the enemy, good God, I used, in Scotland, basically I support Scotland and whoever's playing England and you get down to England and discover they don't really care about Scotland and it's all a real surprise.
But there we go. And I was in a kind of odd duality because I was at Cambridge being a surgical intern in the days when intern was like resident, not an unpaid position. And I was trying to explore, I had been part of a druidic group in Edinburgh, but they weren't connecting to the gods. They were doing a lot of head stuff and it wasn't, it didn't feel real to me at that point.
And then quite a group of indigenous, people from your land, North America. They felt that their guides had asked them to start teaching white people because otherwise we were going to destroy the planet. And they were joined by people from the Sami, from the indigenous tribes of Europe and Africa and Australia.
But in the beginning it was mostly North Americans. And they came across to Britain. And there was a short window of five or six years, mid eighties to late eighties, sliding into the nineties, where they were really freely teaching. And they were saying, you're not trying to be like us. We are giving you these tools so that you can connect to the gods of your place.
And then, predatory capitalism being what it is, people started, setting up courses of pay me a thousand dollars and I will teach you to be a shaman in a weekend. And the doors closed. Not surprisingly, because all the people who'd said, it was very controversial, the people who came across to us, and a lot of people were saying you can't teach the white people, they are, they have not grown up, they are not adult enough, they can't handle this.
And lo, they, that was proved to be accurate, because you cannot teach someone to be a shaman. in a weekend. This is either the indigenous practice of 300, 000 years of human evolution that is one of the most powerful tool sets on the planet or you can learn it in a weekend and it cannot be both. So I learned in that window and there were still people who came across.
There are still people who come across, but it became harder. But I had started on the path at that point and after a while, provided you learn not to project and you learn to actually listen to what's being said rather than to what you would like to be said or you're afraid is being said you can learn from the land.
And I started writing the Boudicca books, which were our indigenous past, I think. Trauma hit our culture in the islands of Britain when the Rome came and I wanted to look at who we were before Rome came so I wrote a series of four books that became pretty much cult around the world really and they were my expression of who we were before Rome came.
the trauma hit and our shamanic past our druidic past. And as a result of those, I started teaching because I went around the country in the days when we still had book tours and people turned out in the evening to come and see an author. And I would say, this is who we were. This is who we could be, particularly the first book.
This is designed so that you read this book and you can pick up the tools and make them work for you. And what I realized quite soon was. that wasn't working. People were reading the books and they didn't see the tools, or they didn't understand them. And I thought I would maybe teach two or three courses, and that was 20 years ago.
And my senior apprentice is now teaching the first five years of what became technically a 10 year cycle, but nobody has done it in less than 16 years. So it's grown to be quite a big thing, and the best way to learn anything is to teach. So my own practice has deepened. out of all recognition from back then.
Michael Reiley: And you said earlier that you felt people of your I forget the phrase you use, but wouldn't identify as a shaman or couldn't say to be a shaman. But you do feel that the lineage of Scotland and my lineage is from Ireland. My family's only been in the U. S. for about a hundred years is quite shamanic, right?
Manda Scott: The lineages, but I think there's 2000 years of trauma that it's hard to find that lineage uncontaminated. And so I think I, I have trained with actual shamans and the difference is spectacular. I don't think anyone from the Western, reared in a Western culture is going to get there. I just think there's things that genuinely shamanic cultures, the children imbibe with their mother's milk.
that we didn't. And we can do our best to grow up, and we can connect to the land, and we can become the best elders we can be, but it's not the same thing. And I think pretending that it isn't useful to anybody.
Michael Reiley: That's important. Thank you for that. And you mentioned a term in the first part of the first question through Thrutopian. So could you describe that term a bit for the listeners?
Manda Scott: Yeah. To be clear, the term was coined by Professor Rupert Reed. Way back in 2017, he wrote an article in Huffington Post, and His thesis then was that dystopias are not useful, utopias are not useful, what we need are throughtopias that lead us through from exactly where we are to a future that is viable.
And I had a set of visions that led to the current book. And as part of it, the instruction was you need to write this book and also you need to be persuading other people who are writers to run with this idea. Because We need more than one set of concepts of how we might hospice modernity and move through to something else.
And so I set up a writer's masterclass, not to teach people how to write, but give them the clues of what to write. Because I realised if I hadn't been running my own podcast for three years at that point, each week interviewing somebody, who was doing their best to move us to the emergent edge of interbecoming.
So people with new ideas of governance systems or new ideas of economics or new ideas as how we could anchor spirituality in the real world or transport or urban design or whatever, I would have had no clue how to write this book. Having been given the instruction, I was given the first scene and three scenes through and then told to write it.
I would have been lost. And so expecting all my contemporary writers who don't spend their entire life doing this thing to have an idea. of how we might get through is an ask too far. But I could offer, we did it over six months, every alternate Sunday evening our time, and invited somebody to come and talk for an hour, and then we spent an hour basically helping people find their emotional equanimity again.
Because a lot, I think, we're not aware of how close to the edge of the cliff we are. Or so many ideas and so many people doing so many amazing things that we could bring into our narratives and evolve. So for me, I have, Rupert and I spend a lot of time talking about this. He's become a good friend, but we have slightly different views of what Three Toby is.
My view now is that, It's any narrative in any form that is anchored in a recognizable present. It starts exactly where we are and walks us forward, opens up route maps to a plausible, grounded, desirable future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
Michael Reiley: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. I think you answered my next question was I was curious how that connects to things like Afrofuturism. Let's say the movement of that, which doesn't seem so grounded in the present. It's makes a quantum leap
Manda Scott: It's always, there's always a leap, yeah, or solar punk,
Michael Reiley: punk.
Manda Scott: Yeah.
any of those things. And I think these have their place. I think dystopias are done. I think I get very cross with my writing peers who think they're going to write the dystopia, they're going to show how bad it is, and then everybody will change.
And that is not going to work. It never has, it never will. It's not how our psychology is wired. I did a master's at Schumacher College seven years ago now, in regenerative economics. But I wrote my thesis on the neurophysiology of language, because I could. And it was interesting. And it really taught me a lot about how we're wired, how little of our decision making is made with our cognitive minds.
I read or listened to something recently that said 0. 5%. of our decisions are made purely cognitively. The rest is made basically at the level of our limbic system. And our limbic system does not respond to somebody explaining the bad stuff that might happen down the line unless we're given very clear sense of agency and a direction to go and a reason to go there.
Which dystopias don't offer, by definition. Utopias can give us a sense of the light at the end of the tunnel, but they don't show the route. And yeah, they often happen on a different planet, or there's been a viral epidemic, and only the people who think like I do, whoever I am who's writing the book, survive, and so everything is beautiful, and the unicorns can dance through the roses and the world is a lovely place.
And, that's it. It is useful if it gives us an idea of what we could get to, but we've got to show people, we've got to give them a reason to get up in the morning and let go of the system that is no longer fit for purpose, it probably never has been fit for purpose, and work for something different.
Because people will throw themselves up Everest if they can see a route to the top. And it's not easy, and it's not necessarily fun most of the way, but it's heading somewhere we want to go collectively. And so I think we really need to open those doors and give people a reason to go through. And fiction does that.
Michael Reiley: On the SAND podcast, we rarely speak to people that write fiction. We speak to a lot of non fiction writers and we're turning, we're reading Robin Wall Kimmerer or Yuval Noah Harari. So what is it about fiction that can really inspire us to get through this?
Manda Scott: A lot more people read fiction, frankly. And they, you might read Robin Wall Kimmerer and Oriel, Osprey Oriel Lake, and a few others in the same space. But you're probably not also reading Kate Roberts and Audrey Tang and people writing about different business solutions and you're not writing, you're not reading across the spectrum.
What we can do with fiction, two things that matter. One is if we create characters with whom you can identify, your brain does not distinguish between their journey and something that's actually happened to you. There's interesting thing about Neurofizz is that if it felt real to you when you read it.
it becomes real for you. So if I can create a reality that feels real, your body will respond as if it was. And so therefore, if I can weave together, I am calling it throwing the ghost lines across the landscapes of tomorrow, I can weave this world that feels like you've tasted it. You've been in it and the people matter to you and the ways that they connect feel like they could happen.
You can see the roots through. then you are much, much more likely to take it than even the best written non fiction. Your body doesn't take that in such a way as if it were real and keeps you on the narrow path, doesn't give you the full picture of the full roadmap. So if I can put in a new, a different way of organizing governance, a different way of organizing finance, a different way of organizing social media, a different way of.
creating power, a different way of being in the world, a different value set, then they become real for you. Did that make sense?
Michael Reiley: Definitely. Yeah. I grew up reading a lot of fiction cause I didn't have cable TV as a kid and there wasn't much on TV. There was no Netflix and things like that. So that was my.
Manda Scott: quite.
Michael Reiley: And, but I think in the last at least 15 years, but maybe longer, I've really shifted towards nonfiction, towards this kind of quest for knowledge and this finding the real truth.
But reading your book, and I was saying before we pressed record, I'm only maybe a third through it, but I really did it. I did resonate with that, that realness of it, that I felt like I, could hear the voices of these people. I could see them. We're going to talk a bit about, yeah, we'll talk a bit about some of the specifics of your novel in a bit.
One thing I really love about fiction and reading your book reminded me of this is that you can control the pace of the story. Whereas things, if you're watching videos or listening to a podcast but with a novel, you can really savor. a paragraph, you can go back and read it again.
You can get into a flow where it's very, you're like almost hearing the voices in your head. And yeah, it's yeah, it's some, it's something to, I needed to remind myself of that beauty
Manda Scott: It occupies parts of your brain that, when we're being passive receivers, are not switched on. And I think it's so important.
Michael Reiley: . Could you tell us a bit about the genesis of "Any Human Power"
Manda Scott: sure. Yeah, this is the part where we just need to, anyone whose belief system is different is welcome to just ignore this bit. Because. My spiritual path is Shamanic. I came back from Schumacher from doing the Master's in regenerative economics, and I set up the podcast and I set up accidental God's membership and I really thought I'd stopped writing because it was too slow.
It takes, this podcast, it isn't life, but it could be life. It's unlikely to be obsolete by the time you put it out. Writing a book takes me, I, the fastest I've ever written a book is a year, and usually it takes longer and it takes longer to publish. I started any human power at. the 9th of August 2021 and it came out end of May 24.
And that was quite fast.
Michael Reiley: probably had no idea Twitter would be not a thing by the time the book came out
Manda Scott: No, exactly. Yeah, quite. And the first draft round, the queen hadn't died. There was quite a lot of things happening in real time. It's we've got to get this book out because the entire premise, We'll fall apart if we don't. So why would I write another book apart from the fact it's incredibly hard work?
I felt there was better things to be doing and then I was teaching a particular course at the summer solstice of 21 and I had a set of visions while I was leading a journey which is not usual and they were clear text which is deeply unusual. I don't know how much spiritual work you do but impulses from the gods are usually, metaphoric, they're felt sense, they're nudges, and you follow a bit blindly down the path and test along the way, is this actually what you're after?
And this was completely clear text. It was take this 30, 000 year old fossilized horse's tooth that holds one gate of the altar, get some ethically sourced horse hide, which took me a month, go up the hill, I live in a farm on the edge of hill, go up the hill to a particular place where there's a very old, laid hedge, centuries old, bind the tooth on to the hawthorn at a particular point, sit with it in the smaller of your back, looking southwest down the valley, in a particular frame of mind, every evening, for an hour as the sun goes down, until further notice.
And that was it was genuinely that clear. And one of the things one learns quite early in this path is that if something comes that clear, you do not piss about asking why, you just, And so I sat on the hill, and it was lovely, and I'd never sat on the hill for an hour at dusk, and I watched the crows go to bed, and it was beautiful.
And then, a week in, I think it was maybe nine days in, the first scene of the book, and the three scenes after, just arrived. And then the instruction was, now you have to write this book. And if you want to come up the hill later, that's fine, but you don't have to. First scene, it's not too much of a spoiler, largely because it's on the back cover.
It's a woman in her 60s is lying on a bed, her 15 year old grandson is lying at her side and he says, when you come home can we go up the hill and watch the crows go to bed, which is What I've been doing and she says no, I'm not coming home. You know this I'm dying there is no coming home from this we have talked about it and he's broken and in the Ensuing conversation.
He says you're the only one that gets me I do not want to live in a world with you not in it and she realizes he's serious And she says, I don't know what's coming next. I don't know exactly. She's been an anthropologist for 40 years studying death beliefs in indigenous cultures, so she has some idea what people think comes next.
But the thing about when you're actually dying is you realize you don't really know. And I don't know, but if you really need me and you call, I will do whatever it takes to get to you. I promise. And he and she and we feel the gods pause in their labor and look down and go, okay, that was a promise. You are held.
to that. And then she dies. And the rest of the book is told from her perspective, where she's caught in the between place between the lands of life and the lands of death, and has to honour this promise. And the other thing I was given was three void walks. The void is a particular place in the shamanic work that I do.
It's out of time and space. And if you're not careful and you fall into it, then total annihilation happens. It's not a place to get lost. And she's taken by the crow that is her guide, and she's anchored and grounded and shown how to be safe, and shown how it's possible to hone your intent and split the timelines, and then see possibilities of what could happen.
And she sees all of the ways, or many of the ways, that Finn does kill himself. She sees those futures. The implication is, if you're in that place, if you can take agency to do that, there's a possibility you may be able to take agency and create a future that doesn't exist yet. And so she's kicked back into consensus reality, into the lands of life with, okay, you don't want him to die, see what you can do.
And she has to try and find agency. I spent many months reading books of near death experiences and people's experiences of what they felt were connections of the newly dead, to see what was possible. And then she voidwalks twice after, once for the extended family and the insurrection, the global insurrection, the movement that is growing around them, and then once for the whole of humanity, seeing the ways that we drive the bus over the edge of the cliff and all of the annihilation and extinction that happens and the horror of it, the little mini dystopia.
in the middle of the book. And yet the implication in both of these is also, can she take agency? And if so, it may be possible to help the people who are in life to create a reality that isn't what she's seen. And there's a 15 year span between the first one and the last one. So it's harder for her to gain agency, but that's the core of the book.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Thank you. That's a beautiful inspiration for a book. Not what I thought you, you would say. And it, as fantastical as it sounds very authentic. Having read some of the that one of the, you were talking about the realism. And one of the surprisingly realistic parts of the book are your descriptions of the between, of that liminal Bardo state between death and being able to interact with the living world.
It feels so, so dreamlike. Lan, the main character is able to communicate with people in dreams. And that's been my experience with people have died in my life that I communicate with them in dreams. And sometimes I know that they're dead and sometimes I don't, and it's, but there's always a message there almost always, there's some sort of message that happens.
So I'm just, Curious what how important I sense very important is dream work in your spiritual practice.
Manda Scott: I teach what I call shamanic dreaming. And the Buddhic books were called Dreaming the Eagle, Dreaming the Bull, Dreaming the Hound, Dreaming the Serpent Spirit, because dreaming for me, partly I didn't want to use the word shamanic, it wasn't authentic in Roman Britain, pre Roman Britain, it wasn't a word.
And I didn't want to use the word druidic, because in the UK there's a lot of projection happens around that particular word. And for me, With what? The way that I practice is dreaming is not just night dreaming, that it's any consciously used way of leaving this reality to enter the other realities in order to ask for help.
And I don't use entheogen, I don't use medicine plants, but there's a lot of other ways that we can traverse between the realities. Once we've had the training that's the point of shaman practice, is this reality is such a tiny part of our reality and it's possible. to move beyond it in order to ask for help and bring it back to this reality.
So for me, dreaming is not just sleep dreaming, but in the book, because that's quite a complex concept for a lot of people and the book is not there as a dreaming manual. It's there to help people see ways through to a future we'd be proud to leave behind. So most of the ways that Lan connects with people are in night dreams, but occasionally not.
But everybody's experience. not everybody, but a lot of people have experience of their loved ones who are no longer alive connect with them through dreams. It's supremely common. So it seemed like a good angle in, and in terms of the between in shamanic work, one of the functions of a tribal shaman is a psychopomp, which is escorting the souls of the newly dead from the lands of life to the lands of death.
So this is a place that I go with reasonable frequency. So it wasn't hard to imagine it. And then. In the way that I write, a lot of it is, it's just me just wake dreaming and then trying to make sense of what I dreamt. So the dreaming parts are, they're not easy to write, but they're straightforward.
The distinction between that makes sense.
Michael Reiley: Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I've used the word consensus reality earlier. Are you connected with the worlds of Amy and Arnold Mindell and their, the world work and dream work and consent? Yeah.
Manda Scott: Yes. Yes. Riding the horse backwards. Yes. Yes. I didn't, I wasn't aware they used consensus reality actually, but within shamanic, the shamanic worlds, there's consensus reality as CR and everything else is what we work with.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Nice. Let's bring it back to some of the the more, let's say I don't know if practical is the right word, but everyday aspects of your book. Mundane. Sure. And one of the things that you talk about, which we were discussing before we pressed record was this connection between initiation cultures and trauma cultures.
And obviously we're in a trauma culture right now. I think we all know that it's very much been revealed over the past kind of decade,
Manda Scott: your listeners know that. A lot of people in Consensus Reality it's, the idea is quite shocking, but I'm glad your listeners know. For sure. Have you? And I talked then to Francis Weller who brought, okay.
Michael Reiley: I didn't, but the other I am the co host of SAND of Zaya and Maurizio. The founders have did a podcast with him.
Manda Scott: Okay, all right, interesting. So where do you want to take this? Because it, for me, this was something that I came to later in the writing of the book, in the drafting of it. But it makes a lot of sense, and It makes sense for me also, if we assume that our culture is a trauma culture, and if we assume that the trauma goes back, in the islands of Britain at least, to the Roman invasion, possibly longer.
The Romans didn't invent their trauma. They just, they were traumatized by wherever it arose. I think we're not ever going to know, unless someone does some really interesting dreaming, and even then, it's not going to be verifiable. I really believe in evidence based spirituality. It's the stuff that we cannot.
Check then it's a belief system and we let it go because quite a lot of stuff is you can verify So I don't think we're ever gonna know what the trauma was But I am, it seems to me that the work of Bill Plotkin is quite interesting. Have you spoken to him?
Michael Reiley: no.
Manda Scott: So he has a thesis that there are four stages of evolution of an individual.
There's childhood, adolescence, adulthood, elderhood, and each of these is divided into two phases that need to happen. One is cultural, social, and the other is, more embedded in the natural world. And his thesis, which makes a lot of sense to me, is that the trauma of our culture locked us in the first of the adolescent phases that basically very few, vanishingly few people in our culture ever progress beyond early adolescence.
And what we witness in the world is what happens when you give adolescents who have no sense of self reflexivity access to very big toys and let their projected damage loose on the world. And so then the question becomes, if it is the case that initiation cultures, people do grow to adulthood and do grow to elderhood and that, A growing, a child, infant, child, adolescent needs a healthy group of adults and elders around in order to grow up.
How can we in the trauma culture move into adulthood and adulthood absent existing adults and elders? And I think that's probably the single most important question of our time. And it's really urgent. And so a lot of what I'm doing now is aimed at finding ways to help people. grow up, basically, as fast as possible and in the largest numbers possible.
And I don't pretend to have got there, but I think it's a question that bears a lot of thinking.
Michael Reiley: And the other side of that, the initiation cultures could you describe that? And
Manda Scott: so in, I take this straight from Francis Weller. So from him, and he's, he got it from Patrice Malademosome, an initiation culture, individuals go through intermittent, episodic, contained, encounters with death and the containment is held by the adults and the elders and the more than human world. And particularly the one that we all get fixated on is the adolescent rite of passage, but there are so many others.
Childbirth is a rite of passage for the child and the mother. I don't think it's as dangerous as we've been told it is because That's a separate conversation. I don't think infant mortality in initiation cultures is anywhere near what we think it is. We've made a lot of assumptions about mapping trauma culture onto initiation cultures.
The, let's assume we've got a child who's grown healthily through childhood, the first phase of adolescence and is into the second phase of adolescence, and they've had everything given. They haven't even had to ask. In a healthy culture, we're born expecting agency, sufficiency, and connectedness. Our culture has Separation, scarcity, and powerlessness.
But if we're born into a healthy culture where we are cherished, and valued, and wanted, then our every need is met, insofar as the culture can do that, and our social needs are met. We might be hungry, but that doesn't mean we feel disconnected, and we're given the tools of connection to the more than human world and to other people.
During our contained encounter with death, We have to ask for help from the adults, from the elders, and from the more than human world. And if, on the condition that we ask for help, hear it and are able to implement it, then we survive and move into adulthood. And that is a pinch point. Not everybody comes through that particular, Write a passage.
It's a contained encounter with death, and death is very close. And if death doesn't feel very close, it isn't a contained encounter with death. But if we come through it, we come through it knowing how to ask for help, knowing how to hear the answers, knowing how to implement them, and with a sense of what we're here for.
I know what's mine to do. I have a sense of being and belonging and meaning in the world. And I have a sense of that serotonin mesh. Take a side, aside, and this is neurophys, but I find it really compelling. There are broadly, and any neurophysiologist listening, we are aware this is neurophys 101.
However, it works at a certain level. There are broadly two sets of reward centers in the human brain that we know of. Dopamine based, and serotonin based. Our culture, the trauma culture, is dopamine based. We have set that up partly because we lack the serotonin mesh. I'll come back to that in a moment.
Dopamine hits are characterized by being short term, they are not additive, and they are subject to the laws of diminishing returns. So I might have sugar or any white carbs, alcohol, or porn, or likes on the internet, or particularly on the internet, my tribe. is winning now, where I thought it was losing.
That's huge. Jonathan Hyatt's done work on that. That's as big as a nose full of cocaine, in terms of the dopamine hits in your brain. But they don't stack up. And the diminishing returns means next time my child needs to win bigger, having lost worse, or I need more porn or more alcohol, or more sugar, or whatever it is that I am addicted to,
Michael Reiley: that's why every day we have to go back to Instagram and reef, or not even every day, every
Manda Scott: yes, every couple of minutes,
Michael Reiley: we hit the refresh because we can't that
Manda Scott: because,
Michael Reiley: dopamine
Manda Scott: going to fill the hole inside. I can order as many boxes off Amazon as I want, and I only get the little dopamine hit when I order it, even when it arrives, I don't really want it anymore, I just give the box to the cat.
Or I could be building rockets to Mars. And this one rocket didn't do it, but the next one will, and they never fill the hole inside because it's not a hole that can be filled by our separation scarcity and powerlessness and our endless consumption. If we put the trauma culture aside, oh, it's probably worth saying.
So the trauma culture is characterized by not having the containment for our encounters with death. We don't have the adults and the elders. We don't know how to connect to the web of life. So we just have traumas that stack, or trauma responses. that stack. I think one of the things that's quite important is just because something is traumatic doesn't mean we have to have a trauma response.
It doesn't have to traumatize us. That's, if we can learn for not to, that's part of the way into adulthood. But we just end up stacking and stacking and stacking and stacking until they overflow, and then we're in crisis. And after a while we don't know how to come back from that.
And that's our culture. Initiation cultures are based in the other, the serotonin mesh, the other reward center. So serotonin reward centers are predicated on pride and respect. as much as anything else. So I come back from my contained encounter with death, I survived, I learned how to ask for help, I learned that help is there.
When I really need it and I ask for it, it comes through. And I come back into a network of social belonging, where I now have a new status. I am obscene for that and people that I respect me back. I can take pride in doing what I can do best and only I can do in a way that is really good and people will celebrate that in me even as I am celebrating them doing what is theirs to do.
in the best way they can. So I get this continuous feedback loop of pride and respect and pride and respect and it serotonin is additive and it is not subject to the laws of diminishing returns and it's it's long lasting it's not a quick spike it's a big arc. So even in the trauma culture people who tried to build community. If you meet and eat together once a week, and particularly if you sing or engage in something that has that sense of rhythm that goes deeper,
That will be enough to hold your community together. It might not be perfect. It would be good if it had more than that, but once a week eating together is enough. So then the question is, how do we shift from a dopaminergic culture to a serotonin based culture, which is, I think is a synonymous with how do we come out of our first stage of adolescence into knowing what's ours to do, and then finding how to really act that, be that in the world. And how do we connect to the web of life in a way that we can ask what do you need of me and respond to the answer in real time.
And for me, this is, It's critical, because part of our culture, the trauma culture, we have that, the concept of citadel mind. Tanya Luhrmann did a lot of work, that's probably off, off topic, but she's spoken about our culture is the only one that has this concept of citadel mind where what happens in my mind is mine alone.
Nothing goes out, nothing comes in, I cannot be influenced by the emotions of the person next to me. It's bollocks. It's obviously bollocks. There isn't another, Okay. Culture on the planet that thinks this is true. Everybody else knows that people who are no longer alive can connect with us in our dreams, and this is a really useful thing.
Our culture has this blind spot, and people will deny it. Rupert Sheldrake is really interesting on this. He's done a lot of work in, Morphic Resonance Fields. He's one of the few TED Talks that's been taken down. But he says he goes to scientific conferences, they still invite him, he stands on the platform, he gives his talk, and everybody's sitting there with their arms folded and the body language and shaking their heads and everything is resistance, no you're talking total nonsense.
And two glasses of wine in the dinner after, they're queuing around the table to talk to him to give them their personal experiences of why he's right. And that, that is one of the many things that's wrong with our culture, is we don't. allow ourselves to accept that the greater than human world exists, and then we decide that we have to have all the answers.
The fact that we are where we are is because we haven't got the answers. And geoengineering is not going to do it, or carbon capture and storage is not going to do it. Fix for x, whatever x is, solve for food is not going to do it, because we're in the middle of a meta crisis. We need complex, multi systemic action and our brains are not wired for that.
What we are wired for if we do it is connecting to the web of life and asking what do you want to be and letting our head minds free of the idea that we have to have all the answers. I had no clue why I was sitting up the hill. I just knew that I had to. And if it had got to three years in and nothing had happened, I would have been asking why.
Probably I would have been very cold and very wet. But because I went there, because I showed up, because I did what was asked and then You know, you have to write this book and it's that's going to be really hard guys. And you're going to have to help, please. And I got the help. And the book is, I'm having this conversation because the book exists.
So it wasn't my job to work out why. It was just my job to do what was there to be done. And that frees our head minds up from a huge weight of responsibility and allows us to infinitely more creativity once We can connect to the web of life and ask what do you want to me and respond in real time? I think i've talked for long enough.
I'll stop.
Michael Reiley: Now there's so much wisdom and and truth in what you're speaking about. And I think it's something that know in our bodies, that difference between that dopamine hit and the moments of serotonin, whether it, whether it's a, an in person community or an online community, how nourishing that is.
When that boundaryliness that when our boundaries dissolve and we become that we come back into, as you said, the web of life we know how nourishing that is and how that can sustain us for days and days. And you said, if you, I live in a community actually in Italy as well, and, so I experienced this. I experienced both the serotonin of community. And when things don't go well, it's you can look back on the pleasant experiences that you had with your community. And that can get you through that. Whereas if I post an Instagram story about a podcast and it doesn't get a lot of likes, I'm like, ah, what's wrong?
It's I, it's yeah. Thank you.
Manda Scott: Thank you. It's really good to hear actual experience that this is real
Michael Reiley: Yeah. And it's so beautiful, this model of the Thrutopian novel as a way that that all of these entry points are available and all of these like you said, we're in a meta crisis. So we're going to need a meta solution. We're not going to need a linear solution. We can't create, we can't fix the problem with the same systems that created the problem.
It just doesn't make any scientific sense. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, now that the book is done and it's out, have you returned back to the hill and reconnected to the spirits that guided you? And what's their, what are their reviews like?
Manda Scott: As far as I can tell, everyone's very happy with the book and I'm asking, yeah, I finished the book, we finished at the end of March, but came out at the end of May, so I wrote 15, 000 words of a sequel, but then I got caught up in promoting the book, and so I'm up for it. in different ways asking, what do you want of me?
And there is not, at the moment, a clear answer. And it might be a sequel. I got two separate sequels started and I've sent them off to my editors waiting to hear what they think. I don't know. And I think that's part of the process is that it's okay to not know for a bit. That might be the next book.
I've got ideas. I could write another half dozen books if I could get the time and the space or other things are arising. And. And I genuinely don't know, but I'm holding open and I'm, there's quite a lot of nudging towards learning other things. And the shamanic stuff, my, my apprentice is taking on stuff and we're exploring things that we could do differently.
So there's a lot of what feels like seeds being planted and I don't quite know where they're going to go yet. And becoming comfortable with unknowing is, part of the process, I think.
Michael Reiley: Interesting. Have you ever had connections with the characters of your book and your dreams?
Manda Scott: Oh, all the time. Yeah, totally. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I exist in a world where sleep dreaming and waking dreaming very hard to tell apart. And to be honest, I don't exist in consensus reality very much or very strongly. So yes, they're as real to me as anybody That I meet on Zoom, or generally meet, so I could shake their hand.
So yes. And talking to them about what happens next is quite fun.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah, we had a podcast maybe, I don't know, six or seven episodes ago with Andrew Holacek, who's a Buddhist Teacher, he writes about dream yoga and sleep yoga and the Bardo states, and we had this fascinating conversation about how as you said, waking dreams and sleeping dreams are really part of the same continuum of consciousness.
It's one continuum of consciousness. It's true that our sleeping, or let's say our sleeping dream self, doesn't know much about our waking dream self, and vice versa. People don't necessarily remember their dreams, or when they're in a sleeping dream state, their reality is disconnected from waking life.
But it is possible to see that as one continuum of practice.
Manda Scott: And with training, our dream self can become more I don't ever want to get to lucid dreaming because I think that's when my ego gets in the way. But it is possible with training to, for instance, carry an intent into the dream and know what that intent is. Ask questions, where I know that I'm dreaming and I'm asking the question now, but I'm keeping everything fluid enough that I'm not controlling the answer.
Michael Reiley: Yeah. Yeah. My, my teacher, a woman named IONE, who was actually one of the first guests on the podcast. She studied with Amy and Arnold Mindell and she calls that dream incubation. Yeah.
Manda Scott: Yes. Absolutely. Exactly that. Brilliant. Oh, I will go back and listen to that one.
. And where would you take a route to the future? How would you help us to hospice modernity in whatever way we need to do it?
Michael Reiley: I think fostering communities is the main one that we would do and, I think you have to try different levels of that, everything from communal living to finding like minded souls online and yeah just breaking free of this model of Kind of the individual in their own house consuming I forget what Noam Chomsky calls it, the something in manufacturing consent.
He talks about the kind of isolated nodes of consumption or something like that.
Manda Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Brilliant. And
Michael Reiley: But
Manda Scott: Fantastic.
Michael Reiley: yeah. But it definitely is, it can be overwhelming when you get into these waters. Cause as you said, there's so many ideas happening from like game B and all the different models of alternative democracies and sociocracy and different financial systems.
And it's you can, I've been at some of these online Conferences, and it's just everyone has a different model and it's just hard to get them to all integrate together. And it'll just take time, unfortunately we don't have time, but it will take time.
Manda Scott: Yeah. And I think if we can agree on a common value set, we'll be a long way there because nobody. suggested there was only one route to capitalism destroying the planet. They just said, whoever dies with the most toys wins. That's the rules. It doesn't matter what you do in pursuit of gaining stuff for yourself.
Off you go. And very effectively, is causing the sixth mass extinction. So if we could arrive at a shared value set, then everybody really throws themselves into the evolution of whatever that is, then I think we would perhaps move faster. It
Michael Reiley: Shared global values that you mean, like all 8
Manda Scott: was shared by all the people who want to hospice modernity, yes.
Yes. And if enough of us, I'm sure there'll be a tipping point, if enough of us can live from a place of integrity, agency, connection, being and belonging then that will spread because I think everybody is born yearning that. And the trauma, whatever it is, the trauma of our culture is the, this, the gradual understanding as we grow that's not And if we can create a space where that is available, then I think everything changes.
Michael Reiley: . This has been an amazing conversation.
Thank you so much, Manda.
Manda Scott: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Michael Reiley: Yeah,
Manda Scott: Yeah, it's really good to talk to someone who's on the path and gets
