Tag Archives: new age

Is nature spiritual? Listen to AEWCH 212 on How To Live: Beyond Nature Worship with legendary spiritual teacher, David Spangler!

31 Jan

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor

SUPPORT AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB

The best way to support this show, my writing, my events & courses, is to give an annual or monthly pledge to Patreon.com/connerhabib.

When you use patreon, you’re not only supporting me, but accessing an economic model that isn’t about paying people for their labor, and instead showing care and appreciation of who they are.

Friends,
Welcome to the How To Live Beyond series of eps on AEWCH! To open 2023, each episode in this series will consider a set of tools or way of thinking that are useful but that we’re ready to go beyond in 2023. We’ll be looking at abundance and manifestation, magick and entheogens, the wellness industry, and more. The first episode (AEWCH 208) featured Mitch Horowitz on How To Live: Beyond the New Age. The second (AEWCH 209) featured Lisa Romero on How To Live: Beyond Psychedelics & Sorcery. The third (AEWCH 210) featured Pilar Lesko on How To Live: Beyond Money Magic. And on the fourth (AEWCH 211), we went beyond wellness with Fariha Róisín.

These are the techniques and traditions we use to cope with and confront the challenges of our time, but risk –  if we can’t consider them deeply – getting us stuck in those challenges or worse, funneling their strengths back into those challenges. These episodes aren‘t a call to forget about these techniques and traditions, but instead a call to bring forward what they‘ve offered without the barbs of the problems they’re tangled up with.

This time:

Everywhere we turn, there are conversations of ecology and disaster, the environment and its needs, the planet’s and humanity’s shared future. If they are not purely materialistic conversations (and the majority are), they often offer only a shallow sense of the spiritual. People talk about “nature” as having its spiritual work removed from relationship with us, as if no more exploration into its actual spiritual orientation is needed. Or we have (some, not all, of course!) neo-pagan views that don’t go much further than translocating the names of old gods and onto the natural world. Or we have neo-primitivism and object oriented ontology which in which humans are supposed to somehow be de-centered, even though humans are the ones coming up with these concepts and pretending to the magically decenter themselves.

So how can we approach nature from a spiritual perspective? And how can we work with the being and being-ness in nature in a real way? For example, should we engage with the trees? The formative forces of the trees? The postmodern assemblage of “tree” or “becoming-tree?” The “dryads” in the trees? The tree gods? The “nature spirits”? We don’t have the taxonomy or the navigational aptitude to even know what we’re encountering, so how can we hope to know how to help?

So I invited David Spangler onto the show. David’s huge and generous body of work includes being the person who coined the term “New Age;” being a prime developer of the Findhorn Community in Scotland; popularizing the concept of manifestation as long ago as the 1970s; founding the Lorian Association, which helps people encounter the lessons developed by David and others on the path of Incarnational Spirituality, authoring many books (including the one we touch on the most here, Techno-elementals); and more.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO
I went into the exploration of fairies (particularly fairies in Ireland), and why we don’t take them seriously enough, with anthropologist Dennis Gaffin on AEWCH 187.

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
Although David does some of the best work expressing the many different kinds of elemental beings, for a one of the greatest expressions of how the elemental beings intermingle, no one to my mind does it in plainer, easier-to-udnerstand language than Cypriot healer Daskalos. I recorded an episode of the show – AEWCH 67 – with one of Daskalos’s students, Daniel Joseph. His book, Swimming with the Whale: The Miracles, Wonders & Healings of Daskalos & The Researchers of Truth is very helpful in this area.

MORE ON DAVID
Many of David’s books (and related books) are available from Lorian Press, which David developed in conjunction with the Lorian movement. You can also find self-study modules on David’s site here. David’s lectures on manifestation, written decades ago, are so far advanced that they move us beyond most people’s current writings on the topic. You can find them in this book The Laws of Manifestation. And one of my very favorite books by David, which is not so easy to find these days, is Reimagination of the World: A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture.

A photo I took earlier this month at the stone circle in Drombeg, Co. Cork

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HOW TO LIVE: BEYOND MONEY MAGIC – Moving Past Abundance & Manifestation with Pilar Lesko on AEWCH 210!

17 Jan

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor

SUPPORT AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB

The best way to support this show, my writing, my events & courses, is to give an annual or monthly pledge to Patreon.com/connerhabib.

When you use patreon, you’re not only supporting me, but accessing an economic model that isn’t about paying people for their labor, and instead showing care and appreciation of who they are.

Two other ways to support the show and my other efforts:

  • Buy my debut novel, Hawk Mountain (and if you‘ve bought it and loved it, give it a great review on Amazon and/or Goodreads!). All my creative projects end up supporting each other!
  • Give the show a 5 star rating and positive review on Apple Podcasts (and subscribe if you haven’t already!).

Friends,
Welcome to the How To Live Beyond series of eps on AEWCH! To open 2023, each episode in this series will consider a set of tools or way of thinking that are useful but that we’re ready to go beyond in 2023. We’ll be looking at abundance and manifestation, wellness and self development, entheogens, paganism,  and more. The first episode (AEWCH 208) featured Mitch Horowitz on How To Live: Beyond the New Age. The second (AEWCH 209) featured Lisa Romero on How To Live: Beyond Psychedelics & Sorcery

These are the techniques and traditions we use to cope with and confront the challenges of our time, but risk –  if we can’t consider them deeply – getting us stuck in those challenges or worse, funneling their strengths back into those challenges. These episodes aren‘t a call to forget about these techniques and traditions, but instead a call to bring forward what they‘ve offered without the barbs of the problems they’re tangled up with.

This time:

The problem with money magic – abundance training, vision boards, manifesting, not to mention all sorts of team-building corporate exercises and so on – is… that it works!

But what’s the cost of just focusing on and trying to make money? After all, if we’re all connected to the economy, is it good for others to be extracting what we need from that sphere by just magicking what we need from it? And is it good for the magick-er?

And why does it seem like some of these money making rituals have diminishing returns for some people? Is it just that they’re not manifesting hard enough? Is The Secret too public now to be effective?

And what about all the above in the times of so-called “recession”?

To talk about all of this, and to create new pathways forward, I invited my favorite journeyer into the realms of money and business, PILAR LESKO back on the show. Pilar’s first appearance was on AEWCH 154, and it was one of the best times I’ve had talking with someone: Pilar is funny, lighthearted, and also completely devoted to real spiritual growth and relationship. Like last time, this is a fairly mind-blowing episode. Mind-blowing for me, and I hope it will also help blow out the restrictions of the money magic world.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER EPISODE SHOULD YOU LISTEN TO
I love the deep economy episode I did with occult economic historian John Bloom and Marxist economic historian Conor McCabe on AEWCH 110.

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
The book that got me on my money magic journey, and which still has merit, even though it’s good to start moving in new directions, is the excellently titled You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life by Jen Sincero. Instead of considering it as merely “how to get what I want,” consider it instead as training for who you are.

MORE ON PILAR
Pilar’s hub is her website. Sign up for her excellent (at times hilarious and strange) newsletter. And to truly level up your life, you can consider working with her. She’s incredible.

Until next time, friends! C

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Duncan Trussell in conversation with Lisa Romero AND Mitch Horowitz in conversation with Dean Spade! It’s the final installment of AEWCH 200

12 Oct

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor

Friends
Part three of the massive, mighty AEWCH 200 is upon us… and it’s a big episode! AEWCH 200 is three episodes over three weeks, featuring six conversations, each conversation has two previous guests of AEWCH in conversation with me on a theme. Here’s Part One in case you missed it, and here’s Part Two!

These are people I’ve loved talking to (most of them have been on the show more than once) in conversation with someone they might never talk to without AEWCH bringing them together. The idea is a sort of conversational alchemy. What happens when people in different disciplines speak? What sort of new substances arise?

For instance:

What happens when a paranormal expert talks with a mortician?
What happens when an expert on transhumanism and culture talks with a psychoanalytic theologian? What happens when a horror writer talks with a journalist of every day horrors?

This time it’s Part Three: Spirit & Hope Mystic comedian podcaster Duncan Trussell talks with occult teacher Lisa Romero + new age scholar Mitch Horowitz talks with mutual aid anarchist organizer Dean Spade!

SHOW NOTES GUEST WEBSITES & SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Mitch Horowitz – Mitch’s website • Occult America: White House Seances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation

Lisa Romero – Lisa’s website, The Inner Work Path • A Bridge to Spirit: Understanding Conscious Self-Development and Consciousness-Altering Substances

Dean Spade – Dean’s website • Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (and the Next)

Duncan Trussell – Duncan’s podcast, The Duncan Trussell Family Hour • my latest appearance on Duncan’s show

SUPPORT AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB

Being up to 200 episodes means AEWCH is in a tiny tiny percentage of podcasts that have lasted this long – something like 2%. I can ONLY keep doing this show if people support it on patreon.

I know post-pandemic times and economic roller coasters are affecting everyone in different ways. That said, the art and culture you love are great places to center support and love.

If you don’t already, please do the following to keep AEWCH going:

  • Give via patreon – Patreon.com/connerhabib
  • Tell people about the show and, if it feels okay, to support it on patreon (especially if you already know your pals are fans of the show but don’t support it).
  • Give the show a 5 star rating and positive review on Apple Podcasts.
  • Tweet and Insta quotes from and thoughts inspired by episodes!

Thank you so much for everything, and enjoy all this big talk.
Love, CH

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Let’s move to another layer of reality. AEWCH 154: Pilar Lesko & Conner Habib

15 Jun

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 154: PILAR LESKO or TIMELINES & THE END OF THE BATTLE OF GOOD vs EVIL

LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor

Your support for Against Everyone With Conner Habib, as well as all my writing, lectures, activism, and the rest, are what keep me going. If you support my work via patreon, thank you! And if you don’t, please contribute on Patreon today!

Thank you so, so much. Buy books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 154 via bookshop.org. The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback.

You can also access Pilar’s amazing course, Uplevel, and get $111 off until June 30 by using the code: CONNERDANCING

Friends,

So much to say about my conversation with spiritual…worker? Attuner? Do-er? Pilar Lesko.

But first things first, it’s difficult for me to describe her. Why? Well, I talk about that at the top of the episode: she expresses a new and individuated unfolding of religion and theology and spirituality that’s happening for so many of us.

Pilar uses her own language – loops, timelines, hooks, cords, cheat codes. Instead of being wary of the mechanistic tone of some of it, we find in her a redemption of the mechanistic, in her, it find its truer form. The language opens pathways up rather than driving us deeper into the merely subnatural.

I took Pilar’s class UpLevel (You can also access Pilar’s amazing course, Uplevel, and get $111 off until June 30 by using the code: CONNERDANCING) and found myself listening, through her, to a new pathway for spirituality being formed. But not one that asked me to replace my pathway, rather I found she was encouraging me to understand my own.

I recorded this episode with Pilar on the day of the solar eclipse, as St John’s Tide approached. The date was perfect timing; I’d just gone through some absolute intensity a few weeks before, and so had Pilar.

Pilar talks about Timelines, and I knew I’d jumped from one to the next in the span of a week. We discuss what that means, exactly on the episode. We also talk about why having a huge spiritual shift doesn’t clear everything up, even as we wish it would: Sometimes when great change comes, you can feel even more acutely the aspects of yourself that are stuck in the old. You achieve something great, you create a great work of art, you get a new partner, you have a breakthrough in your understanding of yourself. Suddenly, you feel liberated, but you also notice now, since you have more light, the knots not yet untied. The parts of you living inn old or artificial layers/levels/timelines of what was real.

But the capacity of change has guided you and continues to. To paraphrase Rudolf Steiner it gives you strength to be yourself, it is now brightening and enlivening the light within you, and it is expressing the warmth from your own soul streaming through you.

I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

ON THIS EPISODE

  • Psychic and economic warfare as a training ground
  • Condensed timeline jumping
  • The will as an inappropriate magical tool until it meets the Will
  • Why do we have to do things twice?
  • That time a cockatiel gave me a spiritual message
  • What are “timelines?”
  • Aleister Crowley and Albert Einstein being part of the same oversoul with different faces
  • The presence of the dead in Pilar’s spiritual output (and all of ours)
  • The principle of ease and its absolute necessity
  • The uses and misuses of intensity
  • How our nervous systems live on other timelines
  • The way “plant medicine” and “magic” and “manifesting” have been infiltrated
  • The higher aspect is always hotter
  • “Good versus evil is still just a level of reality.”

SHOW NOTES

• For Pilar’s site (and her newsletter, which is great), go here. Here’s her post, “’11 Secrets’ to Running a Multiple 6 Figure Business With (almost) No Social Media, No Ads, No Strategy, and in General No F*cks.” And here’s a good discussion with Pilar on the Feeling Free podcast.

• For info on GameStop, here’s a quick and recent breakdown from Financial Times, which I’ve posted here so you can see the mainstream narrative about it and just how huge it is.

• No one called to claim Gino (as I called him), but he found a new and very loving home with one of my neighbors. I guess we were both ready for new worlds.

• I talked about supernatural politics with anthropologist David Graeber on AEWCH 99. And I talked about how consensus in consciousness creates materiality on a very recent episode, AEWCH 152 with supernatural scholar Terje Simonsen.

• Please of check out the work of Byron Katie, and if you’re interested, come to the Against Everyone Salon where I’ll be doing the work with patreon patrons.

• I talked about navigating uncertainty in 2021 on the first episode of the year, AEWCH 136.

• What if all the bad stuff is going away?

Thank you friends,

CH

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