Hello everyone and welcome back to Adventures Through the Mind, a podcast that explores topics relevant and related to psychedelic culture, medicine, and research, and always with the underlying question of how we can work with and through our psychedelic experiences to become better people, not just for ourselves, but for all those with whom we are nested in relationship, presently and across time, human and non-human alike. I am your host, as always, James W. Jesso.
The interview this episode features is a bit of a special one for me. That's because although I get value out of every interview that I do, there are a handful of them that leave me on the other side feeling properly inspired in a way that I could not and did not anticipate would happen prior to the interview.
And well, this episode features one of those interviews for me, one that I found personally quite inspiring with respect to how I was engaging or am engaging and understanding issues that feel quite important to me regarding ecology, my relationship to the natural world, and well, the present situation, humanity and beyond humanity is in ecologically.
Now, I won't say too much about that. I'll let you get your own value from the episode. But what I will say is that the interview today is with John Seed. John Seed is the founder of the Rainforest Information Centre in Australia, and since 1979 has been involved in direct actions to protect Australian rainforests. He co-authored the book Thinking Like a Mountain Towards a Council of All Beings with Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming and Arne Ness, and has written and lectured extensively on deep ecology.
He's been conducting Council of All Beings and other re-earthing workshops around the world for 35 years to help us strengthen our felt sense of connection with the living earth. John spearheaded the Rainforest Information Centre's Endangered Species and Climate Change Campaigns, launched a successful campaign to protect the world's largest remaining population of Asian elephants, and another that protected the Cardamom Mountains rainforest in Cambodia.
His work in Ecuador recently resulted in a Supreme Court decision to eject a mining company from the Los Cedros Biological Reserve, which was the first time that the Rights of Nature Clause in the Ecuadorian Constitution was used to protect country, and the precedent set has resulted in other legal victories and lands protected.
In 1995, he received the Order of Australian Metal for services to conservation, and more recently in 2023, he was one of 109 arrested in the Rising Tide Kayak blockade of the world's largest coal port in Newcastle, which exports fully 1% of the world's greenhouse gases.
John Seed joins us on adventures through the mind today as we discuss the importance of altering our sense of self such that England includes the natural world, the role psychedelics can play in this process, and how, even if the world as we know it burns and collapses, life itself will thrive as it always has.
We also talk about the philosophy of deep ecology and healing ourselves from the illusion of anthropocentrism, falling into the apathy of the modern world, honoring our pain for the world, and how, when given the right supportive context, the full expression of our despair can become empowerment.
Additionally, we talk about the dance between the present ecological crisis and life thriving for billions of years, the Disneyfication of nature versus the brutality of life being itself, and where psychedelics fit into deep ecology and environmental activism. And without much further ado, here's my interview with John Seed on episode 191 of adventures through the mind. Enjoy.
So I first learned of your work when I was in Australia in 2019 at a gathering called Rebel Herbal gathering up in northern New South Wales, just outside of Nimbin, I believe it was. And you'll have to pardon my ignorance, but combination of likely being a foreigner and also being not particularly familiar with the history of environmental or ecological activism, I didn't understand. I didn't know who you were. And I, but I was like, oh, this is interesting.
Someone's here that everyone seems to be talking about being very excited to see speak. So great. I'll make sure I'll catch that talk. And it was very cool to, in the moment, I felt like I, you'll have to pardon, pardon the praise here. I was like, wow, I feel like I'm, I'm listening to a living legend here.
I've been in the environmental activism scene since, you know, it kind of started, you know, and have played a very important role in the, in the development of a whole culture around not only just helping to protect our respective environments and the world ecology from the forces of the modern world, but also to support a reimagination, a reinvigoration of our living relationship with the living. And so it's really exciting to have learned that to have been there and to be here now. Thank you.
So what would you say is the value of environmental activism historically and presently? Well, my own take on it is a fairly narrow but deep one in that I haven't studied it particularly. I don't know a lot about it, but I just stumbled into it in a very, you know, apparently random kind of a way. I was living in a community of meditators in northern New South Wales, not far from Nimbin.
We were growing our own food, building our own houses, delivering our own babies and organising meditation retreats for Buddhist teachers. And I thought that's how I was going to spend my life when mysteriously and suddenly I found myself embroiled in what years later we realised was the first direct action in defence of rainforests, not only in Australia, but perhaps anywhere in the world. And that experience completely turned my whole life around.
I lost interest in everything that I'd been doing and I just felt called. And I've been sort of following that call ever since. And it's led me into my own activism, you know. And so I could speak about rainforest activism and say that it's been apparently the reason why so many rainforests are protected in Australia in particular, but in many parts of the world is entirely a result of activism.
Without that, it's hard to imagine that these forests would have been protected and they contain half of all of the species in the world. It's the womb of life. So, you know, very, very important. And of course, I watch the news so I know about activists for the whales and I've been doing a little bit of activism for the climate as well.
And it just seems to me that without activists, you know, we'd be a lot worse off. There's this great line in Leonard Cohen where he speaks of the widowhood of every government.
And when I think about that, I think, well, if the government's a widow who died and the answer is the citizen, you know, the democracy without citizens, like if the citizens all turn into consumers and no one's ready to take responsibility, the government's helpless in the face of corruption by, you know, the fossil fuel mafia and all the media and so on. So I feel like activists are like citizens. What's your read on where we are right now?
I mean, we in the sense of humanity as a member of a larger ecological community, but also as a sociopolitical force on the planet with respect specifically to our ecology, our world ecology. Well, I mean, I see this from a number of different angles. Like on the one hand, we are totally fucked.
We've had it. Do you know that the destruction that's taken place of climate and species and biosphere and, you know, the poisoning and the microplastics and you name it, there's absolutely no way that anything on the horizon multiplied a hundredfold is going to actually deal with this. And it's only a matter of how exactly watching exactly how the crumbling and the collapse takes place.
On the other hand, as a, how shall I say, as a 4000 million year old part of the universe, you know, that with every cell in my body descended in an unbroken chain from the first cell of life on earth. You know, and when I think that my ancestors have survived six, five or six previous extinction spasms that when millions of species fell by the wayside, my ancestors weren't among them.
And my ancestors survived even the end of the Permian era when 95% of the species 230 million years ago disappeared and everything that we know and love radiated forth from the remaining 5%. My ancestors were among those. So with a pedigree like that, it just seems it'd be a little bit early to throw in the towel. And, you know, it's not over till it's over and I've got nothing better to do than to throw myself into it as if we still had a chance.
Yeah, I remember something I thought of many years ago, something to the effect of like, something like whether or not one is successful in shifting the tide towards goodness in the world is irrelevant compared to the act of trying anyways, regardless of whether or not it will be successful. Of course, we seek to be successful in that or else, you know, what our actions actually amount to, but the actual success of it is in the long scope of things.
What will really matter was the fact that we gave it our all whether or not we were successful. So I kind of hear that in what you're saying there. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, it makes me think one of my mentors is the late Thomas Berry and one of his colleagues, the mathematical cosmologist Brian Swim once said that the earth used to be nothing but lava and now it sings opera.
You know, and so to be part of a universe where something where lava has the ability to sing opera, and where it has the propensity, perhaps even the desire to sing opera. It just seems to me that the worst case scenario leaves that amazing universe that does that kind of thing, absolutely untouched, absolutely intact. I mean, nothing lives forever. No, I'm going to die. The planet's going to die. Humanity is going to die. Everything dies.
If I get a vote, I vote for another million years or 100 million years. I've just started having a good time as a human being when I have been listening to a lot of hardcore history podcasts, and it is just horrible that just the history of the wars and the brutality and the cruelty and all of that. And I just feel like we've just poked out, you know, all of us suffering from extreme post-traumatic stress disorder are just finally just able to look around and imagine how it might be different.
And I would love to give that a shot, you know, but should it be that we are approaching our demise, should it be that I represent the last generation, then I want to go out with a great song of praise to this incredible thing that I find myself somehow to have been, you know, privileged to witness. I hear you speaking from a place and it's when you speak of your ancestry, you know, you speak of an unbroken sort of like genetic line in some respect, all the way back to the origins of life.
You know, you refer to this as your ancestry, like generally when people say ancestors, what they're invoking is my family line. They're invoking, you know, my maternal and paternal sort of lineage backwards through, you know, reproduction and spawning of new human babies and all that. But where I hear you speaking from sounds like an identification beyond humanity, like as an identification beyond the sort of exclusive genetic form that is the human being.
And there's something about that paradigm there of the difference between my sense of identity is rooted in my being a human as a part of a human world with human values, and my sense of identity being something deeper or larger than that. And from what I understand, the sort of the difference in those paradigms and those in those perspectives makes a big difference to how we perceive ourselves in the world and how we perceive the world beyond us.
And I'm trying to evoke here a conversation around anthropocentrism and how that impacts our sense of separation from the natural world. And I'm curious if you can sort of maybe lay out for us a what that is and then and be how you see that playing out in our dynamic with the living world. Thank you. So, back in 1979, I first became involved in rainforest protection with a blockade at Terania Creek in New South Wales. And that succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
Within two years, 70% of the people of our state of New South Wales wanted an end to rainforest logging and the government legislated a string of national parks. We had similar successes in Tasmania for the temperate rainforests and North Queensland for the tropical rainforests over the next five years. But during that first half of the 1980s, for every forest that was protected in the world, a thousand forests were lost.
And it was clear that you couldn't save the planet one forest at a time, that unless we could address the underlying psychological or spiritual disease that allows modern humans to behave in such a self-defeating and foolish manner, this was going to do nothing to protect the future of the world. And that's what led me to the philosophy of deep ecology. The term was coined by the late Arnie Ness, professor of philosophy at Oslo University.
And he said that, "Underlying all of the symptoms of the environmental crisis is the illusion of separation between human beings and the natural world. And that this is the result of anthropocentrism or human centeredness." Just the idea that we are the crown of creation, we are the tip of a pyramid and everything else is just there to support us as a resource.
And this flies in the face of the kind of wisdom of indigenous peoples and the science of ecology, both of which see the world more like a web where we are just one strand in that web and we have no independent existence. Without the support of all of the strands in the web, we are lost also.
And so Arnie Ness said that because this anthropocentrism and the ensuing illusion of separation are so deeply embedded in our culture, stretching back at least as far as the Old Testament, and the idea that we are here to subdue and dominate nature and nature is to be in fear and trembling of us. We're not going to be able to think our way out of the mess. He said that ecological ideas won't save us. What we need is ecological identity, ecological self.
And so that's, I think, what you're referring to about this identification beyond the human, that the ecological identity that begins to emerge, it doesn't replace one's social identity so much as we just get to experience over and over again and understand that underneath that social identity lies that whole 4000 million years. Indeed, the whole 13.7 billion years of the universe is all kind of wrapped up in there and the social identity floats on top of that like some tiny ephemeral.
Another line from Leonard Cohen pops to mind where he just realizes that he's nothing but the brief elaboration of a tube. I love that. There's this tube from your mouth to your asshole which connects you to the worms and everybody else, and he is just a brief elaboration of this tube. And so that's what the human is.
And to the extent that the human can let go of that arrogance of needing to feel special, needing to feel superior, needing to feel exceptional, then we sink back into the extraordinary tapestry matrix out of which we've emerged. And we get to experience how special that is. And so we find the specialness that we've been craving, but not by pushing against everything else as just being ordinary and we are special, but just to experience just how special this thing is.
How do we, I guess in some respect, how have we gotten to the point at which we need that kind of shift? That's one aspect of this question. And another aspect is, what does the process of getting to this larger ecological identity look like? Well, I mean, how we got here is, there are many different theories about that and I haven't got any that I prefer.
I remember a story about the great poet Gary Schneider, who was one of the ancestors of the deep ecology movement, an early beatnik and then a hippie and now a Zen teacher aged 95. And he was working in Jerry Brown's administration in California when Brown was governor of California for the first time and he was apparently a thorn in everyone's side and his boss said to him, Gary, why is it that whatever the issue, you're always going against the flow?
And Gary replied, Jerry, what you call the flow is just a 16,000 year eddy. I'm going with the actual flow. So that's that ability to expand one's identity and to recognize the flow, but to recognize that the eddy has no independent existence without the vast flow. So 16,000 years, what was that? Agriculture? Was that the fall? Some people say so. Was it gods? Anyway, I'll leave that for someone else to answer.
But the second part of the question, which is how do we make the shift? Well, that's actually what I've been working on. I've continued to be an activist and I've continued to be part of the Rainforest Information Center, the organization that I started 40 years ago. And we recently had some amazing successes in Ecuador, which I can talk about later, if you like. I was arrested last November at the kayak blockade of the world's largest coal port at Newcastle in New South Wales.
And first time I've been arrested in 25 years, but it's like riding a bike. Congratulations. Yeah, exactly. I'd forgotten how much fun all of that is. Alongside that, you see Arnie Ness, when he was asked how we are to nourish this ecological identity, ecological ideas aren't enough. We need ecological identity. How? He said he called on us to develop community therapies to heal that illusion of isolation.
And in 1986, I met, I guess, my main teacher in my life is Joanna Macy, a California activist, Buddhist scholar. And she had the missing piece of the jigsaw of how to take the ecological ideas of deep ecology and turn them into a body of work, which she calls now the work that reconnects. But in Australia, we still refer to it as experiential deep ecology.
And I'm in Melbourne at the moment. I had a workshop last weekend with 30 people doing this. And next weekend, I've got another one. And the following weekend, I've got one back at home in New South Wales.
And in these workshops, we find that the experiential processes that we use to move from our social identity to really embrace our ecological identity are in many ways synchronous with the kinds of ceremonies and rituals that all indigenous societies have practiced throughout time to make sure that the human doesn't drift away into merely social kind of conceptions of oneself and to remain connected to all our relations.
So the whole community gets together regularly many times during the year in order to remember who we really are underneath that day to day of things and to remember our connection to the living earth. And so the particular processes that we use aren't borrowed from other traditions. They're ones that we've created ourselves.
But what we found is that whenever a group of people gets together to spend a couple of days with the shared intention to heal that illusion of separation, it hardly matters what you do after that, that anything will work, that the experience of incredible opening up and connection both first to each other, to the other people that we're experiencing this with,
and then this feeling of our rootedness in the living earth and the ability to receive inspiration and vision and empowerment from the earth, all of these things come very, very easily. I think because all of our ancestors practiced similar things, it wasn't that long ago. I guess it was, I don't know, was it when the witches were burned that these things were finally driven underground and are only beginning to emerge again.
But anyway, that's, of course, to spend lots of time in nature, there are many other ways of nourishing our ecological identity, but that's the one that I've been focused on. This podcast is brought to you by listeners like yourself via Patreon. Patreon is an online platform that allows content creators to earn a living by the voluntary contribution and involvement of the people who care and appreciate that content.
Without my patrons on Patreon, I would not be able to continue giving the resources necessary to the production of the show and the larger body of work that supports it. This includes the time resource, as well as the financial resources that go into its production.
So with that said, a big thank you to all of my patrons on Patreon, as this would not be possible without you. Thank you very much. The people whose names are listed on the screen here on YouTube or in the description to this episode wherever you're checking it out are people who give significantly, some of which for a long time, and their name in the credits of this episode is an extra thank you for that.
If you listening are not yet a patron and you're finding value in the show, I invite you to please become my patron today. You can do so by heading to patreon.com/jameswjesso. The options there for how much you'd like to pledge each month are outlined on the main page and any amount of something and it all adds up to me being able to earn an income doing this thing that I love and hopefully you value.
If you're not in a financial place to contribute right now in that way, you are able to sign up as a free member of Patreon and then at least you'll be up to date with the things that I am doing without having to rely on social media algorithms to bring it to your attention. Alternatively, if you'd just like to send me a little bit of a tip for a particular episode such as this one, you can do so by using the PayPal link in the description to this episode wherever you are checking it out.
And that's it. Now back to the interview. I'm wondering about grief. Because I look at grieving and this is partially inspired by my study of men like Stephen Jenkinson. I'm thinking of grief less like a feeling, but instead like a process that includes feelings. So like, grief is not sadness. It includes sadness. Grief is not gratitude but it does include gratitude. There's like, there's, there's something about the grieving process that includes many feelings.
And with grief being, as far as I look at it, you know, a kind of a necessary response and this is leaning into Francis Weller it's a necessary response where we can transform the sorrows of loss in a way that remaps the gravity of our world. And so, anytime, anytime I personally anyways, come to terms or turn my attention towards what is lost. Grief is there.
And what I'm kind of seeing and what you're saying here is that you know even even just to speak to it from the perspective of us as a species and how long we've been in, like, how long our culture and identities were wrapped up in our relationship to the living
world and, and how relatively short our period of time that we've been dissociated from that has been that there's a kind of birthright sense of connection that we come into this world, expecting, but is violated for most of us immediately upon entry. And so, my, my question is and I guess it's also a sense that when you bring people together, and everyone is saying hey we're here to collectively with collective intention, practice, effort, and attention.
I'm going to try to, you know, heal this illusion of separation. And then I assume also with that is the pain of once connecting recognizing how much has been lost as a consequence of our collective disconnection with respect to our treatment of the environment and various ecologies.
So, I mean that's my read on the things of comment, correct, etc. But I'd love to hear a little bit more around what your observations are of the role grief plays in this in this healing of separation and in these deep ecology workshops that you're facilitating.
Well, I love that question. And it's interesting that you mentioned, Stephen Jenkinson because I've been up since early this morning and the first thing that I did was that my friend the filmmaker Peter Downey who has just made a documentary about deep ecology which is calling we the universe. One of the other people that features in that is Stephen Jenkinson and so I was just listening to him and watching him this morning in the trailer for this.
So, when I met Joanna Macy, this was the piece that she added to my understanding and to the creation of the experiential deep ecology workshops, or the work that reconnects. The work that reconnects is a spiral, which starts with gratitude. So the first thing that we do when we meet is we share gratitude, but then goes into what Joanna used to call despair and empowerment that was the title of her first book and that was the workshop that I did with her that turned my life around.
But now she calls honoring our pain for the world. And so, we start that with an exploration of the denial of these feelings, the fact that grief, along with rage and terror and despair are rarely welcome. That if people start to get into this, the usual response is to try and make it better immediately, to interrupt it. That it's very unusual for these feelings to be welcome.
And one of the consequences of this is a dumbing down of our intelligence and of our ability to act. When I think of that long ancestry, stretching back to the beginning of life, and all of those ancestors that I mentioned before, one of the things about them that I'm forced to recognize is the incredible intelligence that meant that in every single generation, each of them was intelligent enough to reach the age of reproducing itself before it was consumed without exception.
So what a pedigree is that? And that 99.99999% of that intelligence preceded this big bulge over our nose and our ability to think our way through the world. And so these feelings like grief that we're talking about are what remains in us of this ancient intelligence, which has definitely stood the test of time. So I love cognition, but it's very, very recent and the consequences, I think, are yet to be seen.
And so this ancient intelligence, you know, we can call it intuition, we can call it instinct, doesn't matter what you call it. It was that that allowed each of our ancestors to make the right decisions in order to be able to survive.
Any mammal running towards something, wagging its tail when it should have been running away, doesn't leave its genes in the gene pool. The accuracy of these feelings is selected for in each generation, and they're pushing up with a tremendous force of natural selection behind them. And it needs an equal and opposite force from our conditioning, our embarrassment, whatever it is to push them out of the way, our fear. We've been taught to fear these feelings.
So what Joanna Macy taught me, taught us, teaches us, is that if we create a safe container to welcome these feelings, and this is what we do, then far from being damaged in any way, you know, we've been taught to fear these feelings that if I were to fully open to the depth of my anguish about what I see happening to my world,
surely I would be crushed, hopelessly depressed, maybe I'd commit suicide. Wrong. You know, I've been facilitating this with people for more than 30 years now, I've never lost anyone. You know, that if you create the right kind of a context and invite these feelings, then they just finally get a chance to express themselves and to be heard. And all of that energy, the instinctual energy and the energy being used to repress it is liberated.
And it's not that we do a despair circle and then follow it with an empowerment circle. We just find that when the despair is honestly met, then empowerment is where we find ourselves, you know, at the end of it. And so, you know, we sit in a circle and all hell breaks loose as people finally get a chance to express these things. And what we find is that everybody's feeling the same way underneath.
Like, we're all living in the same world and the things that, you know, that have been, you know, perhaps we've been defining these pains as being personal. You know, we come from a culture where it's impossible to imagine that this is the pain of the earth that I might be feeling. If I'm feeling a pain, it's because my mother weaned me too early. It's because of some trauma that happened to me or something like that. And so to reframe that and to think, well, what if this was the earth?
Like, if the earth was crying, who would be feeling that if not us, you know? So it's these kind of things that then set the stage in the cycle of the work that reconnects to move beyond honoring our pain for the world into the next part of the process, which we call seeing with new eyes.
That this work with grief and rage and terror, the scales fall from our eyes and we're able to see the world afresh. And it's like, what happens is that that sense of paralysis that everybody is feeling like, I used to think we had just had to create awareness and things would improve. Everybody's now aware and nothing's improved. It's like we're helpless without the passion that these feelings bring that we can know what's going on. We can know what needs to be done.
But without that passion that the feelings provide, that knowledge is sterile. And so, you know, after the ceremony that we do that makes it safe to explore these feelings, we move on to exploring our larger identity, exploring our deep ecology. Not sure if I answered that exactly, but that's what it brought up for me. No, it's good. It's good. Something that came up for me at the very end there, you talked about taking the scales off of the eyes. I think that was a phrase close enough anyways.
And I was struck by the sense of the incredible apathy that I know that I experience at times, you know, at other times, incredible grief and sadness, but the kind of apathy that I experience in my day to day life, in the sort of deluge of things going wrong all around me.
And even just the other day, or yesterday, I ran into a friend of mine who does activism work, and he's supporting a camp right now that is helping to try to, I guess, help encourage the university here in my city to divest from investments in companies that are building weapons
that are explicitly being used by the Israeli government against Palestinians. And he was like, Oh, yeah, I'm just I'm just on my way there right now. And I thought to myself, what ran through my mind, and I felt a bit embarrassed about it, but it was true. I was like, Oh, is that still happening?
I mean, it makes me feel like a heartless piece of shit to say it out loud. But simultaneously, it's like, I realize how much my own mindset is locked into the, into the news cycle, and how quickly I end up removing myself from the pain of it all, especially as somebody who, you know, I live with my partner and good friend and so on and so forth.
But the context that allows to really feel into those feelings without them being actively disabling, not, you know, not shedding the scales from my eyes, but instead, properly being disabling that context isn't there for me a lot of the time.
And so I, as you were speaking to that, I was just feeling into the same feelings that can be so empowering in a certain context can be so disabling in another, and it's not that I'm afraid to feel them necessarily maybe that's there, but it's just the context for the feeling itself, or the feeling process itself is not supportive to transformation, as much as it is, as it is facilitating of a kind of shutdown. Wondering if you could comment a bit on that.
Yeah, well, I experienced the same thing, of course, I think that that's probably universal. And, you know, what, what it brings up for me is just the importance in my own life that in the last year, I've done, you know, 12 or 15 weekends where, as the facilitator of the ceremony, that allows us to listen to each other's deepest anguish. About what's happening to our world.
I was a participant, you know, once, once I had, you know, create, helped to create the container, I just became one of the people that was listening and witnessing each other. And that, so that means that I've had, like, more than once every month, I've had the opportunity to be part of such a ceremony. And what it means for me is that the rest of the time, the feelings pretty well leave me alone. Do you know, it's like the feelings aren't there to disable me, they're there to enable me.
And once I have acknowledged the feelings sufficiently so that the feelings understand that that intelligence has been accepted, you know, that the message has got through, then they don't need to wake me up at 3am. The way that they do, you know, when that kind of opportunity isn't there for me.
So, I don't know how, you know, whether I can generalise from my experience, but anyway, that's what I feel that the feelings are there to wake me up and to, and communicating the feelings are there to wake up my people. Because genetically, no individual can survive, no matter how genetically fit they are, unless they're in a community that survives. And so, you know, the feelings are there to wake me up and to cause me to wake up the people around me.
And if I'm doing that, then their job is done. They're not there to torment me or to, you know, to make me unhappy or anything like that. They're there as part of my intelligence. And when I find a way to engage with them that satisfies those feelings, then the rest of my life works pretty well. Yeah, I think your point about community really lands for me. You know, it's two things come up.
One of which is like the importance of being in a community where you can speak and you can be heard and you can listen. Part of the book that I'm writing right now, I was speaking around, I was writing about a voice and, you know, what gives a voice. Like there's some aspect of it is sort of like an opening that is availed to one to speak through. But the other aspect of it, the other side of it is an opening that is availed to one such that they can speak into it.
So to have a voice is not just the ability to speak, but it's being in a context where there are others there to listen. And that's the essential part of it. And that seems to be like a fundamental piece of this transformational process, how it is that they descale the eyes, these feelings are empowering rather than disabling.
And what also struck me was how much I had accidentally imposed upon who and what those others can be an anthropocentric brain, an anthropocentric view, which is like, well, I don't have other people to talk to about other human persons to talk to about it. And thus I don't have a community, forgetting that it's entirely possible and reasonable, at least as far as I'm concerned, certainly I could get a lot of value speaking with others, other people, and that's an important part of it.
But to, you know, let my voice be heard by the very beings that I'm hurting for, right? The trees, the salamanders, the waters. Yeah, I think to me, that's something that I also brought about, or Darshan Narva is a previous guest brought up around, like during the pandemic and people feeling really, really alone.
And that her discussion with some people who felt less alone, and the reason why they felt less alone was that they felt as though they still had the trees and the squirrels and these other members of their sort of like home community that they could still interact with, even as they couldn't connect with other humans. And that really struck me because I didn't have that. Like, I didn't feel that way. I think that speaks to, you know, my own ecological identity, maybe being nascent.
Yeah, well, it's interesting. You know, we met at Rebel Herbal and then again, I think at Entheogenesis. I don't think, not the second one. No, no, no, I think we exchanged from emails, but definitely. We share an interest in psychedelics and one of the psychedelics that I'm interested in, I loved it that Terence McKenna proclaimed cannabis as being like, I think, the king of the psychedelics when used in sufficient quantities and when used sufficiently rarely to have its full effect.
But in any case, I rarely use cannabis these days or psychedelics at all. But not long ago, I just took what for me was a kind of heroic dose of cannabis and found myself walking into a piece of forest that had been badly damaged. And remembering all of the forests that I've walked into over the decades in an altered state and the promises that I've made.
And now I was walking in dejected and bedraggled and carrying all of my failure with me that all of the things that I have attempted to do to protect the forests of the world are being swept away to oblivion by this tide of destruction that's going on.
And so I came in to report failure, you know, like that's what I found was happening as I walked into this forest was just this feeling of incredible distress at my failure to succeed in what I had gone into the forest full of as a younger man, very brave and promising all kinds of what I was going to do to turn things around, and I'd failed to do so. And the forest sort of said to me, well, you know, we're just as broken as you are, you know, like so.
You know, we understand that brokenness that you're feeling because it's just like everything shares that in common and let's work together. You know, like it kind of did some healing on me. Do you know, it said let's work together, working together to heal all of our brokenness is all we can do now. It may not succeed, but it's better than working alone.
And so, you know, like this whole plan to get more involved in the restoration of that particular piece of forest, you know, like it's a kind of a random piece of forest, but it was the one that called me. And so I've started, you know, pulling weeds out of that particular piece of forest in order to allow the native intelligence of that place to begin to return. But just part of the feeling was that I realised that it could see me and I just allowed myself to be naked.
I allowed all of my brokenness to be visible and I allowed, it was like I felt I was downloading the entire experience of humanity and the failure of humanity and that the forest was taking it in. And as best as it could in its broken state, it was going to help to direct me to in terms of which moves to make now, given what has happened, given what's happened and the immensity of the distraction that's taken place.
You know, I mean, it's the only game in town, there's nothing else for me to do but to give it everything I've got. But what, you know, like so many things that one could choose at that point. And I just sort of felt like the forest was reading me and through me reading me as a person, but reading me as human. Human had come in here naked and the forest was reading it. And unfortunately, the forest was very apologetic because it wasn't at its best. Do you know what I mean?
And like at another time, it might have been able to do more for me. But anyway, it was going to give it the best that it had. I don't know. That's a beautiful story. I'm going to ask you more about psychedelics in a moment. I've got this other question. It feels poorly formed. So you might have to do as much guesswork as the answer work here. It has to do with this.
I don't know, like the Disney vacation of nature, the sort of like, was it Snow White, maybe or, you know, like birds landing on fingers and everyone's friends and it's also and so forth. And I see this represented a lot in many aspects of the New Age spirituality movement, this kind of like, I mean, it's certainly much more psychedelic than Disney in the New Age movement, but this kind of like everything is beautiful and everything is perfect. And it's all like love and so on and so forth.
And that, you know, we reconnect with nature to reconnect with this beauty and it's all wonderful and so on and so forth. And in a contrast to that is, you know, the reality that at least from a human perspective, most things like most animals anyways tend to die a pretty horrible death in nature.
And nature being nature has also been a part of multiple mass extinctions, you know, long before humans came around and decided to, you know, pull up the leftover bodies of all the deaths that existed beforehand and burning it up in the air to kill more. So I'm wondering, like, how do we reconcile these two views between, you know, the sort of like, oh, it's this beautiful, wonderful connection and oh, it's actually on this other end, this brutal thing.
Well, what comes to me, you know, I don't know the answer, you know, but what comes to me is that it's not so much a matter of reconcile as to hold these two things as fully as we can and feel the tension between them and somehow allow that tension, not to reduce everything to one or the other, you know, but to hold both of those, one in each hand, and to let that tension be part of steering one's life, you know.
That in particular, I think that the tendency for human beings to blame themselves for what has taken place is perhaps just as anthropocentric as thinking that we're the crown of creation and the measure of all being. If we are, as I believe, one cell in the living body of the Earth, then this is the Earth doing it to herself, that we aren't separate from the Earth. This is the Earth, you know, it wasn't one man that walked on the moon, this was the Earth that walked on the moon.
This is the Earth that's sending probes out into space. This is all the Earth's doing. And for us to take all the blame is, you know, just as, you know, self-centered as for us to think that, you know, that we're, you know, God's gift or whatever it is.
So from that point of view, when I look back upon the lack of sentimentality of nature, you know, like, and the kind of horrors and cruelty that we know to exist in nature and the mass extinctions and in the universe itself, like supernova explosions that blow entire galaxies to pieces, you know, that this is who we are.
And that it seems to me that the very attributes that are driving us towards destruction, the greed and the violence, were the very things that allowed us to survive and to get here in the first place. That, you know, there we were stuck in a little shelter and driven out of that shelter where all manner of predators were waiting for us by our hunger and our hunger requiring us to destroy animals or plants.
You know, the whole world is consuming itself the whole time. That's the nature. That's what this place is like, you know, so that's what you're holding in one hand. And then in the other hand, yes, you know, we can now see all these other things, like there's this incredible beauty there as well, you know. And so how do we steer with both hands, you know? Anyway, that's about as far as I can get with it.
I like that. How do we steer with both hands? Ten and two. It reminds me of a journey I had or an insight I had on a journey with Changa, you know, reportedly an invention of one of your countrymen out there in Australia. And I smoked it down by a river, a river that I often would visit when I wanted to do a Changa journey or really just needed someone to talk to.
I would go down to the river. It's been a while actually. So it's a cool reminder. But I went down there and I and I when I smoked it, I don't for the listeners who might not know, Changa is, you know, contains DMT.
It has some other factors in there. And DMT, like DMT visuals are quite a common aspect of that experience. And so I I'm looking around and not only is the entire world around me just, you know, not just layered, it was as if coming out from the very essence of everything around me were these DMT visuals.
It's not as though it were layered on top of or anything like that. I was seeing this fundamental or essential expression of reality. And it was these fractal patterns. I could even look upon the grass and the way that it was organized and how it was relative to the stones and to the water, all of which were like perfect, asymmetrical, psychedelic, fractal pattern.
And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was just so overwhelmed by absolute beauty. And simultaneously, I was experiencing incredible amounts of terror, just raw, like, high octane terror. And one of the things I've experienced with Changa is that there seems to be enough space to have a conversation with it, be it the something, you know, synergistic about the compound, or maybe I was talking to the tree from whence the DMT was extracted.
But it kind of gave me the sense of like, well, you can't have one without the other. And a lesson I've maybe had to be relearned to be taught many, many times, but that's what comes up for me when I when I heard your story there. My first response is how vividly you brought things to life in my own mind. I'm not sure what Changa is exactly, but I'm remembering the first time that I smoked, I guess it's DMT.
It was Ralph Metzner had three of us in a room at a conference that we were in, and he called it the toad. So, and I experienced those fractals and that momentary terror. For me, it was just a momentary terror where I had just inhaled and there hadn't been time to exhale when all manner of decisions lay before me. And the only choice was to surrender. And so I did, you know, and then that took me out into the universe in a way that is impossible to remember or describe.
I mean, ineffable, my goodness. But when I, my companions assured me that only seven minutes had passed, but in the eternity, when the eternity ended and I returned and I realised that I existed and I realised that I was in a room and that there was other people in the room. And my voice came back to me and what I, my report at that point was something like, when I get out of the way, all that's left is everything. Anyway, I just thank you for reminding me.
And then the other thought that I have is that one of the ancestors of the deep ecology movement was the great California poet Robinson Jeffers, who died before the word deep ecology had been coined. But his poetry was very much about that. And there was one line in one of his poems where, you know, in terms of the tension that we're talking about between the terror and the beauty or between, you know, the glory of nature and the utter implacable lack of any kind of sentimentality or mercy.
Do you know, in nature, all of that, that he spoke about, he said, when will we learn to hold the diamond within, when will we learn to allow the diamond within to reach out and touch the diamond without stretching one's humanity thin between the invulnerable diamonds.
And so, you know, unlike spiritual people that reduce everything to the diamond within or activists that reduce everything to the diamond without, how can we hold these two things equally and allow what our humanity, our ego, you know, to be stretched thin between the invulnerable diamonds. That was the other thing that you reminded me of.
That's a beautiful paraphrase or quote there. Yeah, it's gorgeous. I'm going to think about that. It's very visually descriptive to one of the authors I really love who he's dead now, Stephen Harrop Buhner.
He wrote a lot about plants and herbalism and also wrote a book on writing and one of the things he talked about was like, talks about is like the really moving writing is one where the feeling and the visual description and the words that facilitate both all sort of harmonized into this like single moving thing that touches the reader,
such that the reader enters the world of the writer, and that the two diamonds and the humanity spread in between them had that sort of like that mark of calling me in, in a good way. It also seems like perhaps a great segue into the discussion about psychedelics specifically.
Where do you see, okay, well, this is a big question. And when I say psychedelics, you know, what substance am I talking about? In what context? For whom? You know, so I recognize how sort of muddy the question is going to be. I'll let you take it however you like. Where do you see psychedelics fitting inside of deep ecology and the work deep ecology seems to be sort of about?
I'm not sure that I have an answer, but I'll just start talking. In 1973, I was a systems engineer working for IBM in the financial district of London. I was really unhappy. I was smoking tons of dope, watching the news night after night in an unhappy marriage, unhappy in my job, and some friends with kaleidoscopes in their eyes pressed a vial of orange powder into my hand and said, you must take this.
And I put it in the freezer for three months terrified, but eventually I did and it changed everything. I was reborn and a month later I'd left my job. I'd left my wife. I'd given her everything. I told her anything she didn't want I would burn and got out and never looked back.
So from there, a common experience in those days, I discovered that no matter how much LSD I took, I kept coming down. So I turned to spirituality and Buddhism. So I stopped taking anything for years and meditated as hard as I could. And then that spat me out into the forest. And then I worked for the forest and then I met Joanna Macy and Deep Ecology.
So it's such a personal kind of a journey. I don't know how to generalise from that. But on the other hand, it doesn't stand out. I was around for the '50s and there was no way that the '60s, no one saw it coming until the beatniks started to see it coming.
But no one saw it coming. And it's all just such a mystery. How could this be? How could I possibly have the receptors? How could this monkey have those receptors that would allow me to have such an experience as that LSD trip or the toad with Ralph Metzner or the ayahuasca with the shaman Kazimiro?
All the amazing adventures that I've had. And there's no doubt that it's all of a piece. It's all part of a single kind of life. And there's no way that the Deep Ecology, the rainforest work, there's no way that that could have existed without the psychedelics, for me.
But there are many people who have a different story to tell than that. But that's the only story that I have to share. So no real generalisations have emerged. But I wonder if you would like to... Can you generalise more about that? Yeah, I'll give it a go. Thanks for passing the ball there.
I guess I could reference a bunch of research around increasing pro-environmental behaviour and altering one's self-construal such that their sense of self is now entwined with a larger sense of connection with the natural world or all of these kinds of things, which are there. And then also the big thing for me is there are fundamental, universal characteristics of every psychedelic compound.
But the context of use is a substantial contributor to both the experiential encounter with it and also its sort of larger outcome. And that context of use, setting dose of where you are, who you're with, how much you take, of what, and then also mindset. And that's not just, you know, like, how do I feel today and why do I want to take this psychedelic?
It includes everything about who we are and everything we've experienced and how we frame and see the world and the substance, and especially, you know, the sort of larger socio-cultural mindset in which we're journeying. Like, are we with shamans in the Amazon?
Are we with a couple of friends in the forest? Are we at a party? You know, like, are we being told that this is about our personal trauma from a therapist? Like, all of these things influence what's going to come through and even more so afterwards what it is we'll feel as though is possible and relevant to do about those experiences.
And so I believe strongly that there's an incredible possibility for a greater kind of softening of the edges of me, such that more of the rest of it can come in with psychedelics.
And that could play a very positive role. And it's also possible that the sort of lane way that they're going to find themselves into as it sort of rapidly expands out to the world is going to be such that it's that that will be a variable that's compensated for in the context of their use, such that we won't see that so much.
Or, you know, people will just go back to their regular lives, and it'll be meaningful, but within a couple of weeks, it fades like a dream. And if, although the prioritization is on personal trauma, which is not a not a bad thing to be focusing on with the with the use of psychedelics by any means, you know, it's we might lose the sort of capacity to write ourselves into a larger story. So, incredible potential.
And I'm cautiously optimistic, I guess, sometimes, sometimes unconsciously pessimistic, but I'm trying not to lean into that one right now. Thank you. Before I'd heard of deep ecology, I just got this sense that I was the rainforest, and that I was that part of the rainforest that had emerged into thinking that I climbed out of the trees and down onto the savannah.
And now here I was standing on the line between the rainforest and humanity. But instead of standing there eyeing the rainforest with a view to conquest and profit, I was standing there as the rainforest in my self-defense. And I've no doubt that, especially the cannabis that I'd smoked for many years at that point, although I'd also stopped smoking, you know, while I was meditating, but you know, that the cannabis had made that possible.
And that, you know, that why wouldn't the plant world try to turn me into someone that was of some use in protecting itself, you know, like, why wouldn't it do that? That one of the things that's clear to me is that part of the anthropocentrism is this idea that intelligence is nothing except what we call intelligence in human beings.
But that human intelligence is just the tiniest fragment of this incredible biosphere that, you know, we are this infinitesimal fragment of this vast thing, and our intelligence is just the tiniest flower of that vast thing, you know. So what is that intelligence? And why wouldn't that intelligence be able to kind of go, "Yeah, that person looks right, I think I could make some use of them," you know.
Maybe, you know, even the distinction between, you know, plant medicine and, you know, something synthesized by Hoffman, you know, like, that's just a construct as well, you know, that it's just like the periodic table is just as miraculous as the biosphere.
And, you know, maybe all of it has some wish for the human and the, you know, whole ecological system within which we find ourselves for that to, you know, have some future rather than, you know, sweeping it off the stage and allowing whatever comes next, you know. There's one of the processes that we use in the DP College, the first of the processes that are created with Joanna Macy in 1986, we call the Council of All Beings.
And in the Council of All Beings, part of seeing with new eyes, each participant finds an ally in the non-human world, a plant or an animal or a feature of the landscape, makes a mask to represent that ally. And then we meet in council and speak in the first person, "I am the Milky Way galaxy," or "I am a drop of water," or whatever it is, and just see what happens. You don't have to believe anything. You just enter the conversation and always we're stunned at the voices that we hear.
But anyway, I just remember one time, you know, in the Council of All Beings, as I do them now, I expressly leave humans out of it. You know, I tell people that they can't be human because humans take up too much space always. And we've heard so much from humans. This is a chance for all of the voiceless ones to be heard, so no humans. But anyway, one of the councils, a human came along and said, "I know I'm not supposed to be here, but someone has to speak up for the humans."
And I want to say, "We're not bad. We're just like adolescents, you know. Just give us a chance." And we're going to come good. And at that particular council, there happened to be two cockroaches there. And they were like, "No, fuck off. You've had your chance. It's our turn now." You know? And so it's like, you know, I think back to that moment in our ancestry when our ancestors were single-celled bacteria floating in the oceans.
And when some of us invented, discovered, anyway, this new molecule emerged, chlorophyll, which allowed us to capture photons of light from the sun and use the energy to extract carbon from CO2 to build our bodies. One unintended consequence of this was that every time one of us did this, a molecule of oxygen would be released into the ocean, and that was a toxic poison for all of the life of that time, the anaerobic life of that time.
For a billion years, that poison couldn't wreak any havoc because there was enough iron in the ocean so that the moment the oxygen was released, it would oxidise iron, and a molecule of rust would gently float to the bottom of the ocean. And the iron formations, the banded iron formations now two kilometres thick that we mine to create our cars and our cities and our culture, that's how they were created.
That's how that iron was all accumulated in the same place over a billion years at the bottom of the oceans, one molecule at a time. But eventually, the oxygen was able to build up sufficiently and threatened all of life, and that was solved by another bacteria that developed the heme molecule in order to be able to utilise that oxygen and that became the ancestor of the hemoglobin protein that transports oxygen through all animal bodies.
And that ancient cycle of partnership between the plants and the animals has continued unbroken ever since then. But I sort of bring that up now because it's like to the anaerobic bacteria, we imagine them walking around with placards saying, "Down with oxygen!"
"What a pollution crisis! They're destroying everything!" But history is written by the victors and that's not how we see it. And now, it's not that the anaerobes have disappeared, you'll still find them in the hindgut of termites and badly built compost heaps and so on.
But now, it's a whole different world. So some other world is going to follow us and it's going to be just as triumphant and just as ecstatic and just as gorgeous and beautiful and as unimaginable to us as we would be to the anaerobic bacteria that we're regretting that their time at the centre of the stage had come to an end. There's no doubt that our time at the centre of the stage will come to an end. Absolutely. I hope that it doesn't come to an end soon because it's too much fun.
And if it is such that we as humanity are playing an outsized role in the death and destruction of not only individual ecologies but whole species, whole sort of swaths of the world, and we might be able to shift our behaviour such that we lessen or cease that.
Hey, great, you know, eventually we're all going to die off no matter what. So if we could maybe slow that down and not be participating and perpetuating further and greater death and destruction quicker and sooner than it needs to be. Why not? Let's shoot for that too, right? And I do believe that psychedelics are a key to that and that's why I've got my fingers crossed for the sort of resurgence in psychedelics.
And, you know, I can see capitalism rubbing its hands in glee and trying to, you know, take control of the situation but I do think that psychedelics are stronger than capitalism, but of course the wheel still spins. Not my correlation, somebody else's, but it's interesting correlation that LSD, which is in fact a sort of remix of a molecule from a fungi or the ergot fungus.
It was discovered the same year as the atomic bomb was created. Now, is that a happy accident? Happy? Bob Ross? Is that a coincidence or is that an expression of a greater intelligence?
I think what we're seeing now is what's happening now, you know, this massive uprising of psychedelic use and discussion around psychedelics and their potential in a timeframe where, you know, a massive, we're starting to see like really significant sort of like right in our faces, consequences of global warming and our sort of ecological destruction. And we look back and be like, well, that was a coincidence, or will we, you know, or is it a larger intelligence at work?
I'm remembering a Ginsberg poem about Timothy Leary, I don't know if you know it, the refrain goes, "Poor Dr Leary, poor Earth." Anyway, beautiful poem in which he talks about this as that, the amazing way in which the Earth brings forth an antidote. You know, LSD, you know, is the Earth's way of bringing forth an antidote to this destruction.
So I want to zoom in a little bit. You're wearing an Acaciaville t-shirt, and Acaciaville is an organization totally aside. Acacia is a tree species that is present in many places around the world. From what I understand, the sort of greatest diversity of Acacia species in the entire world is in Australia. And specifically, there's at least three, I think, or four Acacia species in Australia that contain high amounts of DMT and other tryptamine-based alkaloids.
And there's a growing subculture of people who, from what I understand, are creating a sort of a neo-Aboriginal shamanic culture of consuming the Australian Acacia trees in ceremonial contexts. Something that, you know, I don't believe, or at least as far as my knowledge is, existed with the Aboriginal people before the colonies of England and where else came in.
And I imagine, my assumption is that as someone working in Australia, you've encountered this either directly or, you know, just by the circles you move into, and that my further assumption is that many of the people who have come or are coming to your Deep Ecology workshops either are aware of or have been participating in the consumption of Acacia as a brew.
And I'm curious if you, having been in the work and been in the sort of scene, part of the terminology, of the Australian environmental sort of like culture movements for many decades now, are you seeing this sort of emergence of this neo-Aboriginal shamanic practice with these native trees having a particular impact on sort of people's sense of identity and place with the land? And if so, what is it that you're seeing there?
Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't seen that at all. In fact, what you describe, I definitely know a lot of people who have been using Acacia as the DMT half of the brew with ayahuasca or Syrian roux or other things, you know. And I've partaken myself of several different Acacias to very, you know, been very important in my own life. But it's actually the first time that I've heard of these particular neo-Aboriginal, that side of it.
So I'm surprised. I would have thought that I would have heard of it if it was big. So I'm surprised to hear that. Well, to be fair, my terminology, because I look at it and I see people who are, you know, descendant of colonists who have no genetic relationship to the Aboriginal people there, finding their way into a kind of Aboriginal-like relationship with the land based on shamanic consumption, shamanic practices with a native plant.
So my terminology, part of the verbose-ness was a sort of neo-Aboriginal shamanic practice. That's where that terminology came from. Well, I will definitely make inquiries of people who will know much more about this than me based on what you've said. There's no particular reason, like it's not, that's not central in my life. So there's no reason why I would necessarily know about it. But I'd like to find out more.
But what I would like to say is that there's one of those acacia cordii, which saved my life. I had a tumour behind my right eye and was close to death on a number of occasions, maybe seven or eight years ago. Because I was at a point where radiation, chemo or surgery were no longer an option, I was eligible for treatment with a new immunotherapy, which had never been tried before.
And it knocked the tumour back, but for about eight months it had reduced in size, but it remained stable. And I was doing a workshop and one of the participants in the workshop in talking about who he was and what he did, he mentioned that he was someone who worked with plant medicines. And he mentioned in passing that this plant, acacia cordii, had told him that he was to heal environmentalists.
And so my ears pricked up and I said, well, that's interesting because I'm an environmentalist in need of healing. And so we arranged a ceremony together where I brought six of my closest friends, my eldest son and my best friend and other friends together with myself and my shaman. And we took the shared intention of the healing of the tumour behind my right eye. And in particular that the next scan, which was due a couple of weeks later, that it would have shrunk considerably.
And then we imbibed this brew and I don't remember anything particular about the experience. It was a beautiful DMT experience. But three weeks later, the tumour had shrunk by 70% and the scan after that it was gone. So I feel like, quite apart from the psychological benefits, there's just immense powers of healing there that I've experienced and am in awe and gratitude. Yeah, that's a beautiful story. And that's actually going to call me into, I think, my last question here for today.
So you're in your seventh generation, or sorry, excuse me, seventh decade of your personal life as John Seed here on planet Earth. And you're living in the time that followed a cancer diagnosis. One that would have taken your life had it not sort of resolved. And so my question is, at this time in your life, do you think much about your dying? And with that, the legacy that you'll leave behind or your hopes for the generations that will follow you?
I don't think much about my dying. I sort of feel that I've participated in so many ceremonies that have reminded me of the gorgeous universe from which I've popped out for a moment to which I will absolutely, surely return. And I feel at peace with that. My degeneration is another matter. I think quite a lot about the, you know, basically there's only two possibilities. You die young or you die a bit at a time and it's too late to die young, you know?
And so just watching the bits fall off, watching eyesight and hearing fade, watching memory, watching memory being impacted. But the desire to engage and to pursue my mission, it grows in intensity at the same time as my abilities decrease. And I'm just kind of torn by the anguish of that. All of a sudden, my workshops for decades, only hippies and pagans and witches ever showed up and they loved it and it was very worthwhile.
But all of a sudden, there's a senator coming to the workshops, there's professors coming to the workshops, there's therapists coming left, right and center and IT professionals and so on. And you know, it's just like I've got so much work to do and watching my abilities to do that work, you know, like it takes me, I have to be in bed for like 10 hours in order to get seven hours of sleep. Do you know, like it's just like I'm becoming less and less efficient. So that preoccupies me considerably.
Yeah, I could imagine the case. I'm comparatively a young pup, you know, at 38. And even looking back over the last 10 years of my life, I could see how much things really started to slow down and change and break down. I mean, would I be so lucky to make it to my seventh decade, fingers crossed, you know, my hopes and goals is hopefully to die a little bit at a time and not particularly young.
But yeah, I can imagine how challenging that would be. It sounds something to like, like what was it that you said like keeping the two things, one in each hand and the tension between them and with that driving the bus. So it seems like you're driving it pretty well anyways. Well, so this started at 6am, my time and what a wonderful way to start the day. James, thank you so much. Hey, you're welcome.
Is there anything anywhere you'd like to send the listeners anywhere they can learn more about what you're doing? I understand you're not going to be traveling out of Australia. So if they are local to Australia where they can get involved with the workshops you're running or anywhere you'd like to send them? Well, just there's a few, you know, there's the Rainforest Information Center website, my own blog and so on.
But anybody who does a search on, you know, John C. D.B. College, you will easily find all of those. And yeah, so nowhere in particular. All right. Well, you're welcome. I'm going to make sure that links to several of those things will be in the show notes of this episode of JamesWJSO.com. John C., again, thank you so much for coming on the show and thank you for your time and for your lifetime of incredible work that you've been doing. Thank you, James.
And cut. OK, thank you very much for listening to this episode of Adventures Through the Mind. If you are curious about John's work to learn more about what he does to support him and what he's doing or any of the things that he mentioned with respect to the documentaries and other information about him and his work.
All of that's going to be contained in the show notes of this episode of JamesWJSO.com, which will be easily accessible through a link in the description to this episode wherever you are checking it out. If you found value in the show, please do consider sharing it with someone that you care about or, you know, scatter gun it onto your favorite social media platform in some way or another.
Or you can simply follow me on one of my various social media channels from Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Twitter, yada yada at JamesWJSO or at my podcast. Again, linked in the description to this episode.
And if you're really interested in following what I'm doing and staying up to date and not relying on social media algorithms and all that corrupted B.S., you can sign up directly for my newsletter or follow the Telegram group that I send out information through, both of which are in the description again to this episode wherever you're checking it out.
And finally, well, you could also join as a free member of my Patreon where you can stay up to date with what I'm doing. And if you would like to become a paid member of my Patreon, then you can also be involved in the larger community of people that help support the production of the show and the larger body of my work that goes into its production. Again, guess what? You got it. Links are in the description of this episode wherever you're checking it out.
So all that to be said, follow me on social media, sign up for the newsletter, become my patron on Patreon. Links are, you know. And thanks so much for tuning in all the way to the end of this episode of Adventures Through the Mind. And until the next one, take care.