Interview transcript with Susan Danz on her Frontier Beyond Fear program.

Susan Danz: Welcome to the Frontier Beyond Fear Blog Talk Radio program. I am Susan Larison Danz and I am delighted to welcome you back here today for what has been a very active week for episodes and you’ll find that the next couple of weeks are going to be that way. I am just so delighted to be bringing some very interesting and wonderful guest onto this show. I am talking with you from what is quite a rainy Pacific Northwest. We actually had an ice storm out here in the Portland area but I am on the other side of town where we just got a bunch of rain. And I had the delight of walking in the rain this morning which I always enjoy and as a result I am feeling refreshed and ready for this show.

Today in about a moment I am going to bring on the air a new guest to the show Paul R. Boudreau. His new book is “Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer.” A book that he co-authored with Lloyd M. Dickie.

Now today we are going to talk about how the research that these two have been engaged in shows how myths from the ancient world are more than mere stories. They are gateways essentially to awakening consciousness. They help with our understanding of the greater world and how to balance our world – the world that seems around us that should be the illusive world and this greater world. Well I guess illusive in the sense of illusion and then this greater illusive world using the word illusive with an “e” that can sometimes slip away from us. So we are going to talk about how the myths help us to understand this and make the divine more accessible. Paul, and his co-author Lloyd who can’t be here today, will speak on his behalf I’m sure. They both spent more than a year together in Egypt exploring sacred sites and actually Paul has had a lifelong connection with mythology. He has explored science and myths for many years and travelled extensively. He is an ecologist by trade and comes to understand these things with a societal perspective and what is meaningful to each of us within that context. His website which I am going to spell for you to help you right at the outset so that you can make a note of it is awhico.com. It is up on the page but I know that not all of you can necessarily see that. I am just so delighted to have all of you here today and bring Paul Boudreau on the air.

Paul Boudreau: Hello Susan, how are you? Thank you very much for having me and we’ll get the rhythm going here in a second.

Susan: Well you’ll find that the rhythm of this show is very relaxed and we enjoy exploring here. And you are very much an explorer Paul and I am learning a lot from spending time with your work which is a continuing unfolding, let me say. This is something that there is a lot to this.

Paul: Yes, absolutely. As you mentioned it has been a life-long interest of both myself and Lloyd in terms of some of our first memories were encountering some of these myths and it has continued through our lives so we still work day-to-day to try and understand what that means. What the myths mean for me personally and for ourselves as a society. Absolutely it is just one more step in the process.

Susan: You know something that you touch upon Paul – and really I feel that is revealed in this book and your work – is something that we all have in common, is what touch you as a child, what touches all of us is this sense of wonder. Maybe that’s a good place to start is how we all share this connection to myth, to help us realize that.

Paul: Yeah we start at the beginning I guess. For us as individuals with our early memories, well for me personally it was a lightening bolt. As I was listening to some of the stories, particularly growing up in a Christian household and hearing the stories of the Garden of Eden and naked people running around with a talking snake – how could it not catch your attention. You know that there is something here that I didn’t’ understand, but there is something important because these adults, my teachers, my parents and my associates were telling me these stories for a purpose. Not to just entertain me but to prepare me for life. So before even school started these sort of stories and myths – and I should say that when Lloyd and I talk about myths we talk myths in the very broadest sense from fairy tales that we have all heard such as Little Red Riding Hood through to the Sumerian and Egyptian stories that we analyze in the book and right to The Bible. We talk myths in the broadest sense. But they were all conveying some very important information that connected with my being without having to study philosophy. I didn’t need all that baggage. But yet these myths were able to connect and wake me up a little bit at a very young age. And I am still working through that. 

Susan: Paul what have we lost, maybe we can say it in another way, because I think you say this to some degree. But we don’t all sit around the fire and listen to stories anymore, although stories are still very much in our culture. How can we begin to understand what that was like for our predecessors, what they derived from these communal experience of sharing in stories and myths?

Paul: Let me start in reverse, have you seen the Star Wars movies?

Susan: Yes, I was just going to say that it is still happening. You know I have a ticket waiting for me I’ve been told. So yes.

Paul: You’ll have to tell me if it is good.

Susan: It is like the golden ticket.

Paul: So I thinking that it has always been there throughout humankind right up to present-day. The method may change but for my kids watching Star Wars opened up a whole avenue for discussion on these topics that we had not managed to get to any other way. Looking back in the distant past, looking up at the stars with just a campfire. We are all human and I think although the technology changes, the connection is still made in those different situations.

We see that in the myths. They take different forms with different images, but we always come back to the fact that they are help and guidance for reminding me of who I am and who I am not. Reminding me of my various parts. A good story is a very important part of that. We look in the book at several layers of interpretation of myths. I don’t want to get too technical but a good story has to engage you. It has to interest you. Just because it is a good story of good and bad, or the various sides of a person, there are other levels that as an adult, with my preparation, my training my work, I am able to see higher levels of interpretation of what appear to be very simple myths. The trick is to add more to what providing me and see more of myself in the myths so that they are not just crazy simple stories but they are actually connecting with what I can see.

In many cases myths provide us with language, or is trying to provide us with a language. Awakening higher consciousness, spirituality, the Self as Jung put it. Those concepts are hard to convey. At least I find them hard to convey. Much harder than watching Luke Skywalker flying through space. We have to find a language both for you and I to talk, and for us to talk with other people, but we also need a language for ourselves to remind us what we are. To see ourselves as our many parts. I have a body and that body gets hungry, we have emotions, etc. But every once in a while there is a flickering of something higher that wakes me up and I think the myths provide us with some language that helps me realize that yes that is a real awakening and I need to pay more attention to it, not get too distracted by how hungry I am.  

Susan: You know, something that I was reflecting on as I was thinking about this, and actually it is relevant to Star Wars and maybe this whole genre that is out there that is a new mythology, a fantasy type literature that is out there. What I have observed is, I have come from a scientific high-tech, educational background and I observed that many people who on the surface might say that they are rationalist, or they some people might call them materialist, not all of them, I don’t want to characterize any one group this way, but there can be that element of not necessarily wanting to engage in a direct spiritual tradition or anything like that yet, this group in particular, you will hear them recite all the fantasy novels, some like David Eddings, or whatever, these popular fantasy authors. Or they will be the kids, and I was one of them in the 70s, couldn’t get enough of Star Wars. I watched them over and over – well it was more difficult to watch them repeated in those days as you had to go to the theatre. But that really engaged us in a way just like you are talking about. The show was magical and it uplifted us up out of our own limitations in terms of thinking about spirituality. It is kind of a complex question but somehow it is really important because it is lifting us all to a similar place.

Paul: Yes, your right. I should point out that we don’t define higher consciousness. It is a very personal thing. There is not point in getting bogged down in defining the goal, but right now, right here I can breath and I can be a bit more awake than I was seconds ago. And that opportunity presents itself endless times in my life. And each time I’m a little bit different coming out the other side. So seeing Luke turning off his computer is like “Wow!”

Susan: I love that scene still. I use that often in my head. Its like OK I’m doing that again. Yes, yes, yes! Exactly. It doesn’t have to have a label does it. It’s the experience of it.

Paul: Some things you need a word for it, but if you label it too quickly it disappears. It falls like jelly through your fingers. It is something that one can’t grasp at.

So getting back to the book of course, we’ve looked at a number of myths in this way in terms of this. Some of them are well known to us such as the Garden of Eden. We also deal with Gilgamesh and the Egyptian Osiris story. And these are stories that some people may or may not have encountered. The question is how do you bring yourself to them? If you do that, what can you see in them?

For instance, in Gilgamesh, it is a story from ancient Sumer which is 5,000 years old. Two thousand years before the Greeks started writing. This is the very first literature of humans. In Gilgamesh, it is a story of a demi-god and his wild partner. The two guys go off and do great things. Most people are familiar with it as an external tale about a demi-god living 5,000 years ago. That is somewhat satisfying, but it really didn’t help us understand why we are still telling that kind of tale 5,000 years later. What we have done in the book is to explore the spiritual side of story. The way that we’ve looked at it is more of a tale of my parts. The demi-god is my demi-god. It’s a part of me that is in the story. The mate, the fellow helper, for the demi-god in the Gilgamesh story is a sort of wild-man. And I can identify that wild-man in myself in terms of my emotions that have road-rage and go off track. So we were able to find a number of different levels in the story of Gilgamesh that helped me see my different parts working. Ultimately in the story and in myself what is required is the balancing of my god-like parts with my body parts. I am a body and I have to work with the higher. I can’t just exist as a globe or ball hanging in the ether. And so we found the story of Gilgamesh is just one example of these myths that we looked at that does a good job of capturing the concept of the various parts of ourselves and reminding myself that I have to come back to my breathing, to my appetite, to my pains and sorrows and woes. And I have to find that other higher level that can reconcile those two different sides of me – the god-like side and the animal side – to come up with a reminder to me of what my ultimate goal that is to be real, to be more than an animal. Again the words are difficult, but the myths provided a very lovely way of expressing some of the things that we had been seeing in ourselves throughout the years. Does that make sense?

Susan: Yes actually. I had made a note about something you said in that section of the book that touched me is – and I think actually a lot of people have encountered this myth, whether they totally remember it or not I don’t know, but I think that everybody has been required in high school to, in any kind of English class had probably encountered it. But something you say about the love between the parts of our being as if not just knowing these parts exist, but loving, accepting these parts and self love and what that means. What is self love and how is self love expressed in this tale?

Paul: And how is self love expressed amongst opposite things. We talk a little bit about the reconciliation of opposites. We are often presented with love as “falling in love” and it is easy and it is glorious - love of child and such. But the love here is about how two disparate parts really appreciate each other in such a way that they could love each other? That is part of my challenge as I strive for wholeness. How do I bring my parts so that they love each other and not work against each other? Not interfere with each other? They do seem to be very separate when I develop road rage.

Susan: Yes that is a very good example. So how would it help us navigate that? We’ve all had it happen. You know we all say something, not just on the road, and then why did that just happen? Why did I do that? How does this tale help us to reconcile that a little bit better and just accept ourselves. Is there an example?

Paul: It has to do primarily with recognizing the parts and recognize that I am not one person. I can be leaving the house in the morning and say that I am going to be calm, I’m not going to get angry – and then waking up to the fact that I am angry at someone who cut me off. Its like how could that have happened?? We think that we are rationalists, in the Western World we think we are logical, yet these illogical events creep in. If I notice them, I see more of myself. That’s a part that I have to love as opposed to deny or forget about or dwell on for the rest of the day – that someone cut me off. Really why should that matter?

So seeing the parts comes up in Gilgamesh, in the story of Adam and Eve and all of these ancient myths. It keeps reinforces the need for me to look at my parts and realizing that I am not one. There is not just one “I”. There is another one 10 minutes later. To see that is huge. For them to fall in love with each other – I don’t know.

Susan: To really be able to accept that yes. And something else before we leave Gilgamesh, that I want to explore briefly because we are only able to touch on some of these things but you had mentioned that there is an element here about going to the limit of your ability. Well I see in the modern world the burnout if someone is really pushing themselves to the limits of their abilities. I wonder if you could talk about that very briefly. How does that apply to our world today and our lives today?

Paul: There are a number of grades to that. The one that comes to mind right away is music. I practice music and I write songs and I try to enjoy music. I am terrified of performing. But if I push myself to perform, I perform much better than I ever expected. I have a bigger impact that I ever expected. That is the positive side of pushing yourself to the limit. We know burnout and we live quite different lives than the Egyptians and Sumerians and we have to deal with pressures differently. So there certainly is a bad side. But we talk about direct experience and if you are really connected, if one can really get connected with one’s parts, then that opens doors for performance in the broadest sense, performance in a way that isn’t ordinary, isn’t normal.

Susan: Kind of transcendent.

Paul: Yeah absolutely. Yeah it is definitely transcendent. We can’t get into why we have traffic jams in the 21st Century but we seem to be chasing things that give us the not good stress but the bad stress. We can’t get too much into what would it be mean if our civilization could buy into wholeness and being as opposed to money and progress. That is a much different conversation.

Susan: Yes very much so. I want to take us back a little bit because you spend a lot of time, and we sort of touch upon it when you talk about the story of Adam and Eve, but even going farther back, I would like to take us back to the creation myths. We’ll start there and we’ve already started to talk about separation a little bit. We start with creation and it leads to separation. So I wonder if you could take us through because there is a rich tapestry there. So I will leave it to you to see what you would like to explore there for us.

Paul: Well if I may, can I read one of the quotes from the book?

Susan: Sure that would be perfect.

Paul: One of the challenges is making people aware that some of these concepts are much older than we ever imagine. So in the book we build on the Sumerian myth which reads, and I’ll just read two lines “When the heavens have been separated from the earth, and when the earth had been delimited from the heavens, and the fame of mankind had been established” and it goes on to say a few other things. So some of the earliest literature that humans ever wrote down had to do with the separation, this distinction between heaven and earth. This gets back to seeing the different sides of myself that we talked about a few minutes ago.  It’s about seeing the parts from a higher level. My best visual image comes from the Yin and Yang. The circle with the two tear drops inside. They are in a whole, they are in a circle, but the two sides play with each other. They have to work together to make the whole. If your not perceptive enough, or aware enough to see the distinction, the separateness, the earth from heaven, light from darkness, love from hate, its hard to see enough detail to reconcile the two parts and to have them working together.

So the first step is to recognize that there are these distinctions. There are these differences. That helps one to appreciate that I’ve got this god-like side of me and I’ve got these appetites. To see that they are not the same helps me appreciate that that’s where my work should go. It has to develop both of those sides. Its not one over the other. Its not one beating the other. In the modern world progress means that the white capped cowboy wins over the dark hat cowboy. That is not very productive for my own personal development. But to see these two sides that could work together is really very useful and well its essential. Otherwise I am just a mess. I don’t know who is going to be working me in the next couple of minutes – is it going to be my hunger or is it going to be my desire to be nice to people.

So from the very beginning, from the very early literature that we’ve looked into from Egypt and Sumer had to do with making these distinctions and seeing these distinctions in a way that didn’t have one operating against the other.

Susan: I have a question here about paradox. It seems that anyone who reflects upon experience and duality, there is a paradoxical nature of understanding of duality in the sense that by somehow reconciling, balancing it you transcend beyond it which is what you describe. I wonder if you could explore the whole concept of paradox a little more deeply. It is such a fundamental question. We struggle with this in our society. It tends to lead us to the why. It can create atheists and agnostics. It tends to be a very troubling area where there is a paradoxical nature of our world and myth expresses that and helps us I feel.

Paul: It helps us live with the paradox. Many paradoxes are not going to be resolved such as in the story of King Solomon ready to cut the baby in half. That resolved it but even in modern day physics, if I can take a little diversion, you could explain it better than I, but in modern physics the particle and wave nature of light. Light is something we encounter every day. You turn on a light, we need it to see, and yet there is no resolution to the fact that it exists as both a particle of light as well as a wave. We just have to accept that and accept that those are just two different states of the same thing. So love and hate I believe are on the same level. I would like the think I could be saintly and love everyone but to-date, this hasn’t happened yet. So I have to accept these paradoxes and they live in me and our rational world tends to drive us to a resolution of the paradox whether it’s a good resolution, a necessary resolution. I don’t think that that is very beneficial for us to always drive to resolve the paradox. I think it is better to just appreciate both sides and in some case strengthen. Its not just the field of spirituality, but also physics, hard physics still has to struggle with these kinds of paradoxes. And that’s not without trying to resolve them.

Susan: Yeah, yeah. Somewhere along in your exploration I know that you speak of the heart versus the mind and how these are expressed. And it seems like the mind tries so hard to logically resolve things and yet the heart sees beyond it in. It can’t quite explain it. Its like looking at an object in the sky without looking directly at it where you can see it better.  I always found that odd. People into astronomy always say “Don’t look directly at Andromeda and you’ll see it.” or whatever. And there is something there related to this that. Just to form a question here, since this is a topic that we’ve explored a lot on this show such as following one’s heart and listening to one’s heart, how does myth help us that? How does it help us get in touch with the heart.

Paul: Most myths contain a very strong relationship, Gilgamesh is an example, between participants. Garden of Eden is another example of relationship. There’s a lot of interactions and relationships between all of the players in the myths we have looked at. I don’t know if that gets directly at how we can strengthen our heart and our intuition over our logic. In the western world we are well conditioned to use our logic and our heads in formal fashion. We go to grade school and university and whatnot. We are not formally trained in terms of how we could follow our hearts. That may be something that we need to address down the road but there are certainly many people that I’ve met that are guided more by their heart than their head. In many ways I am envious because as you said, I am an ecologist so I see some of my logical side.

Susan: You categorize things perhaps.

Paul: Yeah, but one of my own personal experiences here in Nova Scotia has been to spend some time with our First Nations people and participate in some of their talking circles. And they definitely demonstrate a movement that leads from the heart much more than logic. It is an incredibly powerful force when you experience it. There are certainly cultures and people that well versed with leading with the heart that am I and that is one of my challenges to learn from them and appreciate that.

Susan: As long as we are talking about place for a minute, and its good that you mention that you’re in Nova Scotia, maybe this is a good place to talk at least a little bit about your amazing travels and how this has connected you to these myths. I wonder if you could talk just a little bit about them? Where have you been such as exploring the pyramids, the hieroglyphics and things. I would love to hear about that a little.

Paul:  I have been very fortunate to be an ecologist and scientist. My specific field was marine ecology so that gave good reason to many of the world’s oceans and coasts for conferences and mangrove swamps in Malaysia. But there were always a few days where I could find some free time and so Lloyd and I have experienced together Stonehenge and we’ve spent some time in the King’s Chamber when we were in Egypt. Lloyd has been to Bolivia and Cambodia to Ankor Wat. We’ve made it a point of “well we are going here, well what else can we see and where else can we go.” Another place we’ve been that has been very influential has been the back of a fishing boat in March off the Atlantic coast cutting up fish doing some of our research. Seeing the moon rise and the planets above you and really appreciating our place on the world as you sit on this little piece of bobbing steel in the middle of the ocean. We try to make the best of all of our opportunities and again I express gratitude more than anything else that my life was able to put me in those places. Of course there are many many places to visit and it is a very exciting time actually Susan with relooking at archaeology and finding new places that still intrigues me and that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Susan: Yeah they are discovering these new things and the way they are scanning the pyramids now and finding new chambers. It is very exciting isn’t it?

Paul: Yeah very much so. Things that we couldn’t image when we started the book so many years ago are now being discovered. There is the site in Turkey, Göbekli Tepe that is 10,000 years old which is 5,000 years older than the Pyramids that we were in. I am encouraged by that because there is much left for us to learn about the world around us as well as ourselves.

There are different things that one picks up in these different places of course. The pyramids is one example. We were in the King’s Chamber which is in the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt. I can’t express how beautiful and gorgeous the place and to get into was incredible. Someone had tipped us off that we should sing when we were in the chamber. So we were in this King’s Chamber in the very center of the Great Pyramid in Giza and we started humming, singing, sort of chanting. Lloyd has a lower voice than I. I did the mid-range and there was a women who did the high voice. It was incredible. We were isolated by thousands of tons of stone and yet the whole world felt alive. The whole pyramid seemed to be singing back to us which still raises the hair on the back of my neck. So that was the experience in that pyramid. In the King’s Pyramid there are no carvings. There is nothing on the walls of the big pyramid but it sings, its glorious. Where some of the older pyramids are covered in these embossed letters or hieroglyphs. We present some in the book. And here you could read. It was a totally different experience. It was a totally different way of communicating. One was with just sound and the other was with letters and words. It is amazing how many different ways we can take in this information. And once you start looking at the astronomical alignments of these various ancient monoliths, Stonehenge I haven’t been there (at the right time) to see the sun come up over the Heel Stone at summer solstice, these are all different ways that information has gotten entombed, I don’t like that word, embodied in these structures. In many cases you have to be there. You can read and Google is great, but actually be there for the sound and vision, to see these things, you do take away something from having those experiences.

Susan: Yes I’ve had guests on the show who have had transcendent experiences just visiting sacred sites. They’ve spoken about this that it is an experience that goes beyond the senses. That you talk about the singing – oh my! That is amazing. I haven’t heard that before. When you were talking about this I was bringing it to popular culture. There is this scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark that captures this feeling. Its that scene where he is holding in his hand and the light is coming in and the music rises and he shines this light on this ancient city. To me that is capturing in a way what you are talking about. Even if we had never been to any of those places. There is something very magical about this connection that reaches us even today. Even when I saw that as a child, or maybe a little older, that had an impact on me and I wondered why, why that? When you talk of singing, I can’t explain it except that it was powerful. And that is how I relate. I haven’t travelled a lot. I haven’t had that opportunity yet.

Paul: Yes – exactly

Susan: I hope to travel some. Probably not as much as some people have. We find these experiences in the ways that we do. They find us.

I have a question for you. You refereed to this and made me think about this a couple of times. At some point I know that I read in your book about how our modern experience of the sky is so different now. All lot of us are in cities, but maybe we are fortunate enough to get to Crater Lake near me where you can see more of the night sky. But we don’t see the night sky and in general our relationship, you talked about the solstice just now. Our relationship with the sky is so different. How that kind of changes how we might see some of these myths compared to how they did it in the ancient world. I wonder if you could reflect on that at little bit how our relationship with the sky has changed. So we may not see the same things on the surface level as those in the ancient world saw every day. It was part of their reality.

Paul: Yeah coming up to the solstice and Christmas we have embodied some of our modern day myths but we don’t experience it in the same way. The most interesting question for me has to do with the Milky Way. I think everyone has heard of the Milky Way, it’s the galaxy that we are in. It lights up a band in the sky. Getting back to my personal experience, I’ve managed to see it a couple of times a year. When you see it from the back of a boat our on the ocean it is spectacular. Its undeniable, its unmissable.  Its not just the Milky Way, there are holes in it, there is the great rift which comes down from it, but in the city you would never see it. Even in a small town you will never see it. From what we’ve seen the Milky Way is a very important visual that is captured in the myths. We equate it with the Netherworld or the Duat. This land that the pharaohs traversed through to get to a higher level. We equate the Milky Way with the Duat. When you see this band of light above you it is remarkable how it sticks out as opposed to being in a city where you might see some of the bright stars of Orion and maybe the North Star. But the Milky Way for me has a draw that you don’t experience in normal day life driving down the highway. So to not have that visual, to not have that symbol in your life, to not know what the Milky Way looks like is a loss. It is a bit of a challenge. That’s a shame.

Susan: It actually kind of sad that so many of humanity don’t have that experience any more.

Paul: And when you look at pre-history at the time that some of these earlier structures were built, you realize that they were built aligned to things that people saw every night. In one way its amazing, in another way its just that its there, its so obvious. But for us its kind of missing. That goes the same for a much more powerful image of a good sunset or sunrise. To see the sunrise or the sunset while I sit on a beach I get a real sense that the earth is moving. And we are moving pretty fast. Some of the images carry forward, but some are purely intellectual as in “I’ve hear about the Milky Way and I know what it is.” As opposed to “Wow! Look at that!” Its right out there and its arching over our heads.

We get a little bit into Jungian archetypes in terms of images that we all have. Some of the stars and the sky are some of the more powerful archetypes that connects us all around the world in terms of we can all see it. When you look up at the full moon and someone in Africa is looking at that same full moon. Someone in Australia is doing the same thing.

Susan: You know there is one area that we haven’t explored too much, and maybe we can enter into this a little bit, we still have time left, is more deeply exploring relationship a little bit. Maybe you could talk a little bit about Osiris and Isis maybe? I am not sure how you would like to explore that? We talked a little about it in the Gilgamesh legend and how that is about relationships but I wonder if you could explore that a little bit more.

Paul: Well my favorite relationship is between the Egyptian gods Heka and Maat. They are Egyptian gods/neters/principles, principles of action. Maat is much more well known in the Western world. Maat is a female god, she is the god of order, justice, truth. She very much aligns with some of the Greek principles of order and everything is set out. In the book we look into her mate or the person who she has a relationship with which is Heka. Heka is magic. Heka is creation. Heka is generation. In the Pyramid Text which is written in a dozen of the pyramids in Egypt, in the Pyramid Texts there is a lot of mention of Maat – or at least in the translations one can see references to Maat all over the place. The Pharaoh is lining up the farm lots and regulating the river. But Heka, the god of magic, is not really apparent in many of the 18th and 19th Century translations. We were struck by this because of our interest in the role of magic. Being biologist, you know creation, ecologist – order isn’t the only thing out there. There is something more that is generally required. And so we explore the god Heka and how Heka and Maat, magic and order, play a much bigger role in creation than we were lead to believe. Its one of those paradoxes. They seem opposite one another but yet, in our reading of the Pyramid Texts, it became apparent that they both seem to be always present when there is creation. So you need some order, but you need that extra little bit. Whether it is that spark of life or that little unknown that irrational imputes that gets things going. And so we found this really fascinating that the two gods are often paired and often working in consort to give rise to creation and the production of higher things.

            Now Heka, Magic, was very much dismissed by the Christians in medieval times and so maybe what we first encountered was the history of that interpretation. Whether that is so or not I don’t know but we would like to promote Magic, the god of Magic and his relationship to Maat, to better reestablish the myth of these two very important Egyptian creation gods so that we in our Western World can start to appreciate that unknown.

            As an ecologist there is always that question of what gives rise to things and what is the right level and how do predator and prey interact. And this relationship between these two opposite gods seems to capture that very well. You need enough hares/rabbits to support the foxes, but if you have too many foxes you don’t have any hares/rabbits. So we found this relationship to be very useful in applying to some of our professional questions in terms of what is that “more than just order” that is required to make our ecosystems work.

            We are still exploring that particular relationship. But it was fascinating to see, once you dug a little bit into the early text, that both sides were there even if they weren’t equally represented. Hopefully we can somehow contribute to looking at the Egyptian myths in a way that gives us the opportunity to introduce Magic and creation.

Susan: Oh I love that actually! Because when you think about it even the quantum physicists for example if you want to bring physics up again just briefly, is that some of that can appear like magic. It defies the order that everyone thinks should be there. Of course that’s the whole point that something that is there should have an impact. It doesn’t make any sense. It seems very magical and Jungian synchronicity comes up. That always feels magical. And so I love that there is a myth encompassing that. I think that’s very cool. We need to bring that forward for sure.

Paul: And not just a myth, but this is one of the first myths ever written down! How could that be?

Susan: Yes! Yes! It makes sense actually. In a magical way yes!

Paul: They were writing about important things. You only have you’re one shot to carve your story into a pyramid, you are going to write about important things not trivial things.

Susan: Yes! I would consider magic quite important – yes - if it has to do with creation.

Paul:  And Magic in terms of creation in particular is

Susan: very important!

Paul: Looking at quantum physics you are right, two particles that are separated influencing each other and we don’t know how.

Susan: Yes, it seems like magic!

Paul: It seems like magic! Absolutely.

It also borders on love making the world go round. I mean, what’s love and how could love influence things? Well it influences who we associate with and who we don’t. It is not easy to fall in love and it is not easy to not be in love. Its part of that magic, part of the magical side that is represented by Heka as opposed to order and logic and justice. And we need both and the myths remind us that we need that balance to find that right level for those two forces is really critical. Not one over the other. Not one beating up the other. It’s a matter of let’s let them both exist and see where that takes us.

Susan: Yes, very much so. Well Paul what a wonderful hour. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation with you and I think we’ve come full circle. We’ve come to this concept that you emphasis so much that you call wholeness. And that is really what you have just expressed so beautifully and I just want to thank you very much for being here today and just exploring. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation today.

Paul: And so did I it has been great fun. I wasn’t going to mention physics but you brought that in.

Susan: Well it just comes up doesn’t it? But you know it is still very approachable. You know that these things are all becoming discussed. You don’t even have to remember your physics if you’ve taken it. Most people have taken physics in highschool. All of us have been exposed to physics and some of these things at some point - although not quantum physics. So that is blowing everyone out of the water.

Paul: But the wholeness lives on that level as well.

Susan: Yes it does.

Paul: You know you can’t partition spirituality off in one corner and not deal with it in the rest of the world, so I really appreciate the time and it has been fun chatting and you’ve got me thinking about a few other things that I’ve got to follow up on.

Susan: That was good! That’s wonderful! I want to remind people about your website. I’m going to spell your website, why don’t you spell your website. The best place where people can learn about your work. Once again.

Paul: It is the first two letters of Awakening Higher Consciousness. So it is awhico.com and on the website we are posting blogs about some of human history, and various things that we have followed up since the book was published. If you do a Google search, or a Bing search for awhico you will find links to our Facebook site and a Twitter site. And of course we would love to hear from anybody – good or bad. Feedback is always important. Definitely all of the social media tools are there if you have a question or some point that you want make or that we could all benefit from. So awhico.com.

Susan: Well I know that I’ll continue to explore your work. You’ve given me a lot to think about to Paul. Give my best regards to your co-author and co-traveller Lloyd cause I find your work really interesting.

Paul:   I will

Susan: And I hope the listener become readers. Readers of your work and explorers of myth. This is a gateway to a richer world.

Thank you so much again Paul and I look forward to more exploration in the future. Take care.

Paul: Thanks and bye.