On this episode of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, I talk with esoteric author and scholar MARK BOOTH (AKA Jonathan Black), whose excellent new book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE: HOW ANCIENT WISDOM MADE THE WORLD, traces the occult influences found in modern science, especially the science of physics.

Mark’s book is not just an outline of confluences.

In other words, it’s not one of many books already available which seem to validate spiritual wisdom with modern science. Instead, it is something more singular and more needed for our time. It shows how esoteric ideas and thinkers, seers and magicians, intersected with scientists as they developed the theories that live in our own scientific worldviews.

Mark is also the author of one of the best introductions to real esoteric perspectives, The Secret History of the World , as well as The Sacred History: How Angels, Mystics and Higher Intelligence Made Our World and the ebook, The Secret History of Dante: Unearthing the Real-Life Mysteries of the Inferno.

Mark has been a dream guest for me since I started this show over eight years ago. Although we spoke a few times in the intervening years, I'm so excited that we finally got to talk in this capacity, for the podcast.

But we weren't alone! In a perfect example of spiritual entanglement, when Mark brought up the physicist Wolfgang Pauli - famed for the so-called Pauli effect or shorting out technology wherever he went - our recoding crashed completely, and we had to restart the call. 

Luckily, it's still all intact for you!

Using AEWCH 317-320 as a starting point, I talk with JOSHUA RIVERS, poet and host of the excellent BUSY BEING BLACK podcast + frequent AEWCH guest, SHULI BRANSON (host of the podcast THE BREAKUP THEORY podcast, and translator of Guy Hocquenghem's Gay Liberation After May '68.) about the small task of remaking the world.

At the center of the episode is a thought that's something like: We have to lose - via transformation - so much to gain the world.

The last time Shuli was on the show was a conversation with a third person, too, with Dean Spade on AEWCH 277 thinking through how to think bigger than the state.

On that episode, we each brought a question for the other two guests, and we do that again - but this time prompted by Josh.

These are the questions:

JOSHUA: How do you care for what you love?
CONNER: If you let go of the set of capitalism vs communism (or socialism) what’s left in your view of how to change the world?
SHULI: How do you open things up so that you have a new and altered view?

Along the way we talk about poetry, science, occultism, politics, and...well, so much else. And the episode ends with dancing. I'm so excited to share this episode with you.

Support the show on patreon: patreon.com/connerhabib

Like many people, I often feel that I don’t understand economics, but, like everyone, I have my own role to play in the economy. So do you. So does everyone. We are all in economy, so we all have something to offer in understanding it.
AEWCH 24 guest Erin Ryan once joked that  “Economics is astrology for dudes” 

Economics feels intentionally mystified, filled with untruths and abstractions, and hopelessly complicated. Those who claim they do understand it are usually people (certain kinds of men, as per Ryan’s joke) who use the economy in a certain way, and are therefore limited to a certain view of it.

Because we are kept at arms length from economic understanding, we have to resort to questions like, “Why is this piece of paper worth something?” or , “Why do numbers moving from one account to another mean something?”

If we're not outright ridiculed for asking, we are often left without much more than broad answers that are detached from history and that lead us away from doing anything about whatever we’ve learned.

But these are the questions we need to ask, and we need to come up with new answers.

This is fourth episode in my series of episodes called A New Spiritual Society, working through how to renew, revitalize, and re-engage with culture, politics, and economics by looking at their spiritual heart. 

This episode stands on its own - but you can also enrich the listening by starting with the introduction to this series on AEWCH 317, if you want to hear more about how and why I’m approaching. AEWCH 318 is on culture, and AEWCH 319 is on politics.

I hope you find this look at the spiritual heart of economy gratifying, and a help in circulating new perspectives that are closer to the truth.

Support the show on patreon

patreon.com/connerhabib

Friends, we might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already. Shaping the world is part of being alive and we all contribute, whether we know it or not.

This episode is part of my series on the social art of renewing, rethinking, and revitalizing the social organism:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

This time, I talk about POLITICS - why politics in our time is about so much more than elections, political parties, protests, and laws. It's about time, utopia, and connection.

Support the show today via ⁠patreon⁠

or

⁠Make a one time contribution⁠.

Want to work with me on your creative, business or everyday life? ⁠Click here for a list of services⁠.

Friends, we might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already. Shaping the world is part of being alive and we all contribute, whether we know it or not.

Welcome to my new series of episodes on the social art of renewing, rethinking, and revitalizing the social organism:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

This time, I talk about CULTURE, what culture really is in our time and what we're being called to do to renew this sphere so it can be strong in its own right and withstand the pressures of politics and economics.

Support the show today via patreon

or

Make a one time contribution.

Want to work with me on your creative, business or everyday life? Click here for a list of services.

Friends, We might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already.

No one who has ever lived, even briefly, has not altered the earth by contributing their own destiny to it, and the way in which that destiny radiated out to affect everyone.

Shaping the world is part of being alive.

We all contribute. This is often broken down into a clunky simplistic and fundamentally flawed statement that “everything is political.” But the truth is everything in our lives - individually, with each other, and with the whole of humanity not to mention the earth itself - is connected to natural, human, and spiritual laws.

How do we bring ourselves out of the automatic everyday ways we shape the world just by merely existing, and into the intentional, purposeful, and true activity of developing a newly spiritual society?

Welcome to my new series of episodes on how to start to renew and recreate the social world in our time:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

Over the coming episodes, I'll be looking into the spiritual heart of culture, politics, and economics, to see what's living there, and how we can bring ourselves to the task of nourishing it.

With Rudolf Steiner's concept of social threefolding as a companion along the way, we'll move past old ideas and into essential, living concepts to move forward.

On this first episode, I introduce what I'm up to, define the terms, set the direction, and invite you along.

Support the show via patreon.

Patreon.com/connerhabib

In an episode that is at once political, spiritual, and intensely personal, I talk about why we need to see the Epstein files in the right light to understand what's at stake: for survivors, for abusers, and for the world at large.

Support the show: patreon.com/connerhabib

I talk with author, teacher, and cohost of Weird Studies, J.F. Martel about how art is the only way out of our predicament.

Support the show: patreon.com/connerhabib

Buy J.F.'s book.

Listen to Weird Studies.

Asad Haider, the political theorist and philosopher, whose book critiquing identity politics from a (non-class-reductive) leftist perspective, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology remains a powerful contribution and who was on AEWCH 26, died suddenly in December of last year.

I’ve reproduced that episode as AEWCH 314*, with a new introduction.

To plant a tree in Asad's memory, go here.

To support the show, go to patreon.com/connerhabib

In conversation with Pilar Lesko about change, Christianity, the dead, and more.

Happy New Year!

support the show: patreon.com/connerhabib