Mark Booth

Mark Booth (0:23)

We have exaggerated ideas about how separate we are from everything, how cut off.

We have exaggerated ideas about our own originality, perhaps. I think in all areas of life, we like to take credit for ideas we have, if they're brilliant or funny, but we don't know where they come from. They swim into our mental space. And if we were more aware, as ancient spiritual teachings asked us to be, we would realize that we are little semi-local extrusions of a universal intelligence.

Rick Rubin (1:08)

Was there a time when humans didn't think of themselves as separate from either each other or the things around them?

Mark Booth (1:16)

Yes, I believe there was. In the Christian Church, it's called the fall. According to Christianity, we are spiritual beings who fell into matter and became encased in material bodies. Generally, that is conceived of in terms of falling into a material realm which was already formed. The esoteric philosophy is slightly different, and that is that the material world only gradually hardened after we had sunk into it.

Of course, all religions around the world have myths which describe forms morphing and changing, and one creature developing out of another, and the animals and plants that we're familiar with coming into being. The myths refer to a time when solid matter was not fixed as it is today.

And the human beings who remember that process and started the process of putting those myths into human language would have completely understood that we are part of a whole. Then if you go to the Siege of Troy, for example, Homer describes the armies fighting battles on the plains in front of Troy, being able to see and interact with the gods who are present, who are striding across the plains with them, and prompting them to do stuff. In Homer's worldview, it's not that I get angry and decide to hit someone with my sword, it's that Mars, the god of war, prompts me to do it. And so, in Homer's time, they had very little sense of the interior life. Everything was happening out there. We were part of this whole which included the gods. And then if you move on to the Odyssey, we see the Seeds of Change. Because the great hero of the Iliad is Achilles, who is very large, very handsome, very strong. He's a pretty kind of straightforward guy. The hero of the Odyssey, Odysseus, is very different. He's smaller, he's a bit awkward-looking, but he's clever.

Odysseus, not Achilles, won the Trojan War, and he did it by means of the Trojan Horse, which was perhaps the first trick in history. If it hadn't been the first trick, why on earth would the Trojans have been taken in by it? Then as we follow his adventures, he is all the time using his cleverness and his trickery to defeat the monsters and the sorceresses and the other creatures he meets on his journey. Interestingly, one of the most famous episodes is when he is imprisoned in a cave by a giant with an eye in the middle of his forehead.

While the giant is sleeping, he gets a giant pole, sharpens it, and jams it in that eye. I think that what Homer is describing there is human beings beginning to lose that third eye faculty of being able to see our connection with all the different gods and spirits.

Rick Rubin (5:44)

Do you think of them as fictional stories or something else?

Mark Booth (5:47)

No, I think that they're factual accounts of things that happened before matter was fixed. Because as matter became harder and harder, it became more difficult for high-level spiritual beings to squeeze down into the material realm and interact with us.

Rick Rubin (6:11)

Do we know why this happened?

Mark Booth (6:13)

Yes, we do. I think esoteric philosophy gives a very good explanation. Our material bodies and our skulls are there to filter out spiritual influences. If we were like angels and had no material filter, we would be completely aware of all the other spiritual beings and of God, and we would have no free will, because we would always do exactly what God wanted us to do.

Angels do not have free will. We have sunk into matter, into these material bodies, in order to develop faculties such as free will and conceptual thought, which may not exist anywhere else in the universe. We may be in that way at the evolving tip of the universe. On the question of conceptual thought, if you consider angelic communications, as they come in visions in the Old Testament or in the Book of Revelation, they are always messages told entirely in symbolic language. There are no concepts.