Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people trying to figure it out. How you doing, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I am so well, it is springtime at this point… I don’t know when you’re listening to this, but there were opossum tracks in the mud by the house, and it made me so deeply happy in my heart.

Rowan Mangan:
I thought you said they were raccoon tracks?

Martha Beck:
I think I found some raccoon tracks yesterday, but I think I found some opossum tracks today. I don’t know, but we had bear tracks once, so.

Rowan Mangan:
Are opossums just like Irish possums?

Martha Beck:
Brendan Opossum.

Rowan Mangan:
In Scotland they’re called Macpossums.

Martha Beck:
Macpossums. The dark play.

Rowan Mangan:
[inaudible 00:01:20].

Martha Beck:
So how are you doing Rowy-Jo?

Rowan Mangan:
I am doing really well, after an aborted attempt yesterday to record this podcast, when all the planets teamed up with Mercury, not just Mercury, everyone was there to flat out make it impossible for podcasts to happen.

Martha Beck:
Scuttled.

Rowan Mangan:
And today is a new day, our energy is clear, it’s flowing. I’ve got a good feeling about it. So, tell me what you’re trying to figure out.

Martha Beck:
Well, speaking of animals, I don’t know what to do with our beloved third leg of the stool here, because we just don’t think alike. We were sitting around the other day and she was just sort of watching-

Rowan Mangan:
We’re talking about beloved Karen, of course.

Martha Beck:
Yes, our beloved Karen, the third leg of the stool of our deeply satisfying domestic arrangement. And suddenly she said, “Sloths, how do they even exist?” I’m like, “Karen, are you watching something about sloths, that’s more my turf.” And she’s like, “No, I’m watching the news, I’m just thinking, sloths, how do they exist?” And I’m like, “How do you exist?” And she said, “Yeah, I know, but sloths?” And I didn’t understand. I was like, I did-

Rowan Mangan:
I sort of get it. They are a four-year old’s drawing of an animal kind of an animal.

Martha Beck:
Well, that’s true too. But I also think another name for our beloved Karen is Hasty [inaudible 00:02:49].

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, this is true.

Martha Beck:
Also, Captain Hammerheels, because she runs through the house, starting at 5:00 AM, just doing all manner of things while you and I are like slots.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s true.

Martha Beck:
What? And so I think she was deflecting her frustration at our morning personas. Interesting-

Rowan Mangan:
Projecting onto slots as we’ve all done at one time or another.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And then when I said, “That’s really silly,” she was like, “Ugh, I guess I was brought down by my own canard.” I think she meant, is it hung from my own petard?

Rowan Mangan:
Hoisted by your own petard.

Martha Beck:
Hoisted by my own petard. Well, she was brought down by her own canard. A canard is like a figure of speech, but I only knew the French canard, which means duck.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s duck. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It is an English word that means an idiom or a figure of speech-

Rowan Mangan:
I thought it was a joke.

Martha Beck:
It could be, yeah. Anyway, I just had these images of Karen going out to kill all that’s lost in the world for not being fast enough and then being brought down by a duck. Her own duck.

Rowan Mangan:
Her own duck. Oh, the irony that it was her own duck.

Martha Beck:
Right? Bitter.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Bitter and sweet. So what are you trying to figure out, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
I’m actually trying to figure out what a petard is, but I’ll leave that for another day. Okay. So the other day, speaking of other days, which we weren’t, I found myself in a mid-oratory to-

Martha Beck:
Oh.

Rowan Mangan:
…I forget if it was you or Karen, sometimes you’re interchangeable to me.

Martha Beck:
I saw you with a whole audience, but go on.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t need an audience. And I was describing this new gadget that I’d ordered online, and I hadn’t-

Martha Beck:
You?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. Oh yeah-

Martha Beck:
A gadget online?

Rowan Mangan:
You know me and gadgets.

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:04:37].

Rowan Mangan:
But this was a new invention, a new never before seen thing that now graces us on planet Earth. And I was explaining, I think it was Karen, I was explaining to Karen what it does, and I had-

Martha Beck:
What does it do?

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll tell you in a minute, but I had that moment in the middle of saying it where I was just like… So I started out, “Hey Karen, I’ve ordered this cool new thing, you’ll never guess what it does.” And then I started telling her, and then I was about halfway through and I went, this is not true, this is not a real thing. I’ve been scammed. This doesn’t make any sense at all. This cannot cannot be, to use my nephew Marquito words, when we once gave him a switch light for Christmas. This cannot be.

Martha Beck:
Best reaction to a gift ever.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. And-

Martha Beck:
What was it? What was the thing?

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a thing you put under your pillow, it’s a Bluetooth little bar. It’s a little Bluetooth bar.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not a speaker per se.

Martha Beck:
No, no.

Rowan Mangan:
Because it doesn’t project into the air, into the sound waves, it only… This is where I started questioning myself. It can’t be heard in the air, it can only project noise through the magic of pillow texture. So, if you want to listen to your audiobook in bed, check, and you don’t want anyone else in the room to have to be bothered by it, check, this is the perfect thing. It’ll just be there under your pillow, only you can hear it because you are the only one with an ear on the other side of the pillow. And I was like, that’s not true, is it?

Martha Beck:
Did you get it? Have you tried it?

Rowan Mangan:
No, I haven’t got it yet.

Martha Beck:
You know what? I quite often put my iPhone under my pillow and put it on a really slow speed and put on a meditation tape to go to sleep, and I think it definitely comes through the pillow, but not out into the room.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe it’s just an iPhone, maybe I’m just going to get the little speaker and they’re just going to be like, you idiot. I just want to say as a side note, that I think you have some of your more interesting dreams when you do that thing with meditation [inaudible 00:07:13]-

Martha Beck:
Holy smokes. It’s so true.

Rowan Mangan:
You often find yourself in dreams where you’re in some sort of dreamlike situation and it’s just, you’re having your dream, but there’s just someone really boring there who won’t stop talking about meditation.

Martha Beck:
Last night, at three-quarter speed, listening to this, I had a dream that I was in a very endless seminar.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right.

Martha Beck:
This wise woman kept talking and talking and talking, and then-

Rowan Mangan:
Wasn’t it that you were lying flat on your back and everyone else was seated?

Martha Beck:
Everyone else was in the meditation posture. I was lying rigid in bed because I had back pain in the dream and in real life. And I kept seeing, you know how they say, let the thoughts go by clouds? Well, I’d open my eyes and a cloud would go by, but super fast. And then there were more and more, and then it was a hurricane, and then all the other people got blown away and that woman was still talking. And then the room filled with evil otters, which I had to deal with one by one.

Rowan Mangan:
And then we woke up to find that we had each bought each other a card, this exact same card with an otter on it.

Martha Beck:
That’s probably what the dream was about. Because they have shown, and this is literally true, they did this study where they kept a record of people’s dreams and they had to do journals at the same time. And what they were thinking was the dreams would be processing what people had experienced during the previous day. And it turned out that the journals did reflect what happened to the people on a certain day, but it wasn’t the day before the dream, it was the day after the dream.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s one of the coolest facts you have ever brought forth.

Martha Beck:
People were dreaming about the next day-

Rowan Mangan:
The day to come.

Martha Beck:
…that they were about to have.

Rowan Mangan:
And maybe in your dream, the otters were evil because you were processing the fact that we were both unoriginal enough to get each other the same card.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. That’s what I’m saying.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, on that note, shall we start drifting like a cloud towards the topic of today’s podcast?

Martha Beck:
Zipping like a cloud. Zip.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. I have a favor to ask. You might not know this, but ratings and reviews are like gold in the podcasting universe. They get podcasts in front of more faces, more eyes, more ears. All the bits that you could have a podcast in front of, that’s what they do. So, it would help us enormously if you would consider going over to your favorite podcasting app, especially if it’s Apple, and giving us a few stars, maybe even five, maybe even six, if you can find a way to hack the system, I wouldn’t complain. And a review would also be wonderful, we read them all and love them. So thank you very much in advance, let’s just go out there and bewilder the world.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we must zip like clouds into the topic, and the topic today, we’re calling it the pull, which is something that is a visceral description of what we sometimes experience, and many people do we think.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I feel like it’s one of those things that we do probably most of us experience, but because it’s not in the culture, we don’t really talk about it, or know that it’s a thing. So that’s what we’re going to try to do today. So, I think that one of the most delicious experiences in life, and also one of the strangest, is when you have the sense of being pulled towards something that makes no sense. You have no idea why you would be suddenly, your interest would be gravitating towards this topic, whatever it might be.

Martha Beck:
Right. And having coached a lot of people, I think we probably all have this, but the culture teaches us not to, or it doesn’t teach us anything. It kind of says, no, don’t go there, it’s not logical. And I do think it’s closer to our true nature than to culture. Because when you’re in your true nature, you’re very close to the mystery because that part of the brain that creates and follows the pull is the part that experiences things as [inaudible 00:11:37], is that the right word? No, nobody knows what [inaudible 00:11:39] means. Experiences things as metaphysical.

Rowan Mangan:
There you go.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Because it’s-

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:11:47] petard, look him up later. Okay. Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, make my list. Every conversation with Marty, here’s your vocab. But ironically, because there’s no language inside the mystery, sometimes our only clue that we are close to it is the fact that we don’t understand it and we don’t have language for it, right?

Martha Beck:
Isn’t that wonderful? I love that 13th century text, the cloud of unknowing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I love that phrase, the cloud of unknowing. And in Asia, they call it beginner’s mind, just the empty open mind. And the logical brain that we are taught to use all the time says, must know why, must know why… But the pull is going out for a walk with our two-year-old, which I did yesterday, and it’s like-

Rowan Mangan:
For your sins.

Martha Beck: .
..we had to visit the same dead beetle at least 40 times. And we didn’t need to know why, she wanted to.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, she has this vibe where she needs to check on things.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the term that don’t change, but she’s just going to go check on it.

Martha Beck:
I’m just going to check. The eighth time we have to go down a steep hill. No, no, I’m just going to check. Yeah. She’s definitely your daughter, honey.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And mine.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. You are the dead beetle, mommy.

Martha Beck:
I’m the nurture, you are the nature.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so that’s another topic for another day. So I reckon when you’re stuck in culture, when you’re very much living inside the culture and you get the pull, I think either it’s just completely confusing. Completely befuddling.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Right?

Martha Beck:
And we’ve both had this happen in our lives when we were very straight down the line, trying to achieve in the academic culture very material based logic, and we’ve talked about how we both resist it. I used to resist it hard-

Rowan Mangan:
So there’s two reactions. Either you get completely confused or you resist knowing it or responding to it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. When I’m being pulled and I’m resisting, that’s when I’m really aware there’s something pulling me. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Yeah. I think it can literally be that physical push-pull kind of thing. You are pushing against it, it’s pulling you, it’s one of those magnet things where, it’s the opposite. You know when you do the same instead of the opposite, and they’re like…

Martha Beck:
Yeah, where they won’t go apart and then you turn around and they go, and stick together tight.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
We were looking back at this, we were just having a conversation about the times we felt this, and then what happens next. And we both experienced it many times, but we thought of some examples that we want to share.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So I once paid all the money I had in the world, all of it, to go on a five-day retreat in the middle of nowhere South Africa, just to spend time with some weird-ass self-help guru. Can you imagine doing such a thing?

Martha Beck:
That is, I’m so sorry, hun. I’m so sorry you spent all your money to go meet this daffy creature in the middle of the African bush.

Rowan Mangan:
Turned out all right.

Martha Beck:
Turned out, because it was me.

Rowan Mangan:
It was you.

Martha Beck:
And I spent all the money I had in the world when I was quite a bit older than… When you’re in your thirties and you do that, yes, but the day I turned 50, the day, I spent all the money I had compiled in the world to go buy this little property in the middle of a forest in California and go there to do, I knew not what. Absolutely nothing.

Rowan Mangan:
Play a flute to the foxes, yes, I think [inaudible 00:15:54] nicely.

Martha Beck:
I did that, the very first night I was there. I wouldn’t turn on any electricity, and that forest was so brimming with life and I just sat there playing the recorder. And you paid all your money to meet me? Oh, good God.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re pretty cute.

Martha Beck:
But for those, I’m checking my privilege here, how many people can buy a place in California? But another experience that was very intense, I get it with books. And I remember being in South Africa and somebody had left this book called I Am That, in the room where I was staying, by Nisargadatta Maharaj. And I’d seen it before, and this one time I was there and that book pulled me so hard toward it, I almost cried. It was weird. I saw it and I was like, oh, thank you. And I started to read it and it’s maybe 800 pages long, it’s really long, and really bizarre for some people, and I couldn’t leave it. I had to take a copy with me on the plane and then buy them another one to replace the one that I-

Rowan Mangan:
You stole it, just-

Martha Beck:
Okay. I stole a spiritual development book. But it was a spiritually motivated theft. I’m sort of like Jean Valjean.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, very much Jean Valjean.

Martha Beck:
By the way, Jean Valjean’s number in Les Mis-

Rowan Mangan:
24601.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. My childhood zip code was 84601. So when I hear that song, I’m like, I am so close to being Jean Valjean, I have almost the same number in my past and I stole something that was spiritually motivated.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel close to Jean Valjean because growing up in Australia, we are taught the white Australian history of convicts and everything is, every convict who was sent over to Australia ended up there because they stole a loaf of bread. Or they were Irish rebels. Either way, completely justified.

Martha Beck:
Very deep, deep relationship with bread in Australia, I take it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s funny, the other thing that we have done since we’ve been together is… You were just talking about the ranch in California, we left that ranch-

Martha Beck:
Yes, we did.

Rowan Mangan:
…and we moved, how wide is America? Quite wide?

Martha Beck:
About 3000 miles.

Rowan Mangan:
Like I said, quite wide. And we moved across those miles without knowing, without having a house to live in. And we had Adam, we had two dogs, it wasn’t like we could just put a swag over our shoulder and wander off.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It was quite a troupe.

Rowan Mangan:
It was a troupe. And it all worked out in the end because it was the pull, we were on track. But we just, all three were just like, yeah, we’re going to do that now. We didn’t have anywhere to live at the other end.

Martha Beck:
Nope.

Rowan Mangan:
But when we were talking to our friend Liz about it, she’s like, well, that’s what we are like, we jump off cliffs. And I just love that, we jump off cliffs. And I do want to say though, just to echo what you were saying about privilege, is that you can take more risks when you have a comfortable and safe space in the culture, right?

Martha Beck:
Yes, 100%.

Rowan Mangan:
So I just want to note that, that our examples are clearly rooted in the privilege of risk taking that wasn’t as risky as it would be for others. So I just want to make sure that I say that.

Martha Beck:
Right. Absolutely. And I also think that we were cliff jumpers all our lives in some strange way. I only applied to one college.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so did I.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but I really, really take your point. And the other thing is that, there’s this saying, I don’t know if you say this in Australia, but parents whose children have succumbed to peer pressure… Well, Bobby did it. I say, well, if Liz told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that?

Rowan Mangan:
100%, yes.

Martha Beck:
100%. Thanks Liz. It was amazing. So depending on how you were raised and where the culture has landed you, it’s different for everybody, and you may not even give yourself permission to know that you feel an inexplicable dream rising up in you. I think it’s harder… It was for me. One of the reasons we did it so comparatively blithely, is that we both had experiences with following it and it worked out, and I think it built trust.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s true. And I think that it’s also define your cliffs. You can jump off a cliff by doing something that’s relatively small, relatively large, you can still jump off cliffs in any place. But we should talk about what the pull actually feels like to us, right?

Martha Beck:
Right. And by the way, don’t just jump off any old cliff. You have to-

Rowan Mangan:
Do it, just do it, find out. Maybe you can fly.

Martha Beck:
If Ro told you to do it, would you? Okay, so the way I feel this, it’s usually when I’m not sleeping in bed, I have not turned on any gizmos under the pillow to speak to me, I’m just in the silence and everything verbal goes away and it’s like something starts to rise, almost like a balloon expanding, when they heat up the air and the hot air balloons start to rise, it feels like that, and it starts to lift me upward into what I call a preoccupation.

Rowan Mangan:
So how do you know with that sensation of the balloon, what it’s referring to? What it’s pulling you towards?

Martha Beck:
Then it starts to come into my mind. So it comes with the feeling. The thing, the person or the book or whatever it is, starts to rise inside me, and the pressure of it inside me, I’m like, why am I thinking about… Happened with you, happened with Karen for that matter. Why am I thinking about this person? Why am I thinking about this person? And then it’s like, oh no, it’s the pull, I’m about to do something to change my life radically. I’m not really ready for this. And then it just keeps rising and rising and rising, and it’s irresistible actually. Yeah. What about you?

Rowan Mangan:
I just want to note that you say that tends to happen to you when you’re lying in bed in the darkness. So, a space that is free of culture-

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
…if you want it to be. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So for me, I think, yeah, it’s less embodied than that I think. My memory of feeling that is that starts in a kind of daydreaming mode, when your mind is just raking through images idly, they’re all floating by like a slow cloud.

Martha Beck:
This is why you can scroll the internet without getting pulled down rabbit holes, you do this in your brain.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I do. I do. I’m a scroller. And thoughts, memories are all being scrolled by, but then the image of… What do you call it? The filmstrip kind of snags on something. And then something in that carousel of images is suddenly higher definition or brighter or more saturated.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s so interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
And then I noticed the physical pull and the preoccupation, as you say. Oh, great example, constant listeners will know, recent preoccupation of mine, not that recent, still going to go on about it-

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:23:43].

Rowan Mangan:
#vanlife.

Martha Beck:
Oh my goodness.

Rowan Mangan:
Obsessed with van life, don’t know why. Don’t know why.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
But that’s all right, I don’t have to know why, apart from the fact that it’s just freaking cool to live in a van. Enough said. #vanlife.

Martha Beck:
There you go, there’s a dream for you. Okie-dokie. All right.

Rowan Mangan:
The van life stuff is pretty constant around these parts, folks. It’s so good.

Martha Beck:
And when she wants something, she makes it happen. Yeah, so I see a van-

Rowan Mangan:
So what if it makes no sense? What if you’ve got a toddler and you would never take a toddler in van life. Shh, shh, it’s okay. It’s okay.

Martha Beck:
She’s getting to the point of using, I think power tools, and would physically disassemble a van at this moment.

Rowan Mangan:
Our toddler?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
Without question. She has the strength of nine elephants and a mind for using tools.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe I could just build a playground on top of the roof of my van. Put her up there.

Martha Beck:
And then just zip down the highway at 75 miles an hour with her playing up there.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, trampoline?

Martha Beck:
There you go, that’s a bold parenting choice. Possibly illegal. Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway.

Martha Beck:
Back to our topic. There’s also, for me, you can feel the timing of it by the urgency.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s true. And just for example, I don’t feel a lot of urgency with my preoccupation in van life, I’m just enjoying it.

Martha Beck:
Thank God.

Rowan Mangan:
Thank God, right? It’s very complicated. Okay, sorry, go on.

Martha Beck:
All right, so, it starts for me as an idle, but recurring preoccupation, and then as the time gets short for it, if there’s a timing element to it for some reason that I don’t know, it can be very, very urgent. And I was thinking about this, when I moved to Phoenix I didn’t know a soul. I mean I didn’t know a soul in Phoenix. And I’d been in prison for stealing a loaf of bread. But somebody told me, oh, there’s a friend of mine, you should look her up, she’s another refugee from Utah Mormonism, and she’s going to this poetry reading, you should meet her there. So I went to this poetry reading thinking I was going to meet this person, and it was actually quite crowded. There were 30 people there and it was in a library.

Martha Beck:
So they did the reading, then I was like, I’m going to sort through all the people and find this woman, just figure out who she is. And the problem was I had to pee. And I went to the laboratory in the library and it was broken and walled off, and I really, really had to pee. So I thought, okay, I guess I’ll just go home, I certainly don’t have time to chat up everyone in that room. And I left the library and it was literally a physical force, a huge hand pushing me to go back into that room. And then I got in my car and I drove away, and I actually started crying because the impulse to turn the car around and go back and find this woman was so intense.

Rowan Mangan:
The magnets, when you put same pull against each other, you were being-

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the push, it’s pushing you back into the library.

Martha Beck:
It was intense, it was incongruous. And I went home and I peed, and I was like, well, that was nothing. And the next day, the very next day, I was sitting at… I’d taken my kids to McDonald’s or something to play in the big thing because it was too hot to play outside, and a woman came by and said, “I saw you last night at that poetry reading,” sat down, it was the woman, and she became my best friend in Phoenix for a very long time. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Amazing.

Martha Beck:
It was. It really was. But the urgency, wow.

Rowan Mangan:
Did your friend who thought you should hook up, not think of just giving you her phone number or?

Martha Beck:
I don’t think she had it, they were vague acquaintances or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, okay.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it was like, oh yeah, I heard that there was this woman-

Rowan Mangan:
I know not very much about her except that she’s going to be at a poetry reading.

Martha Beck:
There you go.

Rowan Mangan:
In Phoenix, and there’s not many of those.

Martha Beck:
Not many of those. And hence the crowd, they’ve been waiting decades.

Rowan Mangan:
So you get the preoccupation and the urgency is either strong or weak or building or whatever, waxing or waning, and then do you find for yourself that lots of synchronicities and stuff-

Martha Beck:
Oh my God.

Rowan Mangan:
…start showing up around that area, that sort of topic?

Martha Beck:
Constant. And I keep thinking maybe it’s just targeted attention, and that’s very probably true. But when I was buying that property in California, I was like, what am I doing? When I saw it, I came back to Phoenix and I was driving along… And the place I bought was near San Louis Obispo, California, which is a tiny little place, tiny. And Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the country. And I was going, oh, am I doing the wrong thing? And I pulled up behind a car at a stoplight, and it had this big thing on the back that said, Welcome to San Louis Obispo. And then it was just constant. It’s a small town, I’d never heard of it, and it just was everywhere. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
The materialist explanation for that is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or something. Because, this is my understanding, is that it was… It’s only named Baader-Meinhof because the person who coined the term, this happened to around Baader-Meinhof, the seventies left wing terrorist organization, German terrorist organization. And they heard about Baader-Meinhof for the first time… I don’t know what was going on with the pull there. And then it was the next day on the radio, Baader-Meinhof, of course is da da da. And then Baader-Meinhof, Baader-Meinhof. And so they explain it as the selective attention thing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
But I feel like, this is a weird analogy, but I feel like the algorithm of the universe builds the new preoccupation into the fabric of your life as you’re moving through space, in the simulation that we live in. It’s like the algorithms just like, oh, let’s put a little more Baader-Meinhof in here.

Martha Beck:
But culture does not say that to us.

Rowan Mangan:
No.

Martha Beck:
It does not say the fabric of the universe has woven a new thread through your life.

Rowan Mangan:
No. No, this is invisible in our contemporary mainstream culture. There’s lots of woo-woo stuff that lurks at the edges of the culture, but as far as culture, nah, nah, nah nah, nah.

Martha Beck:
I once was working with a woman who was planning to move to a place that was west of the home she then lived in, and she said, “But I went for a walk this morning and when I was walking back I tripped, and I was walking west when I walked back, so I don’t think I should move into the house I just bought, because if I go west I trip, and that for sure is a sign.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh dear.

Martha Beck:
You can get out there with it. And so, there are two ways that our culture really deals with it. The first purely materialist says it’s nothing, ignore it. And the religions that believe in the woo-woo to some extent, want to have-

Rowan Mangan:
Or some version of it.

Martha Beck:
But it has to be a woo-woo that is controlled by their hierarchy. So they will tell you you’re either possessed by demons, or maybe if you’re lucky, inspired by an angel or something. Neither of those really works for me.

Rowan Mangan:
So what do you think is going on with the pull? What’s really happening there, if culture can’t explain it for us?

Martha Beck:
I will tell you, in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So Marty, we have this mysterious pull, is it something that we actually can figure out? I start immediately thinking about Malcolm Gladwell’s idea in Blink, which I find very compelling, that is basically, our brains are a lot smarter than our conscious minds can process quickly enough. So, I wonder, could it be that the wild mind, as we like to call it, that’s free of limitations of culture and language, that that can access a different kind of knowledge that culture doesn’t understand? And what is that knowledge? I have no idea. Who knows? I bet you know. I bet you’ve got a theory.

Martha Beck:
Well, I really like your idea, that the wild mind has access to these different kinds of knowledge. But the implication in the Malcolm Gladwell [inaudible 00:32:46] in the lines of the culture is. Yes, somewhere subconsciously you’ve learned that. I get songs where the lyrics describe what’s going on in my life, and I’ll remember a fragment of the song, but when I looked it up online, the whole song is really descriptive, I could have just heard the whole song, registered it, pushed it into subconscious. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
But when you get crazy coincidence upon crazy coincidence, I think… This is my theory, and I may be wrong. Nobody knows what the hell consciousness is. They’ve tried to reanimate bodies like Frankenstein’s monster and everything, and it doesn’t work. There is electrical activity, but nobody knows how it’s conscious. And yet we know that consciousness has this profound role in physics and everything, nobody knows what it is. So I think maybe, this is what I think at my million years old now. I feel like consciousness is continuous throughout the universe and present in everything.

Rowan Mangan:
What do you mean continuous throughout the universe? What does that mean?

Martha Beck:
I think that the universe is literally made of consciousness. Current medicine says that consciousness arises out of the brain, I believe that the science actually shows that it’s more likely that the brain arises out of consciousness. Consciousness-

Rowan Mangan:
Consciousness created brains to play with.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Because when you do the double sled experiment in Phoenix… In Phoenix? Anywhere, you can do it anywhere. Why did I say that?

Rowan Mangan:
In physics, you were going to say.

Martha Beck:
In physics. Physics, Phoenix, what’s the difference?

Rowan Mangan:
[inaudible 00:34:32] the double sled experiment in Phoenix. It’s so funny because Adam, your son, my stepson, has this thing, one of his narratives that he likes to talk about sometimes is… How does it start? Years ago in Phoenix when I was a different guy… And then he’ll tell you how he used to eat unhealthy food, or he went to high school, or something like that.

Martha Beck:
Not anymore.

Rowan Mangan:
Not anymore.

Martha Beck:
He’s a healthy guy now.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
He has down syndrome. This is for those of you who don’t know of him already. Anyway, yeah. So I think that-

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, but Phoenix. Because I’m mashing it in my head with the poetry reading, and I’m like, poetry reading, the bathroom’s boarded up. This is not a good advertisement for Phoenix as a fun place to live. And there’s people doing double sled experiments everywhere.

Martha Beck:
Everybody’s locked up inside, they end up doing physics experiments.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m sorry, I’ll let you talk now.

Martha Beck:
It’s been called the most elegant experiment in the history of physics.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s very cool.

Martha Beck:
It’s very cool, and if you don’t know about it, look it up. But the takeaway is, everything we see as matter is in fact just a cloud of consciousness until… I’m sorry, it’s just a cloud of energy. Stop laughing, you’re getting me off my jam.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m so sorry, [inaudible 00:36:00]. I am so sorry, I’m really trying to not be laughing.

Martha Beck:
No wonder your ancestors stole bread.

Rowan Mangan:
24601.

Martha Beck:
01.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Well, that was a nice interlude. Okay, everything is just a cloud of energy until it is observed by consciousness and then it collapses, the potential positions collapse into a particle, and you have what looks like matter.

Rowan Mangan:
Gotcha.

Martha Beck:
Okay. But there’s no way to find out if this works without consciousness because you have to watch with consciousness-

Rowan Mangan:
We don’t have the option of a consciousness-free control.

Martha Beck:
So, I don’t think that our brains are giving rise to our consciousness. I think our consciousness is creating the brain, the body and everything about… And I think it’s creating this water glass as well. I’m a pantheist, I believe that everything is being made by consciousness as it goes along. And that sometimes it’s up there playing, we’re all aspects of the same consciousness then. And it wants to play with different… Like it’s playing a big chess game or something, and it wants to put different parts together. And the reason I think this, there are many reasons, but part of it is that the pull is often reciprocal-

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
That friend of mine, we worked well together as friends, for her and for me. And you came to Africa to meet me, and then, even though I’d had many, many seminars there, and people give me gifts, and they’re wonderful and they’re lovely, but I have ADD and I lose them. They’re somewhere. But you gave me this painting, an Australian aboriginal painting, and for some reason I rolled it up… It was rolled up in a tube. And I took it back to Phoenix and immediately framed it and put it on the wall. Not Phoenix-

Rowan Mangan:
Not Phoenix.

Martha Beck:
…I was in California.

Rowan Mangan:
What is wrong with you?

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, I think I’m rising like a phoenix from the ashes of my brain. Which is not thinking well. I-

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like you are having the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Martha Beck:
I am with Phoenix.

Rowan Mangan:
But with Phoenix. For some reason, consciousness, the one consciousness of which we are all a subjective experience of, it wants you thinking about Phoenix.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I don’t know why. I hope I don’t have to go back. Oh, everybody who lives in Phoenix, it’s a great town, love it. Really, I had a great time there. It’s hot, I love it. Not as hot parts of Australia, so don’t be stealing any bread, people.

Rowan Mangan:
This is completely unhinged. I love it.

Martha Beck:
This is nonsense. Anyway, I just wanted to get in this phrase, the splendor of recognition. I think it’s in the Upanishads, it comes from Hinduism. And it’s when two parts of the God force that are in different material forms see each other, see one another, and they see… You look in my eyes, I look in your eyes, and I see the consciousness that is us both. And it wants us to recognize each other. And so, that’s called the splendor of recognition.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you know the little rhyme, I do it with Lila before bed, two little dickie birds sitting on a wall, one named Peter, one named Paul? And you do your little fingers up here, for those of you listening to this in audio format.

Martha Beck:
I do not know this.

Rowan Mangan:
And you sort of waggle your fingers to be each of the birds looking at each other. So how I picture the splendor of recognition is the moment when both the birds look down and see that they’re on the ends of two arms that are on one person. Right?

Martha Beck:
That is a perfect illustration.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Thank you.

Martha Beck:
That’s perfect. Two arms on the same person. And that’s why the pull pulls both sides. One thing I’ve learned is if somebody comes and says, you know what? I feel a very strong pull that you are supposed to give me money and make my life easy, that has to come from both of you, okay? So if you’re not getting it, you can just tell them, yeah, no, thank you. That’s not the pull. Sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s the push. Ta-ta now.

Martha Beck:
That is very pushy.

Rowan Mangan:
So what if we just tried living like this a bit more, Marty?

Martha Beck:
Van…

Rowan Mangan:
Not selling all our…

Martha Beck:
[inaudible 00:40:26].

Rowan Mangan:
[Inaudible 00:40:26]. How did you know that I was building to #vanlife? No, not necessarily doing that quite yet. But instead of resisting the pull when we feel it or just being confused… I mean we can be confused, it’s part of bewilderment.

Martha Beck:
Always.

Rowan Mangan:
But just walking a few steps down the path, when we feel a little bit of a pull along the path. We don’t need to know what’s at the other end of the path, because that’s culture saying you need to know why you’re walking on the path. But see if you like the path. Because I reckon the path and the destination, if you believe in destinations, are kind of made out of the same material, and so… As each other. And so, I just had this memory of, when I finished school, you get your exam… In Australia it’s different from here.

Rowan Mangan:
But you get your exam results after you’ve finished all your exams, after you’ve already finished school. And then you’ve already applied to universities, but then you can change it because now you know what marks you’ve got, so now where you can get into. And I did a little bit better than I was expecting to, and I had this crisis of should I go study law instead of the fun, squishy English and history-

Martha Beck:
You would have hated law.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. But then there’s that thing of you got good marks and you can’t do science and math, so you need to do law because that’s what smart people do who use words instead of numbers. And I just remember thinking, hang on… I knew I wouldn’t enjoy studying law. And then I thought, well, if I wouldn’t enjoy the process of learning about the thing, I probably won’t enjoy where the thing takes me either.

Martha Beck:
Good logic.

Rowan Mangan:
Personally, not judging anyone else’s thing. And so, that’s why I think if the path is delicious and intriguing, the odds are it’s taking you somewhere delicious and intriguing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I think it’s also like magnetism in that the closer you get, or gravity, the closer you get to the thing, the harder it pulls.

Rowan Mangan:
Ooh, yes.

Martha Beck:
When I was applying to graduate school and my then husband was going to Harvard still, and I just graduated and I wanted to stay there because we didn’t have a car, is the main reason. So I just had made three different applications and my undergraduate degree was in East Asian languages and civilizations, Chinese basically. And so I applied in that, and then I applied in psychology I think, and in sociology. Now, I’d never even had a class in sociology, but from the moment I started, and that was the one I got into, and I went home from my first classes and started reading. And I remember I was reading Aristotle because they started us at the beginning. I was up reading the whole night, I was like, what is this? This is so delicious. I was like, my brain was starving for it, and I had never studied it, never liked social studies in high school or whatever, and the pull was so strong and delicious.

Rowan Mangan:
God, that’s so interesting, we’re just sort of batting back and forth on university study but it is fascinating, isn’t it? Because I went and did my lovely, squishy, easy little lovely arts degree. God love it, I enjoyed it so much. And then went away and didn’t have any thought of going back to uni until, I think I’ve told the story on the podcast before about needing to know what Mossad was, and then-

Martha Beck:
Oh, right.

Rowan Mangan:
But looking back, it’s so weird that I chose to do an advanced degree in something I’d never really thought about before. Completely different from that undergrad process. I was at a completely different point and the pull was completely different. But the subject matter, what you are saying, suddenly felt like the most fascinating, compelling… Imagine how everyone in the world, not just me, feels about van life, that’s how I felt about international politics. So weird.

Martha Beck:
It really is. And I don’t know if we ever really understand why we do any of these things. But I have a cousin who used to always tell me to tell the story of my life backward, like the causality backwards. So, instead of, oh, I was raised Mormon and then I left and it made me this radical out of culture maverick, instead of putting it in that order say, I was meant to be a radical out of culture maverick, so I was born Mormon.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, or we had-

Martha Beck:
And then hated it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And we had some sort of stuff that we needed to do together, so I spent all my money on this seminar in the middle of nowhere.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, so-

Rowan Mangan:
But for the sociology, political science stuff, you can say… You can tell it any number of ways, but it’s kind of interesting in this context to say, we both had to become very literate in the culture and what it is and what it does in order to understand it, so that one day we could make a podcast where we can deconstruct it from a place of knowing what we’re talking about a bit.

Martha Beck:
It’s so true. I did my PhD dissertation on people… It turned out to be on people who were so pressured by culture that they had to leave for their sanity, and whose PhD thesis is actually compelling to them? We used to have a joke where people would say to each other, so tell me about your dissertation, and then as soon as the person started talking, everyone else in the room would just feign death. It was, no, don’t talk… And yet, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t be here talking about this with you.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right.

Martha Beck:
So, it’s interesting to look back from the very moment you’re in now and see if the seeds of what you love now were planted maybe decades ago in ways you didn’t understand at the time.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, do you know what? When I said I’ll do an arts degree, I’ll do a… What do you call it over here? A liberal arts degree. Everyone said to me, if you do that useless degree, you’ll end up living in a van down by the river.

Martha Beck:
Look, it’s so beautiful. It’s so beautiful, I just want to sit in front of it like I sat in front of the David, Michelangelo’s David, when I finally saw it. That is a work of great van art.

Rowan Mangan:
I just need to say one thing.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
Some vans have hammocks. Okay, that’s it. That’s all I wanted to say. That’s it.

Martha Beck:
Bad back. Anyway, we can fight about this later. The point is here that this pull is out there and I think it’s pulling all of us and it keeps coming and we ignore it most of the time, we don’t know its possible ramifications, and we don’t get the explanation. Who knows what’s happening there? I don’t know. What do we learn from this? What?

Rowan Mangan:
I think from a practical situation, from a practical perspective, that you can just say, if you feel a pull, just walk along that path a little ways, just to see if you like it. You don’t need to understand why, just wonder a little bit.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. And because your mind is wrapped up in the culture, then you know that if you don’t understand where the pull is coming from, it’s not from the culture, it’s your own connection to the mystery. And if it gets more… I think with attention and walking down the path, it starts to rise. It gets stronger. And that in a word is fun.

Rowan Mangan:
It is.

Martha Beck:
And what other reason is there to do anything?

Rowan Mangan:
100%. All right, so for me, I’m going to keep walking along those mysterious paths, going to join me?

Martha Beck:
I will. I believe I will.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll keep following those inexplicable impulses

Martha Beck:
And who knows, listeners, maybe we will meet you out there in the inexplicable garden. So, stay wild.

Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.