 Welcome to Skeptico where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I think we have the right guest to fill that promise today. Dr. Jack Hunter of paraanthropology fame is joining us. Jack, welcome to Skeptico. Welcome back. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. Well, you were on a while back with this very excellent book that I have up here on the video screen, talking with the spirits, extraordinary work. And you followed that up with a new book, Engaging the Anomalous, which we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about both of those. But tell us a little bit about this new book in general, what it's about and all that good stuff. Yeah, well, this book is basically a collection of essays that I've written over the last seven years or so. It's kind of written alongside my thesis. So in a way it's kind of like a mini version of my thesis. My thesis actually takes parts of the chapters from this book and kind of expands on them and makes them a little bit more academic. But really, these are the essays that I was writing as I was trying to think through the whole process of writing my thesis right from the very beginning. And they were all published in different kinds of journals. For example, the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena, their journal, they were one of the first groups to kind of publish any of my writing. So there's a few chapters in the book from there. There's some other chapters that were one was published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Others were published in various magazines and different places like that. So it's kind of like a hodgepodge of different of my thoughts. I think it's unfair to call it a hodgepodge. You know, we should also alert people, remind people that you are the publisher editor of this excellent journal, Paranthropology, which oh, there's so much packed even in that name there. But I wanted to point this out because I thought it was so interesting. George Hansen, the trickster guy wrote the forward to your book. And I love this one little piece out of there. He said, here's a young guy who, when he started his PhD program eight years ago, founded a journal, Paranthropology. And he said, quite audacious. And I thought, wow, isn't that kind of sum it up? I mean, you're such a cool guy, a mellow guy. I love the way you push these boundaries. And you're mellow, but you're incredibly audacious too. It is rather audacious to say, hey, yeah, I'm just going to take anthropology, turn it upside down, kind of take it from this anomalous parapsychology, paranthropology kind of perspective. And yeah, that's just what I'll do to start my PhD thesis eight years ago. What's that all about? Well, really the journal started because when I became interested in the possibility of an anthropological approach to the paranormal, I was looking for academic journals, different kinds of venues where anthropologists would be talking about these kinds of things. And obviously I came across the parapsychology journals, the work of the Society for Psychical Research, and then eventually I discovered the journal for the Anthropology of Consciousness. And that seemed to be kind of like the most kind of fitting for what I was interested in. But then when I started to read the journal itself, I realized that over the years, and this is something that other people have picked up on as well, Mark A. Schroll wrote a really good article about this called With a Psy in the Anthropology of Consciousness. And basically over the years, the kind of more extreme kind of high strangeness, weird paranormal kind of stuff had been expunged from the journal. And they've gone down a much kind of safer route of thinking about the Anthropology of Consciousness. So what I wanted to do was kind of provide a forum where anthropologists could talk about those things that even the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness weren't really talking about anymore. So everything from Psy and supernormal abilities through to UFOs and different kinds of entity encounters, all sorts of things. So that's really what the kind of impetus for the journal was to open up the anthropological discussion to include all of the extreme paranormal or the highly weird paranormal. Excellent. Awesome, Jack. Right up our alley here at Skeptico. Perfect home for this kind of work. So you know what I thought we'd do next, and this has been kind of the new format I'm playing out, is let's just very quickly hit some definitions because I do hate the kind of inside baseball that leaves people on the sides. We're going to get into some pretty deep stuff, but at a very high level, anthropology. Yeah. So in a nutshell, anthropology is the study of human beings. So you can take that kind of really broadly and consider anthropology as the study of anything to do with humans, human cultures, human societies, human beliefs, human experiences. Traditionally in academia, anthropology has been split into four kind of sub-disciplines. So you've got social and cultural anthropology, which is the study of human societies and cultures, which is kind of my main area of anthropology. So that includes all anthropology of religion and all of that kind of stuff. We've got biological anthropology, which is the study of human evolution. It's a fairly kind of like a hardcore biological approach. There's linguistic anthropology, which is obviously the study of human languages. And then finally, we've got archaeology, which is the study of past human civilizations. So like I said, my main area has been in the kind of social and cultural anthropology. And in social and cultural anthropology, the main research method is something called ethnography, which is all to do with going into different societies or different social settings and kind of participating it on a first person level and then writing about that afterwards. And actually it's that process of ethnography that kind of has ultimately opened anthropology up to all of these other, these new different kinds of domains of research. Great. Awesome. That is so important. I think that introduction because it also explains, okay, so here's a guy, Jack Hunter, that says, well, you know, there is this group right down the road from me in Bristol here who sits and does medium communication and, you know, transmedium and does all this crazy stuff. Let's go sit with them. Well, that's an anthropologist would go sit with them and talk with them. So that opens up that door. And at the same time, explain again, very briefly at a very high level, some of the natural and some of the very justifiable criticisms or concerns that people have had about anthropology and kind of the observer effect, if you will, you know, that can you really go observe and do you become a part of it? So just at a very high level, just that any anthropology student would kind of get that for me. So thinking about the kind of the role of the observer. Anthropology, again, is unique among the sciences really. Some people consider it to be the most scientific of the arts and the least scientific of the sciences, because our main scientific tool in ethnography is our own body and the way we participate in the social and cultural environments that we find ourselves in. So automatically, you have this kind of a problem. It's been a problem throughout the history of anthropology of how objective as our research tools. So we're kind of in there from the very beginning. And this has led to something called a kind of like a taboo in anthropology against what has been called going native. So if you spend too much time with a particular group, it's thought that you can lose your objectivity. But actually, one of the things that's arisen out of my own research into anthropology and the anthropology of the paranormal is that it's only through losing our objectivity really that we can begin to fully understand what's going on in these situations. So I don't tip your hand too much. Keep it on the level. Next definition, next word, para anthropology. And we need to kind of keep it at that high level, but then hint at why we really don't want para anything, right? We don't really want para, but that's the word we're stuck with. But first, how have you used that term, coined that term in your journal? And what does it mean for someone who runs across it for the first time? One of the ways that I tend to think about para anthropology is you think about para psychology. It's a discipline that deals with phenomena that are not fully explained by the mainstream laws of the mainstream explanatory models of psychology. Okay, so we're dealing with things like, you know, telepathy and science things which mainstream materialist psychology says can't exist, but then the data seems to suggest that it does. So with anthropology, what we're interested in or with para anthropology rather what we're interested in is phenomena that the dominant models, the dominant explanatory frameworks of anthropology are not able to fully explain. So sorry, the dominant models that we've got are things like social functionalism and biomedical reductionism and all of these kinds of things. These are the cognitive approach again. These are the dominant explanatory frameworks that are used in anthropology. But then when we come to analyze things like spirit mediumship or different kinds of paranormal phenomena, we find that those explanatory frameworks don't really work. They don't match the data and they don't really tell us anything about what's going on. So that's where I think para anthropology is. It's a dealing with phenomena that anthropology, mainstream anthropology doesn't really have an adequate explanation for. Great. Ontology. When we talk about ontology, we can take it in two different ways. We can take it in the philosophical sense of an inquiry or a study into the nature of being. So thinking about what exists. And then we can take it in the kind of anthropological sense as referring to kind of like a set of things that a particular group of people holds that exists. If that makes sense. So some people have said that when we talk about ontology in anthropology, what we're really talking about is just another word for culture or worldview. But actually, it's more than that. We're not just talking about beliefs, but we're talking about kind of whole world as only in shamanic society, for example, is going to contain a whole load of other kinds of entities, beings, different kinds of things. To a kind of Western materialist ontology. So yeah, that's what an ontology is. It's a it's the sum of all the things that exists within a particular framework. Awesome. 40 in. Okay. Yeah. This is a really important one for me. Because like as I was saying, when I founded Paranthropology Journal, I wanted to focus on those kind of more high strangeness kinds of things. And the 14 approach provides a nice kind of method. It gives us a way of thinking about those without bracketing them out in a way that social sciences have tended to do in the past. And just make sure so in case people don't know, quickly cover who Charles Fort was and he was a writer in the kind of towards the tail end of the 19th century. And he wrote these four books, which were basically collections of all of these accounts of strange unusual phenomena that he'd found documented in various scientific journals and newspapers and things. So he gathered all of these things together and he called them his damned facts. These things that sciences. I'm sorry, your video cut out. So I'll use that opportunity to kind of interject and just leave in a couple examples. I mean the reigning frogs and this kind of stuff, which we can't get around the fact that this is documented. This is in the news that we can correlate it with other news events. This seems to be an accurate reporting of what's going on at this time and they said there was a solar eclipse or was a solar eclipse. They said these, these hordes invaded and they invaded and right along beside that they have, hey, you know, all these farmers out in the field observe the frogs, you know, flying from the soap. Why would we dismiss one account than another and that was kind of Charles Fort saying yeah, why would we we can't let's just at least record these right you want to respond on that. Yeah, exactly. He's just saying that there's all of this stuff that happens out in the world but our scientific models have actively ignored for the past, you know, 200 300 odd years. He thinks that they've been pushed aside so that we know for whatever reason because they don't fit in with our established models or whatever. And really what he wants us to do is challenge science with all of this damned data to put it on the table again and also to encourage us to think about things in slightly different ways. So one of the things I've taken most from Charles Fort is his idea of intermediateism, which is his kind of philosophical perspective on the nature of reality. You could call it his ontology really. And he says that everything kind of exists on a spectrum or kind of like on a sliding scale between realness on the one hand and unrealness on the other. So that everything that exists in the world exists somewhere on this spectrum, which basically means that anything that exists is not 100% real and it's not 100% unreal as well. Awesome. So here's where I want to go next and I gave you a heads up on this beforehand. You did an interview not too long ago with the very excellent Gordon White and the interview you guys did was terrific. And I thought it could also serve as tremendous springboard to our discussion because so many of the topics you brought up in that interview are things that I want to talk about. And also I love this idea of interleaving these important conversations that people are having through shows like Gordon's and seeing if we can take it to the next level because I always hate starting at ground zero like we always have to do rather than say, This is what came up for me when you guys were talking. So with your permission, let me play into listeners so they can hear it a clip from that interview that you did with Gordon. And then we can kind of chat about that as as a launching off point into a number of things that we're going to talk about. So we're trying to think of how we could frame it because I thought of other terms before there are terms like a post secular anthropology and all these different ones. And really they're all talking about kind of the same thing. It's just it hasn't kind of crystallized yet. Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just think it needs a barrel roll because paranormals besides super is above meta is above. I think you just need to go to know what fuck you. It's animus anthropology. That's what it is. I'm just what it is. Okay, so there's some really cool stuff there that we can talk about. First of all, I love Gordon's barrel roll. I think that's just just very cool. And then I love when you guys get into, you know, you take the ontology thing that we just talked about. And then you talk about our maybe Gordon, what are you does, you know, ontological flooding and I just thought, Wow, isn't this a cool kind of level three conversation that I want to jump in on and talk about. And maybe you can frame up for people who aren't really getting what that's all about. Tell them what it's all about because I think it's right gets right to the heart of where you're at what you've done some of the most exciting things about this book and your work in general. What are you guys talking about there? Ontological flooding is the term that I've developed for my kind of approach to thinking about all of these competing explanations. Actually, I don't I don't really think of them even as competing explanations just explanations that give us snippets of the truth. Can I interject something there, Jack? Yeah, because, you know, this discussion that you guys had actually spurred some creative thoughts for me and that played into another interview that I just did with Chris Knowles. And let me talk you down that path because it's kind of interesting because when you say ontological flooding, you're really contrasting that I think with ontological bracketing, which says bracketing, which is always should only understand it this way. We should only understand it this way. So this conversation I'm having with Chris Knowles and he's talking about the New York City gala and how the Catholic Church has somehow created this crazy thing where they're loaning items to this basically Luciferian kind of festival and all this crazy stuff. And I said, wait a minute. This is reality bracketing. This is on one hand saying, oh, this is just fashion. Don't worry about it. It's just fashion. And on another level, it's saying, well, no, this is spiritual. This is about the church. Oh, this is political. This is about the Pope and Catholicism. Oh, no, this is about mind control and culture shaping. It's reality bracketing. And I was drawn in that direction because of this conversation that you and Gordon had. And I think the parallels are are important to me. And I think they can be drawn out in a way that you're taking it from an academic thing, but it's the same thing when you say ontological bracketing, you're talking about reality bracketing, you're talking about getting into a certain blinders mode where you say, oh, no, I can only look at this culture through this lens. And I must not look at any of this other stuff that's going on. And what I think you're saying is, no, we need to look at what's going on from all these different realities. And we need to look at them all at the same time, which is even more difficult. And we need to break through the 40 and damn, which I think you have a great thing about the damn damn thing. So I just wanted to set the table with all that stuff and thank you guys for kind of teeing that whole thing up for me. But ontological bracketing, reality bracketing, reality flooding ontological flooding. Let's go. Yeah, so I think what really comes out of this idea of ontological flooding is the idea that we need to embrace complexity and not be so kind of set in our ways when trying with trying to find simple explanations for things. So the example that I use to explain ontological flooding a lot of the time is with spirit mediumship where you have all of these competing explanations which think that they've sorted it all out. So you could, like I said before, social protest theories that say that spirit mediumship is all about social protest. And then you've got biological medical theories that say that spirit mediumship is just a biological aberration. It's some kind of an illness or a disease. There's the psychodynamic theories, all sorts of different theories. But at the end of the day, none of them is a completely satisfying explanation in themselves. And actually, when you start to piece them all together, you see that we're dealing with something that is way more complex than any of those individual explanatory frameworks has been able to kind of accommodate. So ontological flooding is really saying, and as you were saying, that we need to take into account all of these various perspectives at the same time to get the best kind of or the nearest to reality kind of perspective that we can get. And would you also be open to the idea that we need to exercise some discernment there, because there's a sometimes, especially in academia and anthropology, I'm sure is not immune to this. There's the move towards relativism. It's then we're going to let them all in at the same level because they're all valid views. It's like, no bullshit. And as a matter of fact, what's even maybe interesting from this conspiracy angle from this conspiratorial angle, maybe some of it is misinformation. Maybe some of it is intentionally designed to lead us in the wrong direction. We were talking a minute ago about the trickster himself or the trickster author George Hansen, and he has to leave open the possibility that misinformation, head fake, it may be going on at a bunch of different levels. It may be going on at the spiritual level that we don't understand in addition to definitely being going on from a cultural shaping MK ultra CIA deep state kind of thing. So the relativism issue. Do you want to talk to that a little bit? Yeah, well, what what I'm really thinking is that ontological flooding is is more than just relativism. Relativism really is saying that it's placing everything on the same level, but at the same time it's not it's still doing this ontological bracketing thing that we've been talking about. So when when with relativism you're saying those guys believe that those guys believe that but really we know that underlying it all the Western ontology or the Western materialist view of the world is actually the correct one. So my ontological flooding is not about beliefs. It's about. It's about the thing that actually really is there the thing that actually is real. It's not about beliefs about what that thing is. It's about the thing itself and that's what we're trying to get at. So yes there is misinformation and there's all sorts of things that are, you know, guiding us away from apprehending the thing that is really real. But at the end of the day. We're trying to get some experience and participate with that thing. Does that make sense. Give us it does but give us an example, particularly maybe a personal example in your work because, you know, again let me remind people, especially from that first book that she wrote and that you're there in the trenches. I mean you're doing some of this shit, you're living it, you know, so maybe some examples will help ground people and to what you're talking about. Yeah, well, this is actually this give me an opportunity to talk about something that I haven't really talked about before. I didn't really bring it up in my thesis either but again it's to do with to do with the extent to which we allow ourselves to participate in these realities. When I was first getting interested in spirit mediumship in the spirit lodge. I was really thoroughly in there. I was going to say answers, you know, more than once a week, maybe two or three times a week. Like I said, I mentioned this before but it's kind of I was not an interesting point. It's basically right down the street from you. That's going to the hills of Brazil that have never been seen though a white man before. This is right down the road. Yeah, that's the thing anthropology is about study of human beings so you can do anthropology wherever there's human beings. I would also suggest you could do anthropology just on your own using your own body as subject matter. But anyway, as I was participating in this on a really regular basis, it started to see through into my everyday life. So the point when I was the most engaged with talking with spirits regularly interacting with mediums and thinking about it. I started to have all sorts of other kinds of experiences filter through. So I would have hypnagogic experiences where I'd see things appearing in front of my eyes when I wake up. And I started to see little flashes of light which I took as indications that these little flashes of light were kind of guiding me on my way. So the point I'm trying to make is at the point of my deepest engagement with the paranormal and the paranormal seemed to start kind of like looking back at me. And I think that's where all of my kind of approach takes us and where we were moving away from thinking about beliefs towards thinking about participation and ontologies and the things that arise in your experience of existence at that point. And then the thing is then translating that into a kind of an academic context. And that's where things start to become a little bit, you know, more difficult, I think. Why go there? Why go there? And I say that is a kind of to provoke you because I think there's some good reasons why we do want to go there in terms of trying to pull it back into this academic model, this science at its best model. But what's your personal answer to why go there? You had the experience, man, go with it. Go find the next experience. Why are you trying to pull it back? Yeah, because I think that academia serves a purpose and that purpose is communicating ideas. And I think I think it's really important that we have as many different kinds of ideas floating around in our kind of like in our culture as you possibly can. And academia is one way of presenting ideas to not just to other academics, but also to the to the general population. If we can find a way of talking to people, talking to academics and the public about these kinds of experiences, then we're opening up that dialogue and enabling them to share their experiences as well. And then we're building up a kind of like, I guess, a new culture in a way where we're open to talk about it. True ontological flooding, creating your own flood, creating additional waves. Exactly. I love your thing about it. I just have to go back and touch on it. But the dam breaking of the dam of the 40 and dam, that's such a cool point. Can you just talk about that a bit? Well, that's kind of that's what I'm trying to do. We're in academia is break that dam that's holding back all of those damned facts and allow those to flow in Jeff Kreipel's terms to like to put them back on the table. That's why I think it's important that we are, or at least we try to translate some of the richness of our lived experience into academic language, because we're communicating that experience in a particular way, admittedly. I mean, it's a limited way in a lot of senses as well. But it's an attempt to communicate as clearly as possible, and as kind of as honestly as possible, that experience of the world, which is an important thing. Okay, so I want to go back and pick up on this other part of the process for me the skeptical process I like to take people through. And that's this look for the conspiracy part. And we talked about that a little bit. The basic idea being that we can't assume that all the information we're getting back, regardless the source is real, valid information, whatever that means. So we have to look for the conspiracy, whether it's all those things that we said, whether it's in this world or the other world. And I'll tell you the, the piece that I wanted to queue up that relates to that, I think, in maybe a strange way for some people, but it does for me and I definitely think you'll see the connection. And that's my recent interview with Dr. Dean Raiden, who of course has abandoned parapsychology for magic. Let me play this clip for you from my interview with him, and then we can chat about it. I've talked to Joe McMonagall about how he does remote viewing as an example. And he says, well, he knows that next Tuesday, somebody's going to hand them a photograph and he needs to describe it. Well, the moment he knows that that's a task in the future, he has the answer already. So how did he, and he has it in full detail. I mean, he described the submarine nine months in advance in great gory detail. So the idea that somebody can describe a sequence of events that in the future, that is vertically correct, is well established as a Psi phenomenon that people can do. And there's no better way of getting into a Psi conducive state than having your body go away for a while. So I would say then that, yes, I completely understand the counterarguments, but I've not persuaded. I'm not persuaded until we get to a point where we have a way of communicating in some fashion to the person when they are in fact dead. And the only way I can think of doing that at this point, and maybe through mediumship, but even in mediumship, we don't know where the information comes from. Yeah, but if we're going to play this consensus reality game, which at some point of consciousness is fundamental, if everything is, as you were alluding to before, if everything is a thought form. If we are creating our reality, literally, and creating some of the entities that we interact with, if we're creating those crows, well, then really all bets are off anyway. Right. The idea of bringing any of this into the lab. What is a lab measuring it? What is measuring all that stuff goes out the window. No, no, no, no. See, it is very important not to do a regression to the past. We don't simply want to accept something because that may be the explanation that makes us feel good. I'd love to think that the consciousness persists in some way, as I think most people would, but I also aware. That's not the issue. No, just make sure we're talking about the same thing. I'm saying every experiment in your lab can be explained by spirit intervention that you're not aware of, that you will never be aware of, because if spirits have this power to present themselves or not present themselves, or for to believe the accounts, deceive or not deceive, then you will have no way of knowing. You're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. There's an order of intelligence that I'm just hypothesizing here, which is much greater. So the idea that you're somehow going to be able to measure that is, if we're going to go down that path, we can always pull that card out in the same way that you're pulling out that card with your got to experience science. I mean, at some point we have to say, okay, we're going to play this game of consensus reality of science game that we can collect and we can measure. But at another level, we can't collect. We can't measure. That's the idea that consciousness is fundamental and everything is a thought form. So the question then is, can we approach magical concepts? Let's say, can we approach those ideas in a way which is not dependent on faith? I'll end it there. I'm sorry to play such a long clip, but I do think we're now getting to one of the fundamental issues associated with your work and this work in general, is that, yes, we do want to pull it back to academia, but once you go native to use your term or misuse your term, maybe, can we ever really go back if we accept this extended realm? Can we then put on a different hat and say, well, wait a minute, let me measure it? That's a good question. And it is the crux of the issue that we're getting out here. Once we've established, you know, that this complex reality is out there, I think what it means is that we have to develop a new kind of a science that our old methods of science are not necessarily going to work anymore with this new expanded view of reality. And we're going to have to develop some kind of a new science to deal with it. And there's a good chance, and this is one of the ideas that was coming across in the discussion with Gordon, that our kind of older ways of thinking, maybe kind of animistic ways of thinking, we're thinking about an animist ontology, animist anthropology, perhaps some kind of an animistic way of thinking might be kind of closer to the, not to the, well, yeah, to the truth, closer, more more accurate model of reality. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. But it still doesn't, I think, get to the fundamental problem. And I guess, because it's a problem of, that's a psychological problem, it's a human nature problem, is that that we like to measure when like the illusion of control, the illusion that, oh, yeah, I got it. Now I measured it down. Oh, wait, I measured it even further. This is even more statistically accurate. So let's take a minute before we jump into animism, which is the next topic I want to talk about, because I got some ideas on that too, is this idea of the backdoor materialism, which I have the utmost respect for Dean Raiden. I think he was a treasure, an absolute treasure. And I think he had a great response to what I was laying on the table, and I like his response. But I do think there's some backdoor materialism going on here. So we get to the point where we go, okay, this materialistic model that everything is this big clockwork operation that we can measure. Okay, we give up on that. And then we go down that path and then a little bit later we found our self going, but yeah, can I now measure this other weird stuff that I'm getting into. So backdoor materialism, I throw that on the table. Tell me what you think. Yeah. Well, again, I think it comes down to this idea that the science that we're using at the moment is, you know, we're going to come to a point where we realize that it's outdated. Yeah, yeah, but that's an easy answer. I mean, it is, I mean, it would be an alternative to that science. I remember a while back speaking with Raymond Moody, and I love Raymond Moody, the guy who originally coined the term near death experience, wrote the very first and seminal book on it. And we had a couple of interesting conversations with him, and he's such a character, because he talks in these riddles and rhymes and he does so intentionally. And his point was nearly the same, but he made an important distinction that I thought was worth pursuing. And he said that our system of logic and our system of language is not adequate to address those. And I was particularly drawn to his idea that our system of logic doesn't work, because I think implicitly we're all married to this idea that, well, logic, no, logic is the one thing I can hold on to. And for someone to come along and say, no, maybe there's a different logic out there that then would have its own science associated with that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, I agree with that. I think our logic is, you know, it was made for a particular purpose and it works in certain domains, but it's not the be all and end all. That there are other ways that we can experience the world, other ways that we can interpret the world and live in it. And again, coming back to this idea of animism and relational ontologies and all these kinds of things that perhaps they offer us. Maybe they're not the final product, but maybe they offer us a new route or a different route out of the kind of quagmire that we're in at the moment, struggling to fit all of this stuff into our outdated science. So maybe we're looking for some kind of an animistic science or some kind of a relational science or something. But yeah, this is the crux of the issue and it is difficult to talk about. Excellent. Love it. Love it, Jack. So let's move on to the third part of this skeptical process that I like to play around with. And that's find the deep spirituality. And it's my way of saying that, you know, we love all this science talk and our ability to try and gain control of these deep, deepest, most important questions by saying, we'll just follow the data and we'll bravely take it wherever it goes and we'll battle against the conspiracies. But I think at the end of the day, what we're looking for are the deeper answers to who am I, why am I here, the why questions, the three o'clock in the morning purpose of life kind of questions. And that's the deep spirituality to me. And that's what I think we're all really grappling with. And I so appreciate how you're coming at it in this multifaceted, flooded kind of way. But I just want to make sure that that is what we're talking about. And I think a great that leads into this idea of animism. Let's tell folks a little bit about what you mean by animism and why that has a deeper significance to you in terms of potentially drawing you in spiritually or propelling you forward spiritually. Well, again, animism is a term that comes specifically from academic anthropology. So we can go back to E.B. Tyler, who is widely regarded as the like the founding father of anthropology. And he coined this term animism to refer to the belief in spiritual beings. Okay, so Tyler's dealing with belief to begin with. And he's saying that if we look at all of the religions around the world and break them down to their most fun kind of fundamental foundational elements, what we find is a belief in these non physical beings that inhabit plants and rocks and things. So help people understand animism compared to let's say panpsychism or compared to materialism or compared to idealism without getting too much into the philosophical kind of part of that. But just at a really kind of quick level, the people who are saying animism when they throw it in that same sentence with idealism and what are they talking about? Okay, yeah. Well, again, going back to what I was saying about spirits and stuff that was kind of an old kind of like an outdated way of thinking about things that was implicitly loaded with assumptions about the people who were animists. So he was suggesting that the people who are animists were kind of primitive and that their way of thinking was useless. So right from the very beginning, anthropology is kind of like, it's been interested in animism, but again, it's kind of bracketed out. It's kind of ontological truth value. If you can, if you can talk about such a thing. And it's just a bunch of beliefs. Let me interject. What happened later and see if you see if this is true or not because sometimes me coming as a total novice might, might help but you got to correct me because it's totally wrong. So the anthropologist walks into the forest of New Guinea and he goes and talks to the shaman and the shaman says that tree just talked to me and that rock is is also is wise in this way and the water is this. And the guy's taken his notes because okay this guy's really kind of has this really weird belief system because he thinks all these things are alive and have this spiritual quality to them. Right. So that's the is this that what originally they thought animism was from it. Yeah, and they thought it was a belief system because they implicitly understood that, again, the Western materialist scientific ontology was the only one that's actually true. The only one that's actually real. So, yeah, eventually though through more and more ethnographic engagement with people. More and more anthropologists going out over the years and living with people and interacting with them learning their life ways to begin to realize that animism isn't just a belief system that animism is actually a mode of engaging with the world. So it's a way of living in the world. It's not just about beliefs. It's about practice and experience and participation in the world. And this is now animism is often referred to as a kind of as a relational ontology. So the foundational components of animism, the foundational elements of it are to do with relationships between persons. And they say that not all persons are human. So in anthropology we talk about other than human persons as well. So these could be rocks, plants, animals, and all of the other kinds of spirits and gods and deities as well. But the important thing is the situating the situating of societies within a network of relationships. So this is where the ontology differs from materialist ontologies and all the other kinds of Western mainstream ontologies is that we're realizing through animism that we're embedded in this bigger network of interactions with different kinds of minds, different kinds of intelligences. And that these relationships are the fundamental kind of building blocks of reality. And then add to that, flood that with our understanding, our gradual understanding of the paranormal. And someone goes out and encounters spirits or our understanding through parapsychology of medium research or of other encounters with the paranormal that now eat away at the underlying assumption that was originally made that not only is it a belief system, but it's an incorrect belief system. So you're crushing the idea that it's a belief system. It's not a belief system. It's a total engagement with reality. But then add to that that there is a reality to that reality and that my presuppositions about how the world works and the craziness of this spiritual realm have now begun to crumble with the parapsychologists and the paranormal people. Right. So, I mean, all these things are happening kind of at once in real time and having these different effects and forces on the whole process. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And then so we should add to that conversation then and I want you to pick this up because I think this is what throws people sometimes to and it's it's a lot to deconstruct is that animism is now being reintroduced into these conversations like with you and Gordon as an alternative to idealism as an alternative to materialism. And I think we've just given given people an idea of why that conversation goes on. But maybe we need to add to that a little bit and explain how those kind of are now put on. Yeah, panpsychism is basically like animism and that's different than idealism and materialism. I mean, do you have any thoughts in terms of helping people kind of understand that? Well, yeah, it's, it's kind of like a murky territory. I know that Gordon, for example, Gordon doesn't like the idea of panpsychism. And he like you like talking about Dean thinks that panpsychism is kind of like a backdoor materialism again at the end of the day. It's a crutch. Yeah. Well, you think that's a Gordon's crutch. No, no, no. I think I think it's a I think it's a crutch. I think it's the, you know, it's the last bastion of materialism hold on holdouts, you know, one foot on the dock one foot in the boat kind of thing mixing metaphors but Yeah, it's on the, it's on the way towards animism, but it's not willing to go all the way. And when we talk about panpsychism, for example, we're talking about some kind of like a fundamental kind of consciousness that or a fundamental awareness that isn't, you know, it's not consciousness as we understand that it's just, it's the basis of awareness. Whereas when we're coming from an animistic perspective, that other consciousness has just as much agency and intention in the world as we do. They just express themselves in different kinds of ways. So the consciousness of a rock isn't necessarily just some kind of like a flat, flat line background consciousness, but actually it possesses its own agency and intention in the same way that that we do. But it expresses its agency and intention in the world in a very different way, perhaps over like vast, vast timescales or things like that. Okay, and this is fun because this is now an opportunity to take the conversation one step further because I'm listening to you and Gordon and all your cool thoughts on animism. I'm thinking, but guys, you've missed the point in the same way. It's on the way towards what again? I mean, take these different wisdom traditions and I've always been interested in yoga and in the East and in particular the Fadanta non dual kind of thing. Hey man, all those people they're saying sure it's spirits here spirits there spirits everywhere on the way towards what it's about transcending that spiritual reality and getting to what's next. So it does seem to me to be somewhat of an arbitrary stopping point to say, ah, we've got it. We've arrived. It's animism. You know, it's like this discussion you're having about does animism assume idealism and it's like, no, of course not because idealism is really saying that it's all is closer to that that non dual Vedantic kind of it all goes into one that they're the wave in the ocean are just separate only because we imagine them to be separate. So I've teed it up enough there. Let's start that discussion. Yeah. Well, I agree with you because I don't think I'm well I don't think that animism is is the place to stop necessarily. But again, like you're saying it's with one step closer to whatever the ultimate thing is. But I think it's a particularly useful way of thinking about the world, given that we have for the past 150 years been literally destroying our planet. It gives us kind of like a framework to rebuild our relationship with that kind of like the ground of our being here. Do you see what I mean? It's thinking in terms of relationships shows that we are part of this wider network of things, whether it turns out to be an idealist universe or multiverse or whatever. Animism teaches us that we have to look at our kind of the local area as well. I love that. I think that's extremely wise on a number of levels. And it kind of gets into this last topic that I wanted to talk about. And we have been talking about really, and that is what works and what doesn't from a practical sense. You know, once we give up on the idea that we're going to get to the answer, we're going to get to the solution, we're going to solve our own problems and solve the problems of the world. You know, once we get past that, we can be a little bit more humble and say, okay, what might work towards making me better and answering these questions. And as you alluded to, if we can be humble about our role in the world, we can maybe look at the same things, those same bigger questions from that person. Okay, what can I do to make things a little bit better in my community, a little bit better with my family, you know, at the dinner table or whatever. And with that, we ought to introduce people to your excellent podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we're talking to a podcaster, Dr. Jack Hunter has entered the world of podcasting, permaculture. I swear I did not get the whole permaculture thing. Gordon's been talking about it for a year that I've been listening to him. I got it for the first time when I heard episode one of your podcast and how this relates. So let me play a clip from this, an extended clip, and then let's talk about it. Okay. I could, I would argue probably that my approach is not so much to do with belief and it's more to do with experience. Okay. So the kinds of things that I'm interested in are usually rooted in, or from my perspective, they seem to be rooted in experience first and then belief is something that comes later. So if you're researching religion, for example, and you're only researching religious beliefs, then you're not actually researching the real thing. Right, yes. So I think that's where the connection is between observation and permaculture and religious experience or whatever. It's to do with the way we experience and interact with this other mind out there or this other thing. You don't need to believe it. You go into the field and experience and feel it. Yes. It's about changing the way we think about the world. And I'm saying, especially when you look at more traditional cultures is, I mean, it's not, yeah, like you say, it's experiential and it's how they understand their place within the world is how they see the world. Yeah. And that's it. It comes back to this, well, I link it in with this idea of, from deep ecology, this idea of an ecology, which is kind of like a philosophy of place or a philosophy that's emerged from a particular place. And that's exactly what we see when we look at indigenous cultures all around the world. The way of living has emerged naturally out of the environment that they live in. And our problem in the West seems to be that we've developed one particular way of doing things. And then we're trying to apply it across a whole range of situations where it doesn't really work. We need to be reconnecting with our local environments in this way, developing our own ecosophies. Right. And the kind of science we've developed in test tubes, you know, it works and it's observable and real. But when you apply that to natural systems, it just can never understand the complexity and dynamics of a natural system. Yeah. And again, it's part of how we've created, we've, by oversimplifying things, we've created these enormous problems for ourselves because we've, like we've gone into a growing environment and said, well, we want to grow carrots and everything else is a weed. It's an enemy and has to be removed. But we know that the soil wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the worms. And the worms wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the microbes. And they're digesting it, et cetera, et cetera. And without the worms, there's no birds. And birds cycle phosphate and maintain fertility. So actually, and the simplistic thing of going, just thinking about one thing and trying to simplify nature is that's at the heart of how we, you know, how we've caused these really colossal problems. Such great stuff. That is so awesome. I got it. I got it for the first time and talk, talk about that. I'll tell you a little bit about what permaculture is, and then we can explore it a little bit more. So in a, in a nutshell, permaculture is a design system that takes its inspiration from observations of natural systems. So say, for example, we want to design a way of doing agriculture. What we would do is look at the natural world and see how the most abundant systems work and then try to emulate that as best as we can on our farm. So if you look at a rainforest, for example, which is the most one of the most abundant places on the earth, what we see is millions and millions of interactions between different kinds of organisms. So what you'd want to do is try and replicate that to the best of your ability within your kind of local environment. I'm not saying replicate the rainforest, but replicate an abundant space that is best suited to your particular local environment. So permaculture really emphasizes this element of complexity and its understanding of the world as being, as being like a systems of interconnecting processes and interrelated and interdependent organisms. So it's a really, you know, it's, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about that. It's a fairly kind of like Steve was saying in that interview that it's a fairly kind of standard, kind of like earthy understanding of the world and anyone who interacts with the world, you know, on a regular basis will come to realize that, you know, naturally. Yeah, but let's not discount it too much because it's not at all obvious. It's, it's, it's ontological flooding, right, in a whole different way. I mean, so draw the parallels, you've obviously totally living those parallels and have totally brought them into your being and your work, but make them explicit for folks, maybe way. Well, the major parallels that I see are to do again, like I said, with complexity and understanding this, the way the world seems to work is through interactions between different kinds of organisms, different kinds of, I guess we could say, minds. So when I was finishing off my thesis. I hadn't really been thinking about permaculture until I started to work with Steve on this one school one planet project. And when I did a permaculture design course with Steve as well, which is kind of like a, it's like, usually permaculture design courses are two week kind of intensive introduction to permaculture looking at all of these different principles, the way that the ecosystems function and all of those kinds of things. And as I was doing that I was seeing more and more connections with with my own work. So in conversations with Steve over the last, you know, year or so, two years. Two years now. The two might these two worlds my paranormal interests and my permaculture ecology interests have really started to come together. And actually, I've just started working on a new book, a new edited book about the links between anomalistics. So the study of the paranormal in all of its varied guises and ecology and some of the contributions that I'm getting in the different suggestions for chapters coming in so far really a driving home the fact that this connection is there and it's real. Which is really, it's really good. Excellent. So Jack, it's been a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate the dialogue. Tell folks more about this particular book, engaging the anomalous where they can pick that up, how they can keep track of you and and maybe even tune into that very cool podcast as well. Yeah. Well, engaging the anomalous you can you can get it online on Amazon.com and dot code at UK and also various other kind of online booksellers. You can probably also order it into your, you know, physical book shops as well, which would be good. Other things that I've got going on. I'm just about to finish off editing Dr. Mark a Schroll's new book and ecology cosmos and consciousness which further explores some of these interconnections between transpersonal psychology ecology deep ecology and also brings a little bit of superheroes in there as well which is always good. If you want to keep up with my work, you can check out the parent apology website, or you can visit my personal website, which is jack dash hunter dot web starts dot com. And I upload all of my essays and articles and podcast interviews and things up there so that's probably the best way to check it out greening the paranormal, which I think has got some really exciting potential in two different ways. One way showing that there are these connections between ecological ways of thinking and the paranormal, but also one of the things that I really want the book to do is to have a kind of a practical output as well. So just kind of like encourage the paranormal community of you want to think of it in that way to engage with the ecology because there's this thing called the greening of religion. I mentioned it in my interview with Gordon where you know we have all of these religionists are people who believe in the various different faith traditions that represents a lot of people. And if they were putting some of their, you know, even if they only put a portion of their effort into regenerating our biodiversity or, you know, reducing the consumption of fossil fuels or whatever. If they think about it in those terms then it's going to have a positive impact. I think that there are so many people who are interested in the paranormal that we could do a similar thing with the paranormal. And if paranormal enthusiasts start to take an interest in regenerating natural systems in developing new ways of agriculture and things then we'll be on to a good thing. Jack, Jack, Jack. Backdoor materialism world. What world? That's a topic for another topic for another show. But I just so love what you're doing and I so appreciate you joining me today on Skeptico to talk all of this. Best of luck to you and we'll definitely stay in touch. Excellent. Thanks so much for having me. So thanks for watching this video and if it wasn't really a video but just an audio, stored as a video, I apologize. But there's more videos out there as well. But please check out the Skeptico website. You can see it here. We cover a lot of different stuff you might be interested in relating to controversial science and spirituality. A lot of shows up there. Over 350 of them are so all free, all available for download. So do check it out.