Recording: Patrick Harpur & Bernardo Kastrup - Subatomic particles, fairies & finding your God

We started with intense debate: who most deserves the title 'Daimon Expert?' Both Bernardo and Patrick insisted it was each other.

This set the playful and inquisitive tone, marked by mutual respect and a shared passion for the subject: the creative forces of nature that shape our lives.

What most struck me was the invitation to engage with poetry as a way to better see the world.

For Patrick, Bernardo's cockpit metaphor, (our world merely a dashboard appearance), is restrictive. Poetry can cause the soul of things to shine through them. A prosaic cluster of flowers may all at once be seen "as a crowd, a host of dancing Daffodils... ten thousand dancing in the breeze."

Shockingly, this imaginal relationship with reality can conjure up new physics, bridging cosmic math and myth.

We enquired into Free Will, (we had no choice), how Daimons mediate between the human and beyond, and how to discern daimon from addiction - perhaps the very purpose of good therapy.

I would love to hear what most stayed with you from this discussion. Time stamps and the recording are below, in which we also mention:

• Daimons: angels or ambivalent natural forces?
• Why Japanese see fairies in Ireland
• Staying true to yourself
• The daimonic force of Hitler & Trump
• Finding your daimon and your god.

Our first conversation with Patrick Harpur transformed how I engage with fairy-tales I have known my whole life, and revived a deeper respect for Western traditions. You can see this previous dialogue here.

Next week we delve further into 'The Western Path' - I look forward to seeing you there!

Amir

I also promised to send a clip from Bernardo about how to know if you are following your daimon. Here it is on youtube. Members can watch the whole meeting this clip is from (ad free) here.

About Patrick Harpur

Bernardo Kastrup considers Patrick amongst the top 3 authors worthy of far more exposure.

Patrick Harpur attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge, to read English, and his writings have appeared in The Guardian, Fortean Times, Gnosis, Resurgence, the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday. He is often invited to give talks in the UK, in Spain and in America; and he has taught post-graduate students at Schumacher College (Dartington).

As well as several novels, Patrick is the author of 4 non-fiction books including Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld which attempted to make sense of visions and apparitions by recourse to Platonic philosophy, Jungian psychology, and the Romantic notion of imagination. He also wrote The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination outlined an esoteric Western way of seeing the world which has been largely neglected. In 2010, Rider published the rather ambitiously titled A Complete Guide to the Soul, which appeared a year later in the US as The Secret Tradition of the Soul (Evolver Editions, an imprint of North Atlantic Books). The Stormy Petrel (The Squeeze Press, 2017) is a novel based on the life and work of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard, whose writings have gripped Patrick for years.  

You can read his article on the Daimonic Nature of Reality here

TIMESTAMPS

Courtesy of Rita Conde

00:02:10 - Introduction to Patrick's lifelong work on the Daimon
00:03:30 - What is the Daimon?
00:07:50 - Patrick's book: The Philosopher's Secret Fire
00: 10:30 - Patrick's book on Alchemy
00:13:40 - Patrick’s comments on Bernardo's book The Daimon & The Soul of the West
00:18:43 - Does Patrick have a Daimon?
00:20:18 - The Daimon as a guardian angel
00:22:30 - Dissociation after trauma
00:25:23 - The two halves of life
00:29:45 - Natural self and adaptive self
00:30:40 - Free will and determinism
00:39:14 - Can our free will defy the Daimon?
00:40:50 - "There is no could-have-been"
00:42:30 - Patrick's books on the soul and the Daimon
00:45:40 - The Daimon as the personal face of God
00:46:23 - Bernardo shows Patrick's books
00:47:40 - Bernardo's take on Patrick's work
00:50:11 - Patrick's writing process
00:53:00 - The contradictions in alchemy
00:54:00 - Imagination is from another world
00:56:40 - Archetypes and Daimons
00:59:40 - Can one be possessed by the Daimon?
01:10:35 - Discerning the Daimon from complexes
01:05:40 - Daimons from a Jungian perspective
01:07:50 - Shadow Daimon / Anima Daimon
01:08:50 - Can we say a tsunami is evil?
01:10:30 - Hitler's Daimon
01:12:55 - The myth behind Trump’s fascination for so many people
01:19:30 - Are Daimons mediators between the unified field and individualized alters?
01:26:15 - Discovery of new subatomic particles
01:26:00 - Consciousness as more primary than materiality
01:27:50 - Living under the grip of the gods
01:28:40 - The consequences of new subatomic particles
01:31:00 - We each live in our imagined world
01:33:25 - Perception is shaped by imagination
01:34:58 - Something out there modulates regularities
01:34:50 - Are subatomic particles Daimons?
01:37:00 - "What we laughingly call reality"
01:37:22 - The epistemology of fairies
01:38:25 - Daimons are both subjective and objective
01:39:00 - Bernardo in Ireland
01:41:50 - How the Buddha died
01:44:07 - What is transcendence in our world today?
01:50:00 - The soul of things shines through them
01:51:00 - What symbols can there be in strict immanence?
01:54:20 - Rephrasing the dashboard in a poetic way
01:56:04 - Encounters with the Daimon in psychedelic states02:04:55 - Every existent world is the reverse of a black hole
02:09:17 - Will Bernardo return to computer science?
02:12:20 - Our task is to obtain a God

Recording