The Living Philosophy

Peter Ulric Tse is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, currently on sabbatical as a visiting professor at Cambridge and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall. A Guggenheim and Humboldt Fellow, he studies attention, visual consciousness and volition, and has spent over fifteen years building a naturalistic case for libertarian free will, beginning with The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation (MIT, 2013). He is now two volumes into a trilogy: A Neurophilosophy of Libertarian Free Will and Free Imagination (both OUP, 2024), with Re-enlightenment to follow.

In this conversation, I sit down with Peter to explore the idea at the heart of Free Imagination: that what makes humans free is not intelligence but imagination, our capacity to model what is not, has never been, and could not be. We start with bonobos sitting miserably in the rain and the Löwenmensch, a 40,000-year-old carving of a lion-headed man, and trace how tool-making may have forged an internal virtual avatar that lets us act in imagination long before we act in the world. Peter takes apart the Libet experiments and the case against free will made by Sapolsky and Gazzaniga, arguing that the real action lies not in split-second choices but in distal, deliberative imagining. We explore the brain's planning and willpower systems, efference copy and schizophrenia, Kundalini yoga, and why lobotomised patients simply stopped acting. Then the conversation turns to culture: whether our imaginations are sovereign, Edward Bernays and The Century of the Self, why some stories grip us from beneath, and Peter Singer's expanding circle. This is a conversation for anyone who suspects the imagination is both our greatest tool and our greatest weapon, and wants to know whether we can learn to wield it freely.

🔗 Links
- Website: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/peter/
- Free MOOC: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBZk0Jl545845TCxtkEbJQ7bTJTqi_HrF

⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - Free will, imagination and the crack in the animal mind
00:47 What can we learn from bonobos sitting in the rain?
04:37 Defining imagination: our internal virtual reality
07:47 The Default Mode Network, daydreaming and the ego
11:08 From mental workspace to the Löwenmensch
14:27 Hand axes, Homo erectus and the slow birth of imagination
17:19 Our greatest tool and our greatest weapon: escaping the reptilian trap
22:14 Free Imagination: the internal avatar and the evolution of tool-making
24:54 Has neuroscience been barking up the wrong tree?
26:54 Libet, the readiness potential and the case against free will
32:31 Distal decisions: where free will really lives
34:34 Baseball, Sapolsky and learning Spanish: why past imagining still counts
38:27 Why volitional attention needs consciousness
39:59 Split brains, Gazzaniga and the interpreter
43:34 Efference copy and schizophrenia: did I do that?
47:14 Planning, priorities and the neuroscience of willpower
52:18 Lobotomies, akinetic mutism and the fire in the belly
55:57 Ritual, Jung and the gods and madness of the imagination
57:52 Breath, Kundalini yoga and training the will
1:00:30 Is your imagination sovereign?
1:01:56 Edward Bernays, The Century of the Self and propaganda
1:04:42 Why do some stories capture us?
1:07:49 Peter Singer's expanding circle
1:12:24 New religions for an expanding circle
1:16:12 The unconscious and the elves in the basement
1:18:59 Emotions, desires and cybernetic beings
1:21:31 Anagnorisis, storytelling and why Harari is wrong
1:24:19 Globalism and the merging of the world's religions
1:27:26 Peter's guest recommendations: Carolyn Dicey Jennings and Eddy Nahmias
1:28:23 Where to find Peter

Dr. Sharon Blackie is an award-winning writer, psychologist and mythologist whose work sits at the junction of depth psychology, mythology and ecology. Coming from a background in behavioural psychology and neuroscience, she has spent over two decades reinstating imagination and intuition as ways of knowing. She is the author of seven books, including the internationally bestselling If Women Rose Rooted and Hagitude, which reframed midlife and elderhood as alchemical rather than diminishing. Her latest, Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, was published in May 2026.

She writes the global-bestselling Substack The Art of Enchantment (60,000+ readers), is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and an Honorary Member of the Association of Jungian Analysts, and recently founded the Nostos Institute, which aims to build a living Western spiritual path out of ancient philosophy and depth psychology.

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In this conversation, I sit down with Sharon to explore what it might mean to re-enchant a disenchanted world. We begin with her winding path: from a fiercely behaviourist psychology department, to a PhD in the neuroscience of anxiety, and finally to the imaginal, mythic heart of depth psychology. Sharon gives a crash course in Neoplatonism (the One, the Nous and the World Soul) and traces how James Hillman and Henri Corbin drew on it to describe the imaginal world: a real, intermediary realm where images, dreams and synchronicities live. We dig into the difference between enchantment and magical thinking, why so much Jungian thought stops short of the metaphysics, and how big dreams and synchronicities tend to convert people rather than arguments. We talk about Plato's Myth of Er and the guardian daimon, why Sharon has focused on reclaiming women's stories and the archetypes of the older woman (the Hagitude project), and what her new Nostos Institute is trying to build. Along the way: fairy tales as the antidote to alienation, why young people are turning to Christianity, and whether a screen-bound, precarious, increasingly mechanised world can find its way back to community and the more-than-human world. This is a conversation for anyone who feels the pull of meaning and belonging but can't quite find the door.

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🔗 Links
- Website: https://sharonblackie.net/
- Substack (The Art of Enchantment): https://sharonblackie.substack.com/

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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - Reinstating imagination as a way of knowing
01:01 From behaviourist neuroscience to the imaginal: Sharon's winding path
05:59 A crash course in Neoplatonism: the One, the Nous and the World Soul
08:55 "Platonism for the masses": Christianity and the problem of institutionalisation
12:52 Iamblichus, theurgy and the imaginal world
15:51 Soul vs. spirit: the missing piece
19:20 Enchantment vs. alienation: Studebaker, Don Quixote and "to sing into"
25:41 Magical thinking vs. enchantment: fantasy or participation?
29:20 The metaphysics Hillman and Jung left out
31:47 What actually converts you: big dreams and the angel cards
33:36 Plato's Myth of Er and the guardian daimon
36:06 Are women more porous to the imaginal?
38:55 Reclaiming women's stories: from Native American writers to Celtic myth
43:32 Beyond the hero's journey: Hagitude and the archetypes of the older woman
48:41 Inside the Nostos Institute: a Western spiritual path
57:47 What "feeling fully alive" actually looks like
1:01:11 Why young people are turning to Christianity: precarity and meaning
1:11:19 Sharon's guest recommendation: David Abram
1:13:16 Where to find Sharon's work

Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist with a PhD from Cambridge whose work cuts against the grain of almost every revolutionary and reformist story on offer. He is the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way Is Shut (2023) and Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (2024).

His central claim is that the Western democracies have become "embedded democracies" — systems in which citizens can no longer imagine an alternative worth sacrificing for, and so remain trapped in a low, stable, and deeply frustrating equilibrium.

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In this conversation, I sit down with Benjamin to explore his diagnosis of the chronic crisis at the heart of liberal democracy. We begin with the idea of the "embedded democracy" and the restricted imaginarium left behind by the catastrophes of the twentieth century, before working through why the culture war functions as a manageable — even useful — form of disagreement, one that dissipates energy rather than threatening the order. Benjamin unpacks his distinction between personal and impersonal hypocrisy, his four levels of legitimacy (perfect, full, minimal and liminal), and the concept of "enclavism": the retreat into faith, family, fandoms and futurism when politics feels futile. We range across Don Quixote and quixotic socialism, the Lord of the Rings image behind his book's subtitle, the problem of capital mobility, NATO defence spending and the Americanisation of European politics, and why a networked, nuclear-armed, drone-fought world makes the old theories of revolutionary change look obsolete. It's a sobering, clarifying conversation for anyone trying to understand why our politics feels simultaneously so turbulent and so stuck.

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You can find Benjamin's work at:

Website: https://benjaminstudebaker.com
About / all links: https://benjaminstudebaker.com/about
Substack: https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/

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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
1:29 What is an "embedded democracy"? Why revolution is off the table
3:10 Other kinds of democracy: Poland, Hungary and living memory
6:31 Is China a viable alternative? The restricted imaginarium
9:55 Ironism: why public culture can't take anything seriously
12:12 The culture war as manufactured, manageable disagreement
14:52 Fusionism, fragmentation and the collapse of coalitions
21:06 Personal vs impersonal hypocrisy in US politics
28:25 The material drivers: universities, consumers and producers
35:14 "The way is shut": the Lord of the Rings reference explained
37:07 Quixotic socialism: acting out a politics without stakes
43:14 Enclavism and the four Fs: faith, family, fandoms, futurism
46:16 Perfect, full, minimal, liminal: the four levels of legitimacy
51:35 Can things get better? The New Deal, the 70s and why we can't go back
54:29 Capital mobility: the unsolved problem at the heart of the crisis
1:00:00 NATO, defence spending and the Americanisation of Europe
1:07:53 In defence of the Westminster system: order over fairness
1:11:03 Why reform stalls: lost threats and "middle capitalism"
1:19:49 Immiseration and the shrinking sense of the possible
1:24:25 Can revolution even happen now? Nukes, drones and integrated economies
1:28:11 Where to find Benjamin's work
1:28:48 Benjamin's guest recommendations

Georg Northoff is Canada Research Chair in Mind, Brain, Imaging, and Neuroethics at the University of Ottawa's Institute of Mental Health Research, a practising psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and philosopher, and one of the founders of neurophilosophy. Over two decades his work has reframed the brain's resting spontaneous activity — the Default Mode Network — as the primary architect of consciousness and selfhood.

He is the author of The Spontaneous Brain, alongside more accessible introductions including NeuroWaves: Brain, Time, and Consciousness (2023) and NeuroPsychoAnalysis (2023).

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In this conversation, I sit down with Georg to explore his spatial-temporal neuroscience — a framework that replaces the mind-body problem with the world-brain relationship. We begin with AI consciousness, move into the Default Mode Network and why depression is a brain running too slowly, his non-dual awareness study with meditators, his critique of Heidegger as still anthropocentric, and Whitehead's process ontology. A conversation that starts with ChatGPT and ends near the edge of what it means to exist.

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🔗 Links
Website: https://www.georgnorthoff.com
NeuroWaves: Brain, Time, and Consciousness (2023): https://www.mqup.ca/Books/N/Neurowaves2
NeuroPsychoAnalysis (2023): https://www.amazon.com/Neuropsychoanalysis-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions-Psychoanalysis/dp/0367678047
The Spontaneous Brain: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038072/the-spontaneous-brain/

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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro — Georg Northoff and the spontaneous brain
01:15 Can AI be conscious? The case of temporal synchronisation
03:21 OpenClaw, heartbeats, and whether AI is moving towards experience
06:00 Temporal windows: how the brain processes a word, a sentence, and a self
10:12 The spontaneous brain — why background activity is the game changer
13:56 A short history of the Default Mode Network
16:29 Time is everything: depression, anxiety, and the speed of neural flow
22:07 Self as continuity — why the DMN has the longest timescales
29:57 The paradigm shift: from cognitive to temporal neuroscience
38:03 Where does self emerge from temporal structure?
42:33 Self is more basic than consciousness
44:55 Jung, Freud, and cultural imprints in spontaneous brain activity
49:11 Non-dual awareness: the meditation study and what it shows
51:05 The World-Brain problem — replacing mind-body with a new question
56:22 Heidegger and Dasein: existential time, but still anthropocentric
1:00:23 The tango: self at the seam of inner and outer time
1:02:29 Whitehead's process ontology and the Copernican reversal
1:04:37 Why this work resonates more in China and Iran than in the West
1:09:13 Guest recommendation: Federico Zilio
1:09:59 Where to find Georg's work

Keegan Kjeldsen hosts The Nietzsche Podcast and the Untimely Reflections (essentialsalts) YouTube channel — a deep four-year project working through Nietzsche, his forerunners back to the ancient world, and his afterlives in 20th- and 21st-century thought. He’s also a doom metal guitarist with Destroyer of Light and Slumbering Sun, and the author of The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll, a memoir-meets-aesthetics inquiry written on the road through Europe.

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I sat down with Keegan to work through his concept of übermodernism — what’s “over and above” modernism, in the same Nietzschean spirit as the Übermensch is over and above man. We trace the history of “the modern” all the way back to Petrarch in the 14th century, work through Nietzsche’s perspectivism and his critique of the genealogical fallacy, and ask where the next modernism is meant to come from. A conversation for anyone tired of fighting over whether Nietzsche belongs to the right, the left, or the postmodernists.

📚 I’m hosting the Interintellect book club this Sunday 10th May to work through the third and final essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. Tickets: https://interintellect.com/salons/what-is-the-meaning-of-ascetic-ideals-friedrich-nietzsche-on-the-genealogy-of-morality

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🔗 Links
🎙️ Untimely Reflections (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/@untimelyreflections
🎧 The Nietzsche Podcast (Apple): https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-nietzsche-podcast/id1573808070
☕ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/untimelyreflections
📖 The Ritual Madness of Rock & Roll: https://www.blackrosewriting.com/biographymemoir/p/theritualmadnessofrockandroll

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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 James’s Intro
01:59 Welcome and opening with Keegan
02:41 What is übermodernism? Going over and above modernism
05:03 Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the death of objective truth
08:14 Nietzsche as the canary in the 20th-century coalmine
11:47 When did “the modern” begin? Antiqua, nova and the first modernists
13:07 Rousseau’s letter and the first use of “modernist” as a pejorative
19:00 Genealogies, lineage and the string of pearls fallacy
28:42 Reading Nietzsche on the utility of an organ vs. its origin
34:29 Heidegger, Descartes and the “where it all went wrong” move
39:59 Nietzsche’s lectures on rhetoric: language is rhetoric, not information
43:59 Plato’s win over the Sophists as a sophist’s own move
48:59 We Philologists: the Greeks weren’t who you think they were
55:59 Petrarch and the birth of “the modern” as an age
58:29 Toledo and the Muslim transmission of the ancient texts
1:04:29 McGilchrist and the right-and-left hemisphere narrative
1:09:59 Machiavelli, humanism and man as the actor of history
1:15:29 Beyond correctness: value-for-life as the new test of truth
1:22:12 Are we übermodern yet? Great politics vs. petty politics
1:29:49 Keegan’s guest recommendations: Studebaker and Möller
1:31:29 Where to find Keegan and his next book on Nietzsche’s Hellenism

Dr. Aldrich Chan is a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist and founder of the Center for Neuropsychology and Consciousness. An adjunct professor at Pepperdine University, Aldrich's research on the default mode network, mindfulness and trauma bridges neuroscience with ancient Taoist philosophy. He is the author of Reassembling Models of Reality (2021) and Seven Principles of Nature: How We Strayed and How We Return (2025).

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In this conversation, we explore Aldrich's synthesis of neuropsychology, Taoism and evolutionary mismatch theory — his SAD theory (separation, alienation, discord), the seven principles of nature (CPR WEST), subcortical midline structures and our original experience of connectedness, and what it means to live in alignment with nature.

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🔗 Links
Aldrich's website: https://www.drchancnc.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/draldrichan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drchancnc
Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@drchancnc
Book: https://geni.us/7principlesofnature

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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - Neuropsychology meets Taoism
00:43 Seven Principles of Nature and the CPR WEST acronym
03:58 The SAD theory: separation, alienation and discord
04:53 The default mode network
06:29 The triple network: DMN, salience and central executive
10:05 The boat metaphor
12:58 Separation as a natural phase
15:16 Alienation and evolutionary mismatch theory
17:21 Movement mismatch
19:09 Social connection as the most obvious mismatch
21:07 The agricultural revolution's consequences
27:44 Discord and dualism
31:01 The nature–culture debate
36:23 CPR WEST unpacked
39:14 Creativity and uncertainty
41:18 Certainty is the death of a question
43:55 Vipassana and reframing the stress response
45:07 Two stress pathways
51:06 Chaos and order
52:57 Relationship and neuroecology
54:03 Multi-level selection theory
57:59 Ego boundary dissolution
1:00:58 Subcortical midline structures
1:02:04 Jung and archetypes as brainstem activity
1:05:28 Jung called himself a Taoist
1:06:03 Shadow integration and wholeness
1:08:42 Dynamic equilibrium
1:12:03 Flow states
1:13:52 Spontaneity and play
1:18:26 Transformation
1:19:52 Wrapping up
1:22:05 Where to find Aldrich
1:23:14 Guest recommendations

Dr. Erik Goodwyn is a practising psychiatrist with a background in neurobiology who bridges the worlds of neuroscience, Jungian psychology, and fantasy. Erik is co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies and has written dozens of academic papers along with books on the neurobiology of the gods, dreams, and archetypes. Last year he published his first fantasy novel, King of the Forgotten Darkness, which won the Literary Titan Golden Book Award.

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In this return visit, we dive deep into who actually creates the dream – the Invisible Storyteller that isn't your conscious self. We explore the neuroscience behind this, discussing the Default Mode Network, Salience Network, and Executive Control Network, and what they reveal about dreaming, meaning-making, and the deeply non-egoic nature of consciousness. Erik shares clinical insights into Dissociative Identity Disorder as evidence of an underlying organising principle, we tangle with what it means for consciousness to be "non-egoic," and we work through his groundbreaking definition of archetypes through Cognitive Metaphor Theory. It's a conversation that challenges everything you think you know about who you are.

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🔗 Links
- Erik's website: https://erikgoodwyn.com
- Erik's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theimaginarium

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⏳ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro - The Invisible Storyteller
01:39 Greeting and reflections on James's reading
03:35 What is the Invisible Storyteller?
06:01 Jung's avoidance of reductionism through mythic language
08:16 The Default Mode Network and dreaming
10:27 The three networks: default mode, salience, and executive control
15:27 Memory consolidation, identity formation, emotional regulation, future planning
18:29 Is the Invisible Storyteller the unconscious?
22:18 Deeper processing independent of conscious ego
25:58 Recurrent dreams and the role of conscious engagement
28:40 The Invisible Storyteller as meaning-making
31:07 Dreams versus storytelling: memory Olympics and metaphor
36:58 The role of the right hemisphere and symbolism
41:04 The Invisible Storyteller as process or personality?
44:18 Dissociative Identity Disorder and organising principles
50:33 DID as evidence of an organising intelligence
55:43 The specificity of dissociative amnesia
58:22 Non-egoic consciousness and emergent properties
1:02:14 Consciousness arising from complex systems
1:05:44 AI image generation as analogy for dream creation
1:10:56 The Invisible Storyteller as personality versus ancestry and genome
1:15:32 Jungian vision and updating Jung's theory
1:18:40 Archetypes through Cognitive Metaphor Theory
1:22:37 Spontaneous thoughts and universal challenges
1:25:58 Primary metaphors and innate mappings
1:29:20 Danger and darkness as innate mappings
1:32:17 Definition of archetype and falsifiability
1:34:47 Building on Gary Clark's work and Anthony Stevens
1:36:25 Gratitude and future conversations

Adriana Forte is a Brazilian-born writer, facilitator, and developmental thinker currently based in a rural intentional community in Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia. Originally trained as a journalist, Adriana has spent years investigating the intersection of women's cyclical biology, embodied knowing, and the structures of modern life. She runs retreats and workshops through her Substack platform C-Lab (A Lab for a Cyclically Informed Society), and is currently completing a book on the spell of modernity and the role of the matriarch as a force for cultural repair.________________

In this conversation, James sits down with Adriana to explore one of the most under-examined questions in contemporary culture: what happens when society is built around a linear, continuous model of productivity — and half the population runs on a fundamentally cyclical one? Drawing on her own journey from Brazil through Hong Kong and India to off-grid life in rural Australia, Adriana maps the hormonal landscape of the female cycle and argues that the oscillation between estrogen and progesterone doesn't just produce moods — it produces a distinct mode of subjectivity, perception, and thought. We explore the cultural erasure of rites of passage, the psychological costs of the contraceptive pill, the wisdom encoded in perimenopause and menopause, and why Adriana believes the matriarch — the post-menopausal woman — may be the missing counter-energy to the relentless forward drive of modernity. The conversation moves through evolutionary biology, embodied philosophy, grassroots community-building, and genuine hope for a more rhythmically intelligent future.________________

You can find Adriana's work at:

Substack (C-Lab): https://theclab.substack.com/

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⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Intro - Our Bellingen Connection
5:41 How Adriana ended up on this journey
12:56 Critique of Modernity and Birth Interventions
15:23 Rhythms and female psychology
24:38 A map of the menstrual cycle
39:11 The Influence of Modernity on Women’s Psyche
45:59 Transgender and phenomenology of hormones
52:01 The oscillating nature of female psychology
59:25 The spell of the System on modern psychology
1:09:15 The challenge of organising around cyclical society
1:15:03 Adriana’s Matriarch Book
1:18:43 Where to get more from Adriana
1:19:39 Adriana’s Guest Recommendation

Dr. Michael R. Montgomery (PhD, MA, MSc, MSW, LCSW) is an existential psychoanalyst who represents a radical wing of contemporary depth psychology—one deeply influenced by R.D. Laing's anti-psychiatry tradition, phenomenology, and a fierce commitment to humanising extreme mental states. Based between Boston, Massachusetts and having deep roots in post-conflict Belfast, Montgomery positions himself as both clinician and activist, bridging psychoanalytic practice with community healing, peace work, and cultural critique.
His signature concept—"psychophobia" (society's fear of the mind and extreme mental states)—anchors a body of work challenging psychiatric medicalisation, advocating for phenomenological approaches that honour lived experience, and reclaiming psychosis, mania, and other "extreme states" as potentially transformative rather than purely pathological.
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In this conversation, Michael Montgomery shares his journey through various philosophical and spiritual traditions, emphasising the importance of bridging Eastern and Western thought in psychotherapy. He discusses the role of silence, community, and personal experience in healing, while also addressing the complexities of faith and human nature. The dialogue explores the concept of psychophobia and the transformative power of music and community in fostering connection and understanding.
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🔗 Links
- Michael's podcast: https://psychophobia.com/
- Michael's website: https://drmontgomery.com/
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⏳Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:34 How Michael knows Jon Mills
03:04 The art of speaking across ideological lines
04:36 Michael's relationship with Buddhism
08:00 Existential psychoanalysis
09:33 The R.D. Laing lineage
12:06 The importance of existential psychotherapy
13:02 Michael's experience growing up in the Troubles in Belfast
13:43 Michael's quest for answers
16:26 Michael's World Record attempt in the silent room
21:23 The endurance of spiritual lineages
22:38 Why no peace on Earth?
26:19 What Buddhism offers
27:26 The revival of relationship with Christianity
31:43 Does God exist?
37:02 What is psychophobia?
46:47 The McDonaldisation of healthcare
52:12 Michael's disillusion with the mental health system
57:21 Plurality: do we have many selves?
01:06:41 Michael's experience with dreams and consciousness
01:08:53 Elevated states and mental health
01:14:35 How dreams can change your perception of reality
01:17:08 Voices, language patterns and the nature of psyche
01:21:06 Michael's guest recommendation: Ken Wilber
01:22:11 Where to get more from Michael

Layman Pascal is a Canadian "feral philosopher" and host of The Integral Stage podcast who has become a central connector and theorist in the overlapping worlds of metamodernism, integral theory, and Game B. His signature contributions—the Metaphysics of Adjacency, the Integration Surplus Model of spirituality, and Metashamanics—offer a sophisticated yet playful bridge between abstract philosophy and embodied transformation. Known for his capacity to hold complexity with humour, Pascal brings both philosophical rigour and playful irreverence to questions of meaning-making in an age of metacrisis.

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In this conversation, we talk Nietzsche, metashamanism, and the ontology and epistemology of entities.We delve into the role of personal experience in shaping philosophical thought, and the implications of neurodiversity in understanding shamanic practices. The dialogue also touches on the nature of imagination, creativity, and the unpredictability of inspiration, exploring our different approaches to life from the moist pragmatism to dry scholarism.

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🔗 More from Layman

Layman's website: https://www.laymanpascal.com/

Layman's Substack: https://laymanpascal.substack.com/

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⏳ Timestamps:

00:00 Intro - the Feral Philosopher

03:19 Blaise Pascal's spiritual note

05:18 Nietzsche and the irrationality of philosophers

08:55 The power of irrationality in humanity's story

10:41 Layman's book on Nietzsche

12:00 The Integral Nietzsche

14:13 What if Nietzsche hadn't gone mad?

16:06 The enlightened Nietzsche

19:33 The shamanic Nietzsche

22:04 What is metashamanics?

23:07 Shamanic neurodivergence

26:26 Attributes of the well-adjusted shaman

28:33 Liminality and the epochal emergence of the shamanic

31:31 The shamanoid Elvis

33:17 The reality of entities

37:05 Layman Pascal: pragmatist?

47:12 The power of trance

51:50 The muse as entity

56:34 Layman's guest recommendation

57:59 More from Layman