Accidental Gods
Accidental Gods

Accidental Gods

Accidental Gods

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Episodes

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Another World Is Possible. The old paradigm is breaking apart. The new one is still not fully shaped. We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine, and by doing so, to transform the nature of ourselves – and all humanity. Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come. If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation. Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system. Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future. Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/ On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor

Recent Episodes

Seeing the Bigger Picture: psychedelics and sense-making with Alexander Beiner of Kainos
FEB 26, 2025
Seeing the Bigger Picture: psychedelics and sense-making with Alexander Beiner of Kainos

How do we shed the shackles of modernity and step into a new set of stories that could help us grow into the fullness of our potential?

Alexander Beiner is one of a small band of people in our culture who is shaping the cutting edge of possibility, crafting new ideas of who we are, at the deepest levels of our Self and out into the widest view of our place as conscious nodes in the web of life.
Ali is an author, journalist and facilitator focused on bringing new ways of seeing and being from the margins of culture into the mainstream, through writing, and by creating transformative experiences that invite us to find ways to evolve and thrive in the chaotic times we live in. He's the author of
The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world that details his part in a psychedelic clinical trial that took him deep into what it is to be human and he has recently launched Kainos, an alternative media platform and studio on both Substack and YouTube. He says of it, 'in an age of upheaval, we tell stories that help people make sense of the world and imagine new futures. Our films, articles and experiences combine cultural sensemaking with hope, imagination and impact.'

He's an executive director of Breaking Convention, Europe's longest-running conference on psychedelic medicine and culture and was also one of the founders of Rebel Wisdom, which ran from 2017-2022 and explored the cutting-edge of systems change and cultural sensemaking.

This is where we need to be: the edge place where spirituality meets psychology and mythology, where culture meets politics meets our desperate yearning to grow up and become the good enough ancestors we know we can be.  We need path-finders, people who have the courage to stretch out beyond the edges of our being and Alexander is so clearly one of these - his explorations of what makes us human in the psychedelic realm merge with his documentary making and Kainos takes up where Rebel Wisdom left off, delving deeply into the nature of the moment and how we might become more than we are.  This was a genuinely inspiring conversation in a series that I hope is helping you to make sense of these times, to accept that the old system is gone and that something truly generative could arise - if we all take part in its making. 

Alexander Beiner website https://www.alexanderbeiner.com/
Kainos on Substack https://beiner.substack.com/
Alexander on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-beiner-b9aa8b19/
Kainos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@StudioKainos

Books mentioned
Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Some
The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker 

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58 MIN
Becoming Spiritual Warriors: exploring a politics of radical Compassion with Jamie Bristow
FEB 19, 2025
Becoming Spiritual Warriors: exploring a politics of radical Compassion with Jamie Bristow

In a world of turmoil where the only certainty is uncertainty, what happens if we who yearn for a future we'd be proud to leave behind began really to speak the quiet part out loud? What happens if we acknowledge the meaning crisis of our culture and state clearly that we need a world based on Love: on the raw, wild, wonder of life itself? And what happens if we shape our politics around this, instead of defensive attempts to make the death cult of predatory capitalism feel less... deathly?

This week's guest, Jamie Bristow is someone who lives in the worlds where policies are made and, for the past sixteen years, he has been consciously committed to being a Spiritual Warrior with all this implies.

Like Jon Alexander, Jamie started off life as an advertising executive before realising he needed to align his inner and outer worlds.  Now, he's a writer and policy advisor working at the intersection of inner and outer transformation and sustainability. For eight years, he was clerk to the UK's All Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness and director of the associated policy institute, the Mindfulness Initiative, (where he helped to introduce mindfulness to a number of other parliaments).  During this time he worked with legislators around the world to make mindfulness and compassion training serious matters of public policy and catalysts for a healthier political process. In 2023, he joined the Inner Development Goals team to lead on public narrative and policy development, emphasising the inner skills and qualities needed for a sustainable transition. His work includes influential reports such as Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out and The System Within: Addressing the inner dimension of sustainability and systems transformation. He is an associate of Life Itself, The Climate Majority Project, Mind & Life Institute and Bangor University.


Jamie's website https://www.jamiebristow.com/
Jamie's substack https://jamiebristow.substack.com/
Jamie on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamiebristow/
Mindfulness Initiative Mindfulness initiative
UN IDG Inner Development Goals
Life Guild lifeguild.earth
Transformative Skills Guide Transformative Skills Guide: Expanding the Definition of Climate Literacy (co-authored with US gov climate literacy experts)
Jamie's Wiki psycho-social dimensions of societal resilience
Desmog https://www.desmog.com/2024/08/06/between-optimism-and-despair-the-messy-middle-paths-through-climate-breakdown/
Reconnection: Meeting the Climate Crisis Inside Out https://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/reconnection
The System Within: addressing the inner dimensions of sustainability and systems transformation https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/earth4all-bristow-bell/
The Mindfulness Initiative Report on the result of 10 years of mindfulness in Westminster https://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/mindfulness-in-westminster-reflections-from-uk-politicians
Soulmaking Dharma with Catherine McGee https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/courses/immersive-online-programs/soulmaking-dharma/
SoulMaking Dharma teachings  https://hermesamara.org/teachings/soulmaking-dharma

SoulMaking Dharma Course https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/classes/2025-introduction-to-a-soulmaking-dharma/

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98 MIN
Kin-centric Rewilding - restoring relationship to the land and ourselves with Daniel Firth Griffith, author of StagTine
FEB 12, 2025
Kin-centric Rewilding - restoring relationship to the land and ourselves with Daniel Firth Griffith, author of StagTine

By now we know that we need to connect to the More than Human world. We know we need to grow into adulthood and elder hood. We know we need to move from a Trauma Culture to an Initiation Culture.  But knowing these things is not the same as living them as a reality.  To get here, we need waymakers, people of huge heart and raw courage to walk away from the limited, goal-based directions of our culture and step into the ways of being where we meet in open-hearted, full-hearted, strong-hearted relationship with the land and all that lives there.

Daniel Firth Griffith is one of these people. With his wife, Morgan, and their three children, Daniel lives on 400 acres on the eastern side of the Appalachian mountains where he is steadily building relationship with the land.  He lives amongst cattle, sheep, goats and horses - the latter used for logging, on land that was scheduled to be clear-cut when Daniel and Morgan first moved there.  With a growing understanding that even the forms of agriculture we term 'regenerative' are still part of what I would call the Trauma Culture, Daniel and Morgan have been on a steady journey of transition through to something that feels to me entirely different.  This is what we need to be. It's not clear cut. There isn't a hard and fast recipe because every bit of land is different and each of us is different and the routes to connection are unique... up to a point. But there are baselines we can learn: be human. Find what that means for you when 'human' is not simply being a wheel in an extractive system.

We had a really long conversation and we stopped at about 90 minutes in and restarted so you can listen to it in two parts.  We go down rabbit holes. We tell stories, or at least, Daniel does, big, deep, tear-flowing, heart-searing stories that made both of us weep...because stories are how we learn. This conversation, or these conversations, felt like sitting at the feet of an indigenous elder and the fact that this can happen in 2025, talking to someone of white ancestry who lives on lands stolen by colonialists... this is what gives me hope. We can't undo our past, but we can grow into what the future needs of us, and Daniel, Morgan and those who visit them are doing this.

Daniel's an astonishing author as well as everything else, so please do visit his website and buy his books: as with everything else he does, they are filled with layers upon layers of meaning.


Daniel's website
https://danielfirthgriffith.com/

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102 MIN
Find the Others! Beyond the Death of Democracy lies Citizen Power - with Jon Alexander of the Citizen Collective
FEB 5, 2025
Find the Others! Beyond the Death of Democracy lies Citizen Power - with Jon Alexander of the Citizen Collective

Democracy is breaking around us in real time and a small percentage of those in power would like us to become - at best - obedient subjects in a world dedicated to the destruction of ecosystems and the annihilation of compassion, empathy and all that makes us thrive. 

Clearly, we are better than this. So how can we harness the astonishing wonder of human co-creation in service to life and a world where humanity thrives as part of a flourishing web of life?

This week's guest, Jon Alexander started off his professional life as a highly successful advertising executive - until the inherent contradictions in the Consumer narrative led him on a new path, to seeing people as Citizens in his words, 'people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to our community and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, and who create opportunities for others to do the same.'  This quotation comes from his book,  Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us. It's is a genuinely Thrutopian view of possibility from one of the sharpest minds, and biggest hearts in this space of all potential and I wholeheartedly encourage you to read it - knowing that it came out three years ago - and the world has changed since then.


When we first mooted this conversation over six months ago, we still thought Harris was going to win the US election, that democracy was stable and that - in Jon's words - we could affect change by creating acupuncture points in the system.  And now we are where we are and none of these is possible.  And yet, the cracks are where the light gets in and this is a time when we can abandon any belief that the old system is functioning any more. So what doors does this open? What new light is there at the end of the tunnel and how do we find the agency, motivation and connections to the people and places we love, to make the changes that need to happen if we're to create that future we'd be proud to leave behind? 

Jon is one of the people best placed to answer this. He's co-founder of the New Citizen Project which works to help organisations and businesses find ways to enhance Citizenship in all they do. And more recently, he helped found the Citizen Collective which we can all join and which holds regular online meetings to connect people who aspire to citizenship all around the world.

This was a raw, honest conversation and neither of us is pretending we have all the answers.  But we're exploring the ideas - and Jon brings such a wealth of experience to the table to open doors for all of us.  I came away from this feeling that the routes forward are opening up. I hope you do, too.


Jon's website
https://www.jonalexander.net/
Jon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-alexander-11b66345/
Jon on NEXT TV in Hamburg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dvLFWTzXeU
Citizen Collective https://medium.com/citizen-collective-updates/citizen-collective-is-here-and-id-love-you-to-be-part-of-it-525f113fd8de 

Join here: https://airtable.com/appIlFU7nEF8NgiMf/pagsPy8sTEAMKaZpu/form  

Polis AI-based connection https://compdemocracy.org/

Our House https://ourhouseuk.org/
Stephen Green on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenbgreene/


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77 MIN