Foxwizard (00:02)
What-ho it’s foxwizard here and we are Questing Betwixt. Betwixt worlds, amidst the metacrisis. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about The Window of Disenchantment. Disenchantment is such a powerful spell, a useful spell for breaking illusions, for waking us up and allowing us the opportunity to move closer to what might be considered “alignment”. If you're experiencing disillusionment and disenchantment,

you're feeling a kind of a lack of motivation and you know, vitality, this is very much a podcast for you. We venture into quite a few domains. It gets pretty “meta” at times, but I think it's going to be a fascinating listen. So, uh: yeah, join me.

Yes, here we are. It's the 26th of October, 2024. I am mostly foxwizard today. Bit of Jason, not much Dr. Fox. And it's lovely to be with you for episode two of foxwizard Questing Betwixt. This episode is not directly in response to a particular question, but there's a pattern that I'm hearing a lot where people will refer to feeling as though they're in a chapter of life where...

They're feeling disenchanted, disillusioned. They’re not really-- they haven't got that spark, that motivation, that hustle energy, the kind of invigorating vitality that has one show up to the challenges in the world with the alacrity and the vim and verve that we might otherwise have become accustomed to in previous chapters of life. If this is you, if you're experiencing disenchantment, disillusionment, this podcast is for you. I find myself in response.

doing the classic thing, I don't think this is exactly a platitude, but I find myself just reminding folks that momentum inhibits reinvention. And so when we find ourselves in chapters of life where we don't have the momentum, it's actually a profound opportunity for reinvention. And here's what the podcast is going to be covering today. I'll give you a bit of an overview before I dive deeper. So I will be unpacking this notion of momentum,

and how momentum inhibits reinvention. We're then going to be looking at the glorious windows of disenchantment. Whenever you're experiencing disenchantment, this is a profoundly powerful spell and a really lovely opportunity. Disenchantment is the first spell that I cast whenever I'm working with a leadership team or whenever I'm working one-on-one and coaching folks. Disenchantment is the horizontalizing “ground zero”

that allows for the re-enchantment to follow. So I shall be unpacking the notion of breaking spells and why disenchantment and disillusionment is particularly apt and appropriate as a response in this particular chapter of humanity. And then I shall be introducing the notion of how we can,

once disenchanted, start to move closer to that which lights us up, closer to the meaningful progress that was obscured for us as we were perpetuating the rich delusions of progress. And then I'll end on a final note, my signature note on oscillation as a reminder. Anytime I try to make a point that's too clear, as foxwizard an enigmatic advisor to all who quest amidst the metacrisis and a time betwixt worlds, I must mess it up a little bit because I want you to keep your wits about you.

I don't want you to cohere too tightly to anything one particular rogue scholar might suggest to you.

The intent for this podcast is really to offer perhaps, you know, from a warm friend perspective, something that may be a little bit different to the conventional productivity hustle vibes that we tend to get. These days, if you want to be commercially successful,

most- everything is couched in terms of productivity. I was at a conference towards the end of last year, and there was this person who is a CEO of a startup that effectively has little cabins that exist in the forest so that people can go spend some time in nature alone without the distractions of modernity. But the presentation itself, lovely concept, but the presentation itself, it felt like a Silicon Valley startup pitch, like “time in nature”

was used, like the reason that was validated is because you can actually get boosts your productivity with spending time in nature. And once you get become attuned to this, once you start to see productivity as a flag, it's like it's part of the spell because right now we've got this double combination of everyone feeling time poor in this distraction economy, feeling spread thin, feeling tired, worn out.

And the solution that we are presented in this world is, well, if we're more productive, then we'll have more free time, which completely sidesteps the Jevon’s paradox, which says that as the efficiency increases, the demand for that particular task or product or outcome increases as well. So yes, sure, you might get more efficient about a particular thing, but will it actually reduce the amount of work that you do? Will it actually increase the amount of free time?

I'm not so sure and history would suggest that most of these, proclaimed boost to productivity do nothing to abate work. And of course there's bigger issues behind this, but let's, let's go to this, let's go to this notion. Momentum inhibits reinvention. Look, momentum is great until it isn't, but I just want to point out that momentum is fantastic. Once I get into momentum with writing this next book for you,

eight and half years in the making, I'm going to be so glad for it. You want to be in momentum on things that are important. When you are in momentum, the kind of the valence that you have, the salience landscape diminishes and you become, you know, warmly fixated upon a particular outcome and a particular approach. Sometimes when I've been hiking, you kind of get this momentum where

You know, if you're a runner, you kind of find that sweet spot, you're in flow. And even if there may be beautiful views off to the side, there's this hesitation. You don't want to slow down because you would lose your momentum. And if you did slow down, things would catch up to you. And, you know, The Heresy of Rest might come to you and, the temptations of actually taking it easy for a little bit. One cannot afford to do that, not in this economy.

And also then the energy required to reactivate is a lot higher. So momentum makes sense. And in a business context, of course, you know, most organizations would want to be in momentum most of the time. But then, for those of us that are paying attention, it can sometimes feel as though the universe is trying to teach you something. And this

starts to feel for you, and you may already be noticing this if you attune. One of the things I encourage in The Ritual of Becoming, which I shall be unpacking at some point in the future and reinvigorating, is to cultivate levels of self awareness, self knowingness via introspection, reflection, intuiting into felt sense about how you are. And this sense of incongruence is something where you might have momentum, but it doesn't feel right.

And it doesn't, it doesn't feel right. Like you, you're busy, you're productive, you're doing all the right things, but there's a lack. There's a kind of, there's a malaise, the feeling of, hmm, this isn't really moving closer to who I am. And of course I've touched upon some of the themes in the previous episode, but we're going to double down a little bit now because this incongruence can then blossom into a sense of incoherence.

as in our own unfurling story or narrative trajectory, not that there is any fixed narrative, it's all unfurling. But when we consider the range of possibilities that we are moving towards, it may feel like a lot of them don't really make sense. Like, this is not who I want to become. And yet I still find myself, you know, on this path, or I don't believe in these futures anymore. And one of the big questions is, what is the story of the future that we have?

And a lot of metaphilosophers are talking about this time between worlds or a time between stories. We are where,  for those of us paying attention, the old story, the story of the naive progress narrative where everything's good and getting better all the time, where civilization is great and science is awesome and, you know, meritocracy prevails and rationalism will triumph and man versus nature, the path to victory. And a lot of folks are...

seeing that that's not really working out for us and can't quite fathom how rampant inequality, exponential extinctions, global heating, not to mention genocides and ecocide, how that's actually conducive to a brighter future. And so with becoming disillusioned with that story, one can be disenchanted by it too. And that can lead us to a place of like, huh, I...

don't know if what I'm doing is actually going to move us closer to future relevance. I don't know what I'm doing is actually going to make sense. And so we get these glimmers, we get these senses, but the habituation is strong. This is what I talk about when I refer to the delusion of progress, because our motivation, our focus, our attention, our behavior naturally gravitates to the things that provide the richest sense of progress.

These are the things that are often the default things, well established things that have precedence, that are easy to measure, that are kind of normative, everyone else is doing it, seems like the right thing to do. I guess I just carry on. But I was having coffee with, Kim and I were having coffee with a friend of ours, a yoga teacher. And she shared this saying, which is a common saying, what you resist persists.

And so whilst you have these glimmers, sometimes these senses, this intuitive sense that, hmm, what I'm doing doesn't really feel like it is in alignment with who I am to become, knowing that there's no singular true authentic self. But there is, having said that, and it's the nebulosity of the plurality of selves and the ontological coherence that they may have, there is a higher kind of like

calling that is an alignment to your values that kind of reconciles the conflicting values, the contradictions, the paradoxes that you have within. And unless you kind of step up and into that, the challenge and the complexity of that, unless you kind of actively embrace the complexification of self, then you might find yourself stubbornly persisting on a path that leads you further into disenchantment and disillusionment.

And what you resist persists and the lessons that life will dish at you will get stronger and stronger. You may find yourself burning out. You may find your mental health collapsing. You may find your physical health collapsing. You may find tensions increase in your life. You may find that a sense of scarcity starts to breed into things. These loops, I mean, these loops require breaking. We need to actually progress through them if we're going to move

I guess closer to future relevance, closer to meaningful progress, closer to a sense of like alignment. And the one might call this Dharma. And I mentioned the Dharma inquiry in the last episode. But let's, look at this notion of windows of disenchantment. So occasionally life offers you a window of disenchantment, maybe a day, an hour,

a week, a month, a quarter, a year, where we just find ourselves, disenchanted and there's a sense of like this yearning, this deep yearning for a break, for a sense of quiescence, a sabbatical or some sort of solace. And it's hard, right? Because to actually take time off,

and to then resist the temptation to fill that time with stuff because the default we have is to optimize our time. Remember productivity 10x, we've got to like always be hustling and always be making the most of our time. So when we do have time, it's very easy for this time to become optimized. And this is the antithesis of what Nassim Taleb writes about an antifragile where he makes the comparison between two types of holidays. One approach to a holiday is to approach it like a tourist,

which is where you optimize the whole experience. We have this really tight plan about here's what we're to do here. And then we catch the bus here and then we do this thing there. And that means that we can catch the overnight train to this. And that means we can go to this popular thing here. And it's this beautiful, you know, architected plan that's, you know, wondrously optimized, but it's also fragile because if you miss one of those connecting things, lot of the plan will fall apart. And it also means that when you are on your holiday,

the question is, are you personally experiencing the experiences? Are these personal experiences personally experienced as Layman Pascal writes in Gurdjieff For A Time Between Worlds. Or are we superficially experiencing it all but mostly focus on capturing the photos and the kind of signature stories so that we can retell them on social media to boost our status and basically perpetuate the same game? as I said,

I feel like I said this previously, but it used to be that we could just disappear. We could just fly off somewhere or catch a long train or just disappear for a few months and then come back changed. But nowadays our social networks follow us and as soon as we land, we're back online, we're back connecting, we're back reinforcing an older form of self. So partly the window of disenchantment beckons a different type of approach.

And what Nassim Taleb talks about with a different type of holiday is to approach it like a “rational flaneur”, where you're kind of guided by your nose as an example uses where you walk the cities. And if you smell the aroma of baking bread or whatever it is, you go venture there and you've got serendipity, you've got synchronicity, you've got emergence, you've got all sorts of unanticipated things that may lure you to a new moment of reckoning of realization. And that's kind of the angle that I'm

trying to take here these windows of disenchantment are opportunities for you to take some solace or step back from that which is no longer serving you. But the way that we do this requires us to really cultivate and embrace the conditions of emergence of generative ambiguity. And let's just play with this question of disenchantment because it sounds like a really bad thing.

And there are different lenses here, mythological, philosophical, psychological, you know, from a just mundane sense, it doesn't mean simply losing interest in something, but it means actively stepping out of an enthralling and possibly deceptive spell. And maybe that's not a mundane sense, but this sense of disenchantment of

being a window in which you are free from a spell that otherwise has you hoodwinked, which otherwise has your ontological disposition trapped within a cycle that is not actually serving you and you get this glimmer of an alternative. But the thing is, of course, it's quite scary to kind of leave the comfort of the familiar. So often we turn away from that, that window of disenchantment. And sometimes my mind goes a little bit of faë with this.

Having grown up in a land that has been colonized and we don't really have the ready access to the lineage of folklore and fairy tales and so forth, or perhaps we do, but then there's a right relation and a respect that is required in order to glean and learn from this. I've been kind of turning to things. I've got the book in my hand, The Uses of Enchantment, Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim.

That's a lovely book, unpacking some of the deeper truths within the lies of fairy tales. And so, my mind goes often goes to this fey notion when I think of windows of disenchantment, there are these, sometimes there are these moments in life where, you know, maybe it's the stars aligning or the way the light is shining, there's a particular hour, a particular mood, a particular hush in which

your context seems to speak to you and call to you in a different sense. And if you're paying attention, you'll sometimes be attuned to these moments. And there's a beckoning in that there's a beckoning to quest to venture beyond the default. But in this distraction economy, these moments don't often last long. And because of the demands and the ravages of modern work, we often find ourselves so busy anywho, so we often don't partake of the invitation.

But this enchantment is an invitation. In myth, if we put a mythological lens on, enchantment is like, it kind of implies a spell. Like if you think of going into an enchanted forest, what does that imply? Like it means things are so beautiful within the forest. Like you don't want to leave. Like the lichen, the moss is so soft. There's a glowing nimbus, the way the light, the komorebi 木漏れ日 is the way the dappled light

filters through the leaves into this open glade and the kind of glimmer of potentially fireflies or butterflies and so on, the kind of the beautiful chorus of the birds and so on. It's like, this is a beautiful place, why wouldn't you want to leave? And so there's often like a mystery, a beauty to it that keeps us enthralled and enraptured and hides or obfuscates the otherwise dangers that might be lurking there. So thus to be disenchanted means breaking these magical illusions.

And then typically in mythological tales, when these enchantments are lifted, a character confronts reality, which is often more complex and sober or even bleak compared to the mythical version. And having this awareness that, shit, right. Okay. It's not as simplistic as I had once thought. It's not as cartoonish or naive as I had once thought. I'm not the hero of this story, but in fact,

a kind of a complicit co-creator of conditions that are manifesting all sorts of harm and setting our collective species on a pathway towards self-termination. What do we do with that? So we have this sense of the kind of magic being lost when we awaken to a harsher reality. And then from a psychological perspective,

in some theories, disenchantment is considered a really important milestone, or at least a stage of developing towards a more resilient and complex worldview. But it can also exist, and I'm just reading here my notes, it can also result in existential feelings of emptiness if you struggle to find new sources of meaning post-disillusionment. And this is where folks often fall into

the nihilistic gap or the abyss, you know, as we begin to walk the paths, of the labyrinths of reason. And as we start to see the limitations of reason itself, and then we're confronted with the absolute nebulosity of the fact that all of these reasons are constructs, doesn't mean they're not true, we just recognize that we become construct aware. And we see the constructs of reason, and then the nebulosity beneath it all, and the mercuriality, the kind of contextual, contingent, relational,

meaningness that, that pervades all of life. then, well that can be really confronting and disheartening and folks can fall into these faux nihilistic, tendencies where they say, nothing means anything. This kind of anomie this, this, this kind of torpor, this, this, this, numbed, detachment. And whilst, I'm a proponent of disenchantment.

Disenchantment happens as a spell so that we can confront reality and then move to new enchantment. There's always re-enchantment that follows disenchantment. To live life without enchantment, gosh, that's not a life that I would want to live, but it remains an oscillation. We don't want to become enthralled or ensnared and hoodwinked by enchantment, but at the same time, we don't want to live without enchantment because that is bleak. And so,

one of the things that, I was, I really fell in love with, with the mythologist, Martin Shaw, Dr. Martin Shaw, he writes of in the book, Courting The Wild Twin and also in, crap. Well, many of these other books, I'm just trying to--Smoke Hole was another one. There's notion of breaking spells and, I'm just going to focus again on this, importance of disenchantment, but I want you to know that we're going to land back in re-enchantment. but, let's just appreciate this.

The windows of disenchantment and the invitation that they provide. When I am doing my work as Dr. Fox, ArchWizard of Ambiguity (most fantastic) and I am called to work with a leadership team, typically on a leadership offsite or strategy offsite or something like that, DISENCHANTMENT is the first spell that I cast. And I do this for quite a few reasons. Firstly, with any group context, you want to win over the most skeptical

cynical people in the room first. And often these folks will have preconceived ideas as to, they'll think, who is this wanker coming up on the stage, coming up to speak to us in the room, they probably think that they know things and I need to kind of disabuse them of those notions. But also I need to kind of collectively disenchant stories that may no longer be serving the group.

And there's this move of disenchantment that is levelling and horizontalizing because one of the enchantments that persists within Enterprise Land, as fellow infinite players know, is that there are roles and titles. And some of the finite players who have forgotten their infinite nature kind of cling to this with a seriousness, which means that you press for specific outcomes rather than being open to play and possibility. And in this...

gripping to roles there’s an artificial inflation of hierarchy and other structures. But the reality is we're a bunch of people in a room that want to work out how we can work together and do better work together and generate more value together. And so sometimes, you know, it is the thing of you want to, know, jester mode, you want to speak truth to power. you kind of

you bring any of the seemingly uppity folks down a notch. And then you also want to lift some of the more quieter voices. Effectively, the first 30 % is disenchantment work, but it's a complex weave. We want to horizontalise, we want to level the playing field. We also want to, you know, I'm effectively doing the thing that people say of public speaking, just imagine everyone in their underwear.

I mean, that is literally the case. And we have costumes on top of what we're wearing, but beneath it all, we're just naked apes. Not really apes. I don't want to insult the apes, we're, we're, you know, we're mammals. We're coming together. But of course you can see, even as I say this in the disenchantment, there's a kind of postmodern bleakness that we can fall into where we start to see everything as mere construct and

that can get carried away. We can start to not believe in kindness, for example. “Kindness doesn't exist”, Some postmodernists might say, but it does. There are emergent properties that are kind of baked into the universe itself, one might say, of intimacy, of finding ways to cohere. Atoms, elements, molecules have done this. We are on a trajectory towards

complexification, which means we need to coordinate at higher orders of complexity at scale. And so beneath it all, naked humans coming together to figure things out. beneath it all, we're just figuring it out. And of course, you, my dear listener, you are a naked person beneath your costume too, navigating life, trying to figure things out. And we are all trying to collectively

orientate towards relevance-realization, and hopefully a world more curious and kind, a world where at least some of our base needs are met. We feel a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of place, a sense of contribution, collegiality. And disenchanting the kind of artificial titles and constructs and the theater of the costumes and all of that stuff is really useful because it means that we come back to this horizontal relation.

I'm quoting a little bit here from The Courage to be Disliked; Adlerian philosophy. We don't want to have verticality in any of our relationships. We are neither better or worse than others. We are just, as Adler would say, we are all comrades in amidst this. Of course, there are different domains of expertise and you know, there are different strengths and talents. So verticality still exists, but these are non-dominance hierarchies in that there is no greater-than-thou.

If one was to quote from Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk, and how he describes the myth of the emu and the lessons of this, the greater-than-thou, the seed of narcissism is one of the things that we need to ward and protect against. And so the disenchantment spell is a good way to kind of just make an attempt to smooth things out and horizontalize things. And then when we start to think about business stuff, like I like to use a couple of examples, like home ownership.

Like right now we're in this phase where a lot of our friends are really excited about buying homes and then some of our friends are buying investment properties and so forth. And, you know from my perspective, and maybe I've been radicalized, who knows? The postmodernist in me would say that home ownership doesn't exist. Ownership only exists via consensus, via social consensus. And it's kind of true. It is true.

This is why I'm sort of excited by blockchain as a coordination technology because consensus is baked in via the validators, but that's a story for another time. So ownership only exists via social consensus. When you own a home, what often happens is actually you sign a contract and the bank actually owns your home. But if you happen to pay the bank enough money, eventually with all your interest, then the contract moves to you. But even that contract was essentially a bit of paper, which sigils that are kind of sequentially

written out on that paper, a series of glyphs that transmute into words and thus meaning. And meaning is an intersubjective entity that we share as a species. And so you have your sigils mapped across there. You have a contract. That contract is a kind of spell. What does that contract do? Well, it says that you own it, but if ownership only exists via social consensus,

then what we're relying on here with the contract is a social consensus of the government, which has the monopoly of violence to protect your claim on that property. So when people buy property, they're effectively buying contracts to the largest monopolized violence entity. And the hope is that if anyone was to challenge their contract, the entity will intervene violently if so.

Now, if you lived in a country where another country is literally bombing the property that you own and so forth and your country itself doesn't have enough monopolized violence to combat the other country, then yeah, your property is not going to be there. But is it even your property? And this question of like dividing up pieces of the land, drawing lines in the land with something that is so interconnected and nebulous and flowing, it doesn't really make sense. So...

I won't harbour this point on too much because I want to talk to you about regenerative finance at some point in the future. (with a pinch of salt). But home ownership, you can kind of see how the disenchantment spell on that kind of really makes you think, shit, okay, what are we talking about here? Even questions of money, like what is money? Money is a symbolic claim of energy. So if you have, you know, a hundred dollars, you get a hundred dollars worth of, you know,

energy that's kind of transmuted in some form. Money itself is not actually valuable. It's well, the money itself is a meta optionality token that allows you to access a claim of energy in myriad forms. And so therefore, you know, how is money created? Well, real value is actually destroyed or extracted from its context, you know, mined as oil, or gold or whatnot.

An then it is abstracted into symbolic form and then is accumulated. And effectively then money is backed by the industrial military complex and global heating and climate change and colonial imperialism. And so therefore, the spell with all this, if not disenchanted, is that if you own investment properties and are into the accumulation of money, then you naturally have a bias to protect that interest, which means that

you're not interested in solving the housing crisis because it will lower the property value of the investment properties that you have. And then also, you're not interested in, seeing a shift in the global hegemony to something that might be more equitable and fair because that might debase the very dollar that you have, of course, you know, who knows what's going to happen there, but just having a sense of disenchantment allows us to have better connection with

“reality”. And naturally though, there are some enchantments that people don't want you to break out of that enchantment. I'm going to quote from Martin Shaw here, Courting the Wild Twin: “the business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.”

So most of us by default, persist with automaticity, we do our things day to day, there we confer to social norms, we persist within the stories that we've grown up with and been surrounded with and tell each other and ourselves. And so therefore being asleep is the default, are perpetuating, under the spell. But as I share, and this podcast is for the infinite players questing amidst the metacrisis in a time betwixt worlds, some of us awake, awaken to this.

And awakening to our complicity within systemic inequality and all sorts of myriad violence and harm is not a fun place to be. And once in this woke phase, one can become very hostile, very critical. I was there once, nothing I could do was enough. I felt complicit and wretched. also when I'd see my

you know, friends and colleagues who are still kind of asleep perpetuating the naive progress narrative and feeling good about it. I felt this urge to kind of point out, no, no, can't you see? It's a real buzzkill. No one really likes folks that are freshly woke and amidst the woke. Well, maybe they do, but like it's, it's really hard. Like, there's nothing you can do that is good enough or right enough and so forth. But I do want to offer you, there is a, there's a space that can go to that is post-woke.

And this post-woke phase is a phase where we recognise the systemic inequality and harm and we're actively working to reconcile that whilst being aware of our own complicity and also knowing the fact that we still need to participate in order to survive. And so it is a complex place of turmoil for many of us, but it's better than the other options because sometimes

when people awaken to this realization, the disenchantment of modernity wears off and we see what's really happening, particularly in the global north and the unnecessary toll we have on the global south. It's very much like Hunger Games, if you're aware of that movie series or the book series where you have The Capital that extracts resources from all of The Districts, but then it manages to pacify and keep it all in peace by having these Hunger Games and these narratives woven...

until the districts actually realize and start to coordinate and work together. That's the same pattern with Star Wars and you have Empire and you have The Rebellion. It's a pattern that's persisted throughout it all. What happens, actually side note, most movies and stories have this oscillation. Either things are in Chaos and you have folks working together to rally folks together in some sort of coordination or things have too much Order.

And there's like a stagnation and a crushing oppression to that. And people are working to bring in more chaos, this dance between order and chaos. This oscillation is what is a generating function of life and development. And so yeah, so we're in a moment where, where it could be said that, I don't know, it seems like we're potentially moving closer towards authoritarianism. We'll see. We'll see. It's a rough

rough time out there. But the being awake, being awakened to this, you know, some people actually then go like, I don't want to know. I don't want to know. And then, you know, pursue ignorance and kind of go back to sleep. Reminds me of that A Perfect Circle song. “Lay your head down child. I let the boogeyman come. Count the bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums. Pay no mind to the rabble. Pay no mind to the rabble. Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums”. Anyway.

It seems like sleep is preferable than living with the angst that the awakened state brings. And then you have, course, the emergence of the anti-woke narratives where naturally this persists in politics, it persists in nations and in businesses because

awakening to systemic inequality, our complicity in harm, the limitations of the market to actually properly factor in externalized harm, like that is a threat, an existential threat to most business models. And so very much the impetus is to not only stay asleep, but to be anti-woke, to be against those that are awakened and pointing this out. And so the kind of enchantment, the hoodwink, the spell remains strong,

even resistant to attempts to disenchant. And there's some parallels here between asleep, the tragic mode and then the post-tragic or the doom mode and post-doom. Jem Bendell who wrote the book Breaking Together has a notion of doomsters. And this is kind of reflected in the Dark Mountain Manifesto too. I'll include these in the show notes.

...where there's a sense like it's the end of the world as we know it, but it's not the end of the world full stop. But part of recognizing it's not in the end of the world full stop is how we have to let go of the old enchantments, as in not the old enchantments, but the modern enchantments that we've held onto that may be blinding us to the deeper realities at play. And when we let go of that, we can enter a post-tragic, post-doom, post-woke mode where we can start to actively work on things in a way that is effective, even if most of our friends and colleagues are still asleep.

And that's okay. So we can effectively waken to better stories. So let me quote to you something from Martin Shaw’s Courting The Wild Twin. “This now is mostly an era of spellmaking, of tacit enchantment, of stulified imaginations, and loins inflamed by so much factory fodder lust, our relations malfunction in their millions.

We are on the island of the Lotus Eaters, curled up in our warm sleepy breeze of a Russian fairy tale as the robber steals away the Firebird. How do we wake up? I will give you a little plot spoiler right now, right here. It sounds so very deceptively simple. The secret is relatedness.”

These themes that you probably heard me refer to quite a bit in the last episode. I talked about authentic relating. So instead of pursuing an authenticity of self, pursue authentic relating in the moments and the situations that we find ourselves in. Our “selves”. This relatedness is one of the things that we reawaken to when we break through the spell of modernity. Modernity tends to...

be reductionist, materialist, individualist, has us siloed, somehow separate. We distance ourselves with rationality. We try to approach things objectively. We believe naively in things like the market. And the warmth of relatedness, of relationality that is returned to us when we break free of the enchantment, when we become disenchanted enough, when we step into the window of disenchantment, we can see new possibilities emerge.

And this is where we need to be. And so if you're feeling disenchanted or disillusioned, this is fantastic because much of what we do is an illusion. How we think of like the accumulation of money and wealth and status and power, a lot of it is illusionary. The reality beneath it all is the relatedness of the wider richness of the living systems that we are a part of. So I'm going to give you one more quote because this kind of is related.

This comes from the song, Disillusioned by A Perfect Circle. It's a great song to listen to. Maynard James Keenan who does the lyrics, says, we have been, I'm going to just speak it out rather than sing it too. I'm not that kind of bard. “We have been overrun by our animal desire. Addicts of the immediate // keep us obedient and unaware.

Feeding this mutation, this Pavlovian despair, We've become disillusioned. So we run towards anything glimmering. It's time to put the silicon obsession down. Take a look around, find a way in the silence. Lie supine with your back upon the ground. Dis- and re-connect to the resonance now. You were never an island. Unique voice among the many in this choir. Tuning into each other, lift all higher.

Yeah. I love it. didn't do it justice reading it out, but it's a good song. Hopefully this, this little podcast here is, I'm already like half an hour in. I'm hoping it serves as like a little, a little, you know, if you're feeling the disenchantment, disillusionment, there are options. I'm going to shift now as to what we can do if we're feeling this because

to go back to sleep, to persist with the illusion, to hop back and I don't want to use matrix things because that toxic masculinity guy kind of loves that phrase. But anyway, to persist in the illusions again, we've got to be aware of it. We still have to dance within the illusions, but we can embrace some of the warmth that lies on the other side of disenchantment. So re-enchantment is where we go to after disenchantment, which also means that we embrace

new illusions as well. If we're feeling disillusioned, the answer is not to persist solely in base reality, it's to actually warm into new illusion.

So here's how we do this. Ritualized quiescence. Quiescence is a sense of solitude and space and time, quietude in a busy and distracted world. there's a model that I've been using for about 12 years now. I used to call it contextual momentum, but now I'm dubious of the term momentum because momentum inhibits reinvention. But there is something about intentionally carving out time against the grain of busyness to progress the things that matter.

And to doing this in a manner that it's not simply routine, but it's actually ritual. And so there's this model. And again, I'll share it in the post. This will probably be foxwizard.com/e2 which you can look up on the website. I have this model that I previously called contextual momentum I don’t what I'll call it now, which looks at life through the lens of daily, weekly, monthly, seasonally, yearly and decade + time signatures.

And there's a balance between specificity and fuzziness. As you know, I'm not really a proponent of hyper-specific goals that are cast far into the future, but it is useful for you to know what you can do with a high level of specificity today or this week that is conducive to meaningful progress. But even then, I tire myself of hearing myself say the words ”meaningful progress”. There's a sense of,

listening to that which leads to a deepening, a kind of a call towards more meaningfulness as distinct from mere habituation or the default mode. And what I remind people of like most of the time, we actually want to have default thinking, we want to actually have momentum most of the time, I'm thinking 80% of the time. The worry is though that we have this more like 98% of the time and so

we persist in default mode and don't really pay attention to these glimmers of disenchantment, this kind of beckoning sense of disillusionment. As I wrote about about a year ago, a year and a half, about a year and two months ago, sharing Daniel Schmachtenberger's quite profound talk about letting yourself feel depressed. You know, many of us are so scared of feeling depressed. We don't go there. So we kind of plow on and we...

plaster over it with positive, know, toxic positivity or doubling down on default narratives. But if you actually let yourself feel depressed, let yourself feel the grief. I swear on the other side of that, more beautiful things emerge for you. It's this denial. What is this quote? can't remember where this from. But it's something like we would rather see the world destroyed than face the grief of seeing the world destroyed, which seems to be the pattern that we're on at the moment.

So actually, if you're listening to this, one of the things that's active from both Kim and I at the moment is, and I got this from Josh Schrei from The Mythic Body course, intentionally cultivating a sacred calendar. I think my friend Buster Benson has been exploring this too. I think it's quite personal. What is a sacred calendar for you?

And you can't necessarily sit in isolation and map out as an architect all of these rituals that you want to do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, et cetera. But if you start with the lunar and solar cycles, if you start with like equinoxes and solstices, full moons, new moons and things like that, maybe there's a bit of a canvas for that. Maybe there is something profound that you can do for yourself.

each morning before you, you know, before you tap on the black stone tablet and be ensnared in the world of the interwebs. Maybe there are shutdown rituals that you can embrace if we're to borrow from Cal Newport, who also speaks about productivity, although his latest book is slow productivity. He's warming to the whole thing. Cal Newport, Oliver Berkman, you know, there is a one of the things I love doing is if I put my futurist cap on

you look at where publishers are publishing things because I have a lot of friends that are authors. I have a sense of what is emerging in the intellectual landscape. Partially this is intentionally curated by the market forces being the major publishers, but partially it's also a prescience that is worth tapping into. For example, with all of the challenges of the pandemic, there was this wave of

of books of like how to consciously deal with breakups and all kind of find a ways to revive relationships and so forth, which is a pretty good sense of things given the shared context that we had. But yeah, I'm in this phase where I'm not rushing this, but quite intentionally trying to cultivate a sacred calendar. Now, some people might have issues with the word sacred. It's good to be aware of our own allergies. By sacred,

I mean something other than mundane, that the real risk with ritual is that we turn it into something that is routine and that becomes a habituation and becomes something that we unthinkingly do automatically. We want to be present to this. I remember this quote that I think I read or something about that much of childhood is not that magic exists when we were children. It's more that we were present when we were children, which meant that we were present to the magic and much of

what we need to remember as adults nowadays is to cultivate the quality of presence, to be present, to be attuned to what we're experiencing and what is happening and what is emerging for us.

So yeah, the solution to disenchantment and disillusionment is the... I don't even want to frame it as solution. When experiencing disillusionment and disenchantment, there's usually a deeper message that we need to pay attention to. I would suggest if we were to go mythic here, and we can do this while still say, you know, keeping grip on rationality if you want to, but if we're going mythic, we'll suggest that there is, there are forces, spirits, the universe, whatever it is, your daemon,

that are telling you that you're veering off track and it might be experienced as a sense of premonition. A sense of like, hmm, The Tower card in tarot is coming for me. There is something that's going to break down. I can't sustain this. And that's a scary thing to confront. But if we actually start to build space for this, build time for this in a non-optimized fashion that allows for a kind of reverent attention, contemplation, introspection,

It might be that we can become a little bit more attuned to this and catch this a little bit earlier before travesty emerges for us. Yeah. So have a think about your rituals. I'm not at the moment. I'm At the moment. I'm not feeling like a paragon in this regard. I veered myself and I shall be ritualizing the book writing for you. And also time in nature is one of the things that

I'm actively orientating towards. Kim got me onto this fantastic new app, by the way, to not that I want to encourage more tech use. I think we're good there, but Merlin Bird ID, Merlin Bird ID, and check out that app. It's you can download a sound pack of your the birds in your area, and you can start to pay attention and notice what birds are around.

This is at a different quality to the way that we go for our daily walks when we walk our little guy Snörri at the Abbotsford convent or in other areas. And it's these kinds of things where I feel like, you know, when you're thinking about rituals for yourself, that is your own kind of nourishment, they'll often not look productive. They'll look sort of indulgent, perhaps a little bit pointless. I remember Martin Shaw has this ritual of

brooding by twilight. And I love that. And that's one of the things that I do regularly manage to do a good little brood and a contemplative brood as the dusk, as the sun, you know, has its all of its wondrous hues upon the sky as the stars begin to awaken. As we, you know, contemplate amidst the kind of the daily liminal. Yeah. So then we kind of move closer to re-enchantment then.

And there's a really fascinating quote from, Trickster Makes This World how disruptive imagination creates culture by Lewis Hyde. I want to read this to you. It pertains to one of my, this guy's been a favored deity of mine for a very long time. I'm talking about Hermes, the

the trickster God of crossroads, of boundaries, of transgressions, of merchants and thieves and communication and messaging. A psychopomp, know, the spiritfarer and so forth. Hermes often, as most tricksters do, represent paradox and oscillation. And whilst we want to be respectful of trickster energy, you don't want to like, I feel like I fell into the pattern of calling myself trickster.

It just, which is perhaps a bit of hubris because, you know, trickster will fuck you up as, as, know, if you don't pay proper respects. But trickster comes and disrupts when stagnation, when the things are too solid, too structured, too neat. And this can be experienced as disaster, divorce, destabilization, destruction, all sorts of things. And the result is it stirs things up.

And that kind of cultural stirring new things emerge. There was a fantastic episode by Josh Schrei on trickster specifically. I'll try to remember that, include that in the show notes. But what I want to read from you here is this oscillatory nature that Hermes provides in terms of disenchantment and re-enchantment. They both happen at the same time. This is then going to land into the final conversation that I share with you about Father Tongue and Mother Tongue. How are we going?

52 minutes, okay. All right, we can do this under an hour. I don't think so, but we can get close. “Depending on which way he is moving across the threshold, I call him Hermes of the Dark or Hermes of the Light. Hermes of the Dark is the enchanter, the hypnagogue who moves us into the underworld of sleep, dream, story and myth. This darkening motion is a precondition of belief.

With it, Hermes delivers you to one of the gods or puts you under his or her spell. He dissolves time in the river of forgetfulness. And once time has disappeared, the eternals come forward. Hermes of the Dark is the weaver of dreams, the charmer who spins a compelling tale, the orator who speaks your Mother Tongue with fluid conviction. Hermes of the Light is the disenchanter or the awakening angel who leads you out of the cave.

There the bright light prepares the ground for doubt. There he kills and roasts the sacred cattle. He dissolves the eternals in the river of time and when they have disappeared the world becomes contingent and accidental. Hermes of the Light translates dreams into analytical language. He rubs the charm from old stories until they seem hopelessly made up and mechanical. He walks you inland until you stop dreaming in your Mother Tongue. Hermes himself is neither one of these alone.

but both at once. He is the mottled figure in the half-light, the amnigoge who simultaneously amazes and

unmazes, whose wand both bewitches the eyes of men to sleep and wakes the sleeping, as Homer says in Iliad." You get the vibe here. We've got a both-and, oscillatory, simultaneous, proto-metamodern, trickster deity who helps folks that are too ensnared by enchantment, by bringing the disillusionment of light,

and allowing doubt to creep in and, slaughtering the sacred cows and making hamburgers and so forth so that we kind of have the taboo and the transgressions and we're looking at things through the kind of analytical Father Tongue. This is an important role. This is an important role. And then there's also Hermes of the Dark, who is the re-enchanter, who brings us back into the world of dreams of enchantment of our Mother Tongue. And

This is vitally important too. As someone once said, I can't remember who, it's easier to, no, think it's Slavoj, whatever. It's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And imagination is what we need so desperately in this time betwixt worlds. And I know I've kind of gone quite meta with all of this stuff, so I'm hoping it's like useful for you personally.

That if you're feeling a sense of disenchantment and disillusionment, then perhaps it's useful. And perhaps through the sober light of day, as we allow doubts to creep in, doubts as to our current trajectory, that they may be leading us to a future that we're no longer relevant, or it's a future where we don't feel the sense of meaning and warmth and relatedness. And instead, with that realization, start to dream up and weave into the relatedness around us and to move closer to whatever is calling us to closer to something that may feel like meaningful progress. That sounds good to me.

I just want to like, finally, second last point for you. Have a quick little discussion on Father Tongue and Mother Tongue. This is something that Kim brought to my attention after reading a fantastic essay from Ursula K. Le Guin in Dancing at the Edge of the World. And I think it's useful just to have the awareness of not only the tongue that we're speaking in, but the tongue that we're thinking in.

Because modernity does anchor very heavily towards Father Tongue. Father tongue is the language of authority, of logic, of distancing. It's language shaped by patriarchal traditions and prioritises objectivity and competition. So it's kind of like the formal discourse of power. And we see this play out often if women or those that

have a feminine disposition, they want to be heard in a public sphere, often feel compelled to adopt this Father Tongue. In my own adventures with the rekindling with my friend Paul Kearney, we’ve been trying to create the conditions where Father Tongue does not prevail. This happens a lot in metacrisis conversations where you have a lot of gigabrain complexity practitioners use ever fancy technical language to describe

exacting detail, the predicament that we're in. That's fine to a point, but we just need to be mindful if we're spending too much time in Father Tongue. There is a role for it. I don't want to go into a masculinity bashing campaign. I think we've kind of passed that. We are over indexed in masculinity as a frame and as a mode in which we go to. Masculinity itself tends to narrow our focus, go with much more linear, much more measurable, much more known.

It’s less tolerant of complexity and nuance, paradox, contradictions, ambiguity, and so forth. But Mother Tongue. Mother tongue. I've got some notes here. In contrast, Mother Tongue is the language of relationships, of stories and connections. Ursula Le Guin describes it as a mode of speech that flows from subjective experience, fostering empathy and mutual understanding. In a polarized time, mutual understanding seems more important than ever.

Rather than distancing, Mother Tongue seeks to bridge weaving a conversational web that holds space for vulnerability and shared experiences. She describes it as offering an experience of truth rather than asserting dominance, reflecting a worldview based on trust and relationality rather than hierarchy and control. For Ursula K. Le Guin, this language is essential for genuine human connection and for fostering a world where varied voices and lived experiences are equally valued. I come back to my very first point.

The disenchantment, particularly the disenchantment, a lot of the myths of modernity allows for horizontalizing, allows for leveling, allows us for us to connect on an equal plane as mutuals working together with our own unique talents, unique voice amongst the many in this choir, tune in into each other, lift all higher. Like there is multiple threads that are pointing to what is needed today.

So as I wrap up, we are always in oscillation with this. If we're spending too much time in Father Tongue, spending too much time in Mother Tongue. I mean, that could be off with the fairies, right? We don't want to be daydreaming forever. There's still reality, there's still shit to do and we need to, you know, mouths to feed and so forth. We still need to participate in this wretched system. But at the same time, we can begin to imagine things anew for ourselves and for all around us. And the most important thing you can do, I believe,

is to tune in, tune into what is an authentic path for you. If you sense the disillusionment, if you sense the disenchantment, see these as windows of opportunity, windows that are invitations where you can start to pay attention and attune with presence to what fills out of alignment and what might bring you closer to alignment. Sounds like a nice thing. All right. Thank you so much for listening.

Again, subscribe to the museletter at foxwizard.com I've got a backlog of questions to be going through, but I'll be sharing some updates on foxwizard.com Some exciting things coming up in 2025. I'm feeling this kind of shift to wanting to kind of serve more of the infinite players, the folks who do find themselves questing amidst the dark forest, a place where it's easy to lose your way.

Offering more for my fellow Infinite players, of which everyone in the world is, of course, but most of us forget. So stay tuned for that. And thank you again for joining me.