Marcus Link, co-founder of New Foundation Farms and the Holos Project, speaks with Ben about his personal journey towards self-discovery and expression. Marcus shares his experience of learning to let go of the "doer" mentality and embracing being present and authentic in all aspects of life, even in uncomfortable situations like networking or business contexts.

He discusses his transformative experience on a pilgrimage in Italy and the importance of being seen and witnessed by others in order to integrate his inner baptism into his outer self.

Links

• Episode 6 of Peripheral Thinking, with Marcus Link
• Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn
• New Foundation Farms
• The Holos Earth Project
• Bill Plotkin
• Peter Kingsley
• AN Whitehead on Plato
• Individuation and the Self
• Christopher Alexander
• Our Real Work, by Wendell Berry

Hello there, peripheral thinkers.

Welcome back to another conversation, another episode on this journey of podcasts, conversations with academics, activists, entrepreneurs, other generally good minded agitators, all with a purpose to helping you.

We kind of inspire you really with ideas from the margins, from the edges, peripheral thinking, cuz that's where the ideas which we'll shape tomorrow are hiding today.

This week on Peripheral Thinking, uh, we welcome back a Guest from a few moons ago, Marcus Link.

Marcus is co-founder of a really exciting business, seeking to disrupt the entire food industry from a regenerative point of view.

Uh, that is called New Foundation Farms.

Uh, he's also the co-founder of the Holos Project and generally all round inspiring being.

If you're interested in the New Foundation Farm story, check out the earlier conversation with Marcus.

This was a follow actually, to a seed, which was sewn at the end of that conversation.

A chance to talk more openly and more deeply about many things actually, which are kind of personal and true to each of our journeys.

Uh, I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Uh, look forward to hearing your thoughts.

So sit back and enjoy.

Marcus, thank you for rejoining us on Peripheral Thinking.

Really appreciate you coming back.

So what have you been up to since we last spoke?

Um, that, that's a, a lovely question.

If I answer on that same general level, I I, the, the answer is that I am coming into myself.

. And that is quite a remarkable experience.

And it's, expressing itself on a number of different levels, but, um, on the very top level, um, I feel like I'm coming into myself.

That is a good feeling to have, I would imagine.

And actually something that many don't even get close to feeling.

well, I think it's as much a decision as it is something that we also have to let happen rather than make happen.

And I think that's the, for me, Now, let's be really clear.

I don't know how it works for anybody else, but in my case, , it, it has been an experience of getting out of the way and allowing that which is already there to express itself.

Um, which is, um, not, not dissimilar to getting undressed and experiencing oneself, metaphorically naked.

And is this, is this a, a practice and practice and process, which sort of turns up in all aspects of life, it being the point of it?

Uh, and so in the work you're doing, in the things that you do day by day and how you feel and how you talk and how you communicate?

I guess this is an idea which beholds all of that.

Yes.

It, it is expressing itself in all the different arenas and um, I can definitely say that.

It, it is still at a point of not just not coming easily.

It's at a point where I recognize just how unpracticed it is.

And therefore how in particular circumstances I find myself hiding, although I'm not as, as a habit, because that's how I appeared.

And and yet I, I also am able to observe myself hiding and I can communicate to the people, say in a conversation.

Like just very recently, I sat in a, in a restaurant, was having a beautiful meal and with beautiful people and there was absolutely no need to hide from the questions and answers that were flowing around the table.

And yet I did find myself unpracticed at allowing myself to be fully present.

And so I, I, I brought that, that became part of the conversation, part of if you want the practice that we were then able to do together.

Um, but I still found myself when I, when I left the table and I was on my own again, that there was a very different quality of presence determined simply by the absence of other people.

I am a very introverted individual.

I, I find engagement with the outside world overall and with other people in particular, challenging at times,

And I guess, but what part of what you're saying is the sort of acknowledging that, cause I think I, I feel that, I feel that too.

I work, I kind of enjoy small conversations like this one or kind of, you know, sort of focused conversations like this one rather than the, you know, the kind of the, the idea of kind of big bustling room, uh, and actually what you are talking about there, um, I think it was kind of summed up nicely.

You were saying earlier, you know, it's a choice.

It's not something you do, it's something that you kind of let happen.

This sort of exploration.

And of course, you know, we are not really sort of conditioned to function in that way.

That's not how our sort of culture sort of speaks to us.

It's not how our training is, you know, our kind of training in life in this world and then, you know, in this, in this country at this time, you know, these are, these are we, you know, we kind of, we are in the cult of the do aren't we, rather than the, uh, letting be.

Did you cult of the do.

Yes.

Yes.

The doer.

We're very much in a doer attitude and very much in a situation where we impose, if you want, frameworks of being that are actually frameworks of doing.

And that that, um, that where the, where everybody lives with a sense of unattainable objectives that they, um, on the one hand self-imposed, but on the other hand, I'm not so sure, um, they really have self-imposed, they have learnt to impose them through very disciplined training, um, of, of giving up oneself.

Um, for, for part of some kind of collective, apparently collective wellbeing.

I'm not so sure that wellbeing is true.

Collective is definitely true.

One of the things which I noticed this morning when I was, uh, doing some writing of my own, uh, to your, to, to what you were saying there about, um, sort of comfort and ease in sort of speaking whatever is sort of, you know, genuinely true rather than kind of hiding, sort of in my own case, hiding behind a mask or a role or identity or kind of fears or, or whatever.

I was kind of reflecting that in my own thing.

One of the, one of the things that I really sort of makes me deeply uncomfortable is the, uh, the what do you do question when you, uh, when you meet somebody.

Uh, and I was reflecting on what it was about that that kind of made me feel so uncomfortable.

And, uh, I think there are, you know, there are things around sort of identity.

There are things around, uh, kind of like feeling like you need to know, feeling like there needs to be an answer.

Feeling like there needs to be a certain answer.

Um, and, and not actually feeling at home in any of those things.

To actually kind of find myself really avoiding or certainly resisting situations where I fear that question will come up.

And actually I might, as I'm saying it now, also, cause even when I see people who I've not seen, who I already know, who I've not seen for a long time, the same version.

What are you up to now?

It feels of the same, the same kind of thing.

And I think part of the discomfort around that actually is a fear of actually sort of expressing, you know, genuinely what I feel or what I say, as opposed to Haida behind the what I should say or what I should be doing all of those more, more, more on the should, should side of things.

Um, one, one of the ways in which that expresses itself in my case is that I'm, what you might call a feeler.

I, I have a very rich, uh, feeling life, but I have found that, um, ex bringing one's feelings to a conversation is not a practice thing in, in, in, in a collective sense.

And it, it does jar and it, especially jars in the business context.

A strange, strange, um, uh, as, as I, as I in many ways experience that our capacity to relate, which is immediately, um, connected to our capacity to feel is what is really lacking in so many different ways.

Uh, so, so we, we end up in, in an economic sense with a whole narrative of competition, for example, which is a, um, a narrative of separation where we then establish our value through competition rather than through collaboration.

which is, uh, which is part of this as, this is my perspective.

Uh, I have no evidence, um, that this is anything akin to the truth.

It's just simply my observation is that we, we, we end up creating other narratives, um, whether they're healthy or not.

I don't know.

I just notice myself really uncomfortable in that way.

I'm not the person who's any good at an elevator pitch.

I have to leave that to other people.

One of the interesting things around, uh, journey of, of the last year, if this is a, a bit of a frame for today, is that I just before we spoke, uh, in, in September, so actually it was two months prior to our speaking, I, um, went on a pilgrimage.

in, in, in Italy, uh, in, in, I, I was walking part of the St.

Francis Trail in reverse from the mountain village of Pier Delco to, uh, the cathedral in Assisi.

And this was under the leadership of, uh, one of my now living masters, Sujit Ravindran, who had brought together a group of 12 conscious leaders, as he called them.

Uh, and he does this regularly.

In fact, my walk was his 58th walk.

He is, I believe, 48.

And he started in his teens in India, taking groups of men on a rite of passage through the Himalayas.

Eight weeks.

Now, no person involved in.

Leadership or any other Western occupational, uh, sense can take eight weeks off.

Uh, or maybe they can, but it's not really compatible with our mindset.

So he's condensed this eight week passage into eight days.

And it was a great privilege in many ways, but the greatest privilege of the whole thing was actually the encounter with myself witnessed by these other men I became very fond of.

Um, in, in, because they, they, they witnessed me so, so clearly, so authentically, um, uh, within the space of eight days without a mobile phone and walking many hours and, and doing many, uh, weird and wonderful practices on the side.

Roadside, there is in the end, very little place to hide.

And it's not that hiding in this case is something that anyone really wanted to practice.

It's just simply the fact that we're so familiar with it.

And so at some, some point under the baking sun, uh, I had this experience of just actually being seen simply because I was actually present.

So I've been integrating that experience for me that that was a, an outer baptism, um, to to borrow a few terms wildly from different traditions, as, as opposed to an inner one that I, I believe that that built over, over the years anyway.

Um, but the here was one where I learned to stand in that, stand in my truth as it were.

And, one of, one of the pilgrim brothers, um, to, to use a phrase we, we lovingly use for each other after the walk was, he, he said something akin to Stop thinking so much about things.

Just put it out there.

There are actually people waiting for what you have to say.

And I understood this not as a sense of what I have to say is special or like, you know, better than anybody else.

I understood it more as I have a particular place, I occupy a particular niche in our social, in my social environment and my ecological environment where I, I am actually called by that niche.

That's, that's the whole point why I'm here.

And, and that's a, that's a very uncomfortable experience at first.

And, but over the, the, this is what I mean when I say I'm finding myself un practiced and stumbling and clumsy, as, as it is, it feels full of purpose of a way that, of a, in a way that's particular to, to me and my experiences, and my capacities.

And I am in, um, reverse able to be open to what other people bring as a, as a consequence of being more open to myself.

And that's really, that's making itself known in all sorts of different ways.

So I have these two strands, um, that represent things going on inside me in my outer life.

And the one is that, uh, so here's my little elevator pitch or here, what do you do?

Um, I am, I'm on the one hand.

I am, uh, I remain and I'm very excited about my role as a co-founder of New Foundation Farms, and I am equally excited about my role as a co-founder of what's called the Holos Earth Project.

And I recently came up with this articulation, which really resonates for me, which is that the Holos project is like my temple and the, a New Foundation Farms is my marketplace.

And in my little village, I've got my temple in my marketplace.

They're separate, but the more I become myself, the more integrated they actually are.

And, and we've, we've spoken or danced around, um, at, at one point the fact that I also.

I, I've got a website where I, where I publish some of my, my attempts at writing.

And I've often experienced in my life the split in myself as, you know, am I a writer or am I a, an entrepreneur?

And what I've, what in the last year has happened is that I've recognized that it's not either raw, it's not this duality, it's the non-duality behind it is simply a particular creative flavor that appears in different guises, in different arenas of life, if you want, uh, different conscious pursuits.

But they actually have the same origin in my, in, in, you know, the word source, um, in, in terms of my creative response to the ecological and social niche into which I was born.

This is a f um, this is a, this is language I have taken very happily from an eco psychologist called Bill Plotkin who, who talks about how we have our place, much like any moose or mountain in a particular social niche, and then with within our kind, and then within the larger than human ecosystem, in our ecological niche as well.

And we respond to that in different, or we can respond to that in different ways.

And, and that's what I'm talking about here, is that New Foundation Farms is such a response.

My writing is such a response and my participation in the Holos project is that kind of response all coming from the same source that, um, I, I, I, what I can do in that is practice my connection to source.

Hmm.

So there's lots, I'm kind of curious, I'm curious to understand a little bit more about the Holos Project.

I'm definitely curious to sort of better explore around this idea of source.

And I'm also really curious about the, the eight day pilgrimage, the initiation, uh, and what, what that was, you know how that was?

I, I think what that, what contributed to is that it ga, it allowed me to develop a sense of courage that became slightly larger than my.

and, um, allowed me to just venture out a little bit further and find confidence in the fact that I'd experienced other people wrestling with similar things in different ways.

And that nakedness that I experienced there began to feel like the experience of drinking fresh water.

When you are really thirsty, nothing else will do it.

It, um, and, and yet you require that.

So that's the whole point of a right of passage is that we require an initial experience of a depth that allows us to acknowledge its reality.

And without that, um, we, we feel.

There's a wonderful writer, um, I feel very connected to, called Peter Kingsley, uh, a modern mystic if you want.

He describes that in the Western world, the malaise that we suffer is that we, we have a phantom, like phantom pain.

Uh, there's a, a limb we've lost and we feel this pain of, but we don't even remember what that limb was or that we had it.

We just feel this deep aching.

And, um, uh, that's for me, connected to this sense of feeling and relating is, is that unless we experience that with healthy role models, um, and, and have a practice of it ourselves, it is really difficult to establish a confidence in it, um, or explore, take it further.

So one of the things that I took away from my eight day pilgrimage, which is actually really quite short in a way, but long enough to, to have sustained this is something called morning practice.

It's in, you could, you could give it all sorts of different labels, but for me it's quite significant that I do it in the morning.

Um, you could call it meditation, but it's a number of different exercises that build me from my sleep, um, through my breath, through my voice, through my body, into the, I establish myself into the world as it were.

And, and gradually, um, dip through different layers of consciousness.

And I work very consciously with these gifts that I have, like breath and like voice, but not, not in the sense that I articulate words.

It's, I mean, quite, quite, um, it's, it's essentially, um, the chanting of seven prime ordeal sounds of as the Hi, hi Indians say that relate to the chakra points.

Now for, for some people that may work and for others it may not.

Um, in, in my case, I found that I'm really comfortable with it and it's coincidental in some shape and form that it came to me in that, in that way.

I love singing, I love ch music.

Um, I g i I go and listen to chal music, uh, western chal music in, in, in, in churches and so forth.

So, so for me, there's a, I I was very open to that and it has real meaning.

And I've actually run a number of workshops as part of New Foundation Farms we run holistic workshops with people we work with, and I have structured them according to this pattern of finding breath and articulating our voice and, and defining our body, articulating our body, and, and through that, arriving at a sense of wholeness in our inner and outer existence.

I don't necessarily tell everybody that this is how I've structured it.

It's just a helpful way of thinking about, um, our interconnectedness.

So this morning practice is important for me.

I've done it most morning since.

There have been occasions where I actually preferred sleep over, uh, the practice.

You know, sometimes we think meditation is a discipline that we just have to keep going in a military style.

But my experience is that actually the discipline is to be, to enjoy it.

And that the pursuit is to find a place where it's not uncomfortable, where actually I am opening myself up to experiencing the deep joy that being alive can be.

As opposed to some kind of forced higher level of consciousness that I must now achieve.

Um, it is quite the reverse.

It's getting myself out of the way, and I have this experience there of arriving eventually, sometimes not every time in an inner wood.

And in that inner wood is a lake.

And then I sit by that lake my well, as it were, and then the wood disappears.

And I might as well be, um, at the seafront.

Um, th this ocean, this, this wa body of water becomes huge.

And, and yet it's the stillness, the quality of its stillness that allows both for reflection of the sky, but also for us to see to the bottom.

And it is, it is, these metaphors all expire very easily, but it's how, how else do we communicate profound inner experiences, but through relating them to things we all know in our outer world?

Yeah.

So that, that is something that I, was familiar with in my life before this walk.

But it is that walk that really brought things together because I was at a crisis point.

And I think that's important too, is sometimes crisis points turn our, our suffering and our shadow into little pearls where we recognize suddenly the reason I've suffered in this way, or the reason I'm experiencing it like this is also because there's inside a particular gift.

It's my perspective.

And I hadn't, haven't, haven't yet managed to open, open the shell to see the pearl that I've been working on.

And so for me it has been a courage of, even with my very close business partners or even with my, my, my partner in life to stand knowing that their expectation of me might be different, and it, how else could it be if I haven't actually shown up?

To show up as that person who I actually am and realize what a fool, what a fool I am and how stumbling and clumsy it all is.

And yet it's, it's a pointing and, and, and as my, my rusty joints are gradually becoming freer in their movement and I get better at being me in, in moments.

And, um, it's also helped me with being a lot less your simple things like getting angry, um, when something doesn't work.

I find myself still getting angry, but I also see the humor in the situation more often.

Why on earth am I trying to do this, like this?

You know, I need, actually, I need to breathe.

Um, the reason I'm getting so upset is because I haven't sat down and breathed, and maybe we can do this tomorrow.

Maybe we really didn't, don't need to do this.

And suddenly there's a completely different perspective where I'm not trying to meet perceived external expectations of myself, but having more of a patience to sit with what actually is in this moment.

And you know how hard that is to actually see what is, because of course, I only ever end up seeing what is through my eyes and my filter.

And there's the saying that's.

people.

Some, sometimes it's at attributed to the Talmud, but um, I'm not sure that's true.

It might have been a rabbi who was explaining something in the Talmud, but it says, we, we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are.

So, so we, we use the world as a projecting surface, as it were.

And, and we, we all, we, we initially think this is just how it is.

And then we recognize, no, this is how I am and this is why I'm seeing it like this.

And you are seeing it in a slightly different way, but it's the same thing we're seeing.

And to get outta the way and just have a sense of, okay, these are your needs and these are my needs.

And there are lots of other maybe individuals and creatures that I also have these needs.

So how do we find that place in the middle of all that?

That can be a generative place?

And the reason I say that is because I experience myself as most joyful when I find that generative place where I can be of service, not, not as a martyr, that's a terrible place, but as a, um, as a small sense, a small moment of something having become a little relaxed where it was tense or, um, I stopped and observed the, the bird on the bird feeder or just tiny little moments like that and give me great sense of joy and participation in the great mystery of, of being alive.

And, and that those, even saying those words might have not, um, might have just felt a little embarrassing a while ago.

Um, I feel, I, I, I actually feel it's really lovely, um, just being able to talk about these very simple things.

And when I, when you now translate that into a business context, it's extraordinary how business meetings have this, this code, these ideas of how meetings are to be conducted and the note taking and the, the, the, the, the little acknowledgement emails afterwards and the, what you discussed.

But somehow, I, I smile at the fact that nobody's really present in the meeting.

What, what, what's present is some sort of set of expectations.

And there are these humans that are so in service of the expectations that they become like functions of the expectations.

And the, the, the scary thing of that is that suddenly these expectations have actually materialized because the humans are in service of those.

And then we say that science is the opposite of religion.

Um, because actually there's a, there's a very powerful narrative at work in the way people conduct themselves and they believe the strangest things, and, and, and, and bring them about through their behavior as opposed to these things having been realities before.

The phrase of getting out of my own way, um, feels kind of very, kind of, uh, always very intriguing, very compelling, very resonant to kind of, really keen to sort of understand, you know, what that kind of means and, and how to do it

Um, and also I guess one of the other things, it kind of feels a little bit as you were talking, It felt to me like there was, what was the need, what was needing to happen in some respects is a, is a, is a sort of surrendering.

Um, and I was kind of curious whether that is kind of part of what you feel is happening is that there is a surrender.

I, I know maybe I'm just reflecting on that from my, my own experience or my own understanding of the journey is one of trying to surrender.

I like what you were saying about service and actually, cuz I, I find one of my own struggles I think is, the kind of the ego as safety net, right?

Which like links to kind of roles being sort of doing certain things.

But I think one of the things I've gotta find in, in some ways that is actually I, the story that I then tell myself is that that is getting in the way of.

I think partly because I have an idea about what service is, uh, and, uh, you know, the ego, my, my own ego wanting to sustain itself and protect itself and enlarge itself, um, is quite kind of blinding and suffocating in a way.

And so what I think happens with that is that I kind of fail to see acts of service all over.

And I really like the, the kind of simplicity of that moment you were talking about with the, the kind of bird, the bird feeders.

And the service is happening in all of these different ways, at all of these different times.

If we give ourselves kind of pause and permission, I guess, to, to kind of notice those things and experience those things.

Yeah, absolutely.

I, I was going to say probably you are seeing this conversation as, as you are, and, and, but at the same time, the word surrender really, uh, resonates with me.

Hmm.

I think it's the British academic Whitehead who once described all Western philosophy as a footnote to Plato, and even if it wasn't him who said that, it's a very nice, um, way of understanding the, the, the history of philosophy.

My particular.

Development, or if you want my, my, my own epistemology, my, the development of it is a footnote to conversations with my father who has a very, who who's a, um, a very intellectual academic individual whose particular background is that he grew, was born just after the war in Germany, and is one of those, one of that generation who wanted answers from his elders about how it was possible for the, the Holocaust and, and the other incredible acts of violence to happen in Germany and, and that these, these vi these acts needed people to execute them, not just orders to be given.

How was that possible?

And he didn't get answers that were satisfactory.

And his response to that was that ideology is the problem.

and that any ideology subsumes us into a collective world of symbols.

And we then lose our freedom.

And then these kind of things happen.

And the the irony I feel is that in this, in this exchange, my observation is that when we take that perspective too far, we end up with an ideology of, let's say accidental or scientism.

Or meaninglessness.

Um, and, and, and you have various individuals of the sort of scientism kind in that world who, who for whom the world has been reduced to a, a physical or a particle reality.

And the thing about particles is that particles are defined in part by their separation from other particles.

And yet, yet, when you take that to its infinite extreme, we, we, in, in our scientific research, you end up with a realization in quantum mechanics that separate particles are actually connected in a strange way that we still don't fully understand.

How can to electrons that are not directly connected or in the same space.

So they're separate in, in our understanding of space time and yet the change of motion of one of them results and the change of motion in another, and we don't, we don't quite understand, um, how, how that, how that works.

And so what, what you have two, do you have two ways of going about that sort of mystery is you can feel the mystery and surrender to it or you can resist it and try and find yet another deeper layer explanation.

For, for me, I have really struggled with surrendering to the mystery.

Because I've always, I've grown up with this idea that we can explain it all.

We are rational creatures, and the Enlightenment has given us the gift of our rationality, our logic, in my own exploration of this subject.

I mentioned Plato earlier, quite deliberately because for me, something, Plato isn't the beginning.

For me, Plato is the end.

Um, Plato for me is not the beginning of Western philosophy for me.

Plato is actually the covering up of wisdom.

Now I'm using words, uh, describing something that this author I mentioned before Peter Kingsley talks about, which is that there were wisdom traditions in the west too, but they were lost in the pursuit of what today we call philosophy, which, um, if I, if you know, if you, if I'm allowed to put it like that, it's really the argument about truth as opposed to lived wisdom.

Um, there's this idea that there is something that's true and it's, and it's an abstract, it's that there's an abstract reality that we can access that is true always, um, and in all places.

And, and that is one of the things that gets, it certainly got in my way because I try to explain everything, including my individuality as a function of something abstract.

And then I discovered that I'm actually real and unique.

And that I had a real appetite to be more of my uniqueness.

Um, in, in Jungian psychology that's called individuation.

So the, the idea that, that at some point we break through collective norms and collective symbols into an expression that is just simply nothing else but ourselves.

And for me, that was the same, the tan tantamount to a religious conversion, not into a particular tradition.

I'm open to many different phase, I find lots of things very fascinating and intriguing of a, there's this universal spirit for me, a present in all, um, material, uh, in all, in all faiths.

But if you want, this was the religion of myself, if I can put it like that, a recognition that I'm, um, not, not special.

It's not that I have significance, but that I have relevance.

And I have relevance because I'm part of a hole and I have no idea how big that hole is or how many holes there might be.

But this is a sort of exploration of being alive that I find deeply meaningful.

And when I started off articulating things like that, I found that deeply embarrassing.

I was so vulnerable to how that might be criticized or rejected or, um, and yet somehow I feel very privileged to have found the confidence and courage to explore that further.

And the Holos project and New Foundation Farms play a significant role in my personal journey.

As, as in, if you want, these are crystallizations from the place of being.

So, um, one, one of my Pilgrim brothers says there's a particular way in which our doing can become, uh, a crystallization of our being, and that that is the truest form of doing, if doing can ever be true.

That, um, that it's, that it's just freely flowing as your gift.

Where, where I was trying to go with this is, I'm gonna borrow from another big thinker that I've become, that I, that I admire.

His, his name is Christopher Alexander.

He's a, he's known as an architect and, and is a design theorist.

He, he died, um, I believe just before Covid, if not during Covid.

He's originally from Austria and because of the, you know, the same, uh, second World War conflict, et cetera, he ended up in, in, in, in the UK and then, then in the US and his.

His whole pursuit of architecture, of building things actually had a deeply spiritual narrative, although he only at the end of his life reflected on it as such.

He described, uh, in, in a, in an interview that he s he recognized that what he was concerned with all of his career as an architect was to help God appear in the field.

And this, um, this is a f a very meaningful way of articulating things for me, because what it says is he, this man didn't have a Christopher Alexander style.

He, what he was concerned with was what are the patterns in a particular environment that a building could crystallize and make meaningful and work with as a form of habitation or as a marketplace or whatever the building is that was needed to be conceived?

And he found, so his whole work was not just concerned with design theory in terms of how do we, what materials do we use and how do we make it most efficient and so forth.

It was how do we actually access that world of patterns in a particular location?

And one of the, and just as there's a whole body of work, um, but to cut through this, he arrived at a sense that we have to connect with it through our capacity for feeling.

What is the feeling I get in this place and how can I start to talk to other people who are related to this place in a meaningful way where the feelings we're discussing are actually objective, if that makes any sense.

Because we have a collective response.

There must be something not just in my subjectivity.

And I really appreciate this because we grow up with a sense that our personal feeling is totally subjective and is not part of an experience that is part of the objective scientific world.

So it, and it reduces things like awe, or even respect or love to just a sort of whim of my, and, and, and it has, uh, it, it it's is very much akin to this amputation I talked about earlier.

It's like we, we, we have enormous heads and totally shriveled up hearts.

So, so, so we can't relate to each other properly, but the fabric of life somehow is made up of ephemeral relations.

And, and when I say ephemeral, I, I, I have to say, I don't mean that they're, they're invisible, but they're foundational.

And just while I'm off on this tangent, one of the concerns for Alexander was this idea that you can arrive at faith in two different ways.

One is you inherited it is what your people have done and you've learned their traditions and you simply take it on in a sort of unconscious way.

That's probably, he says the way most people end up with faith.

And then there's one where we may, may have gone out to look for something and we recognize something as more or less what we like and we, we take those practices on.

And then there's another he says, and that's really, really hard is that we go through the root of what we might call rationalism.

We end up understanding something so well, that we arrive at the other end of it, the recognizing the mystery of it, that we transcend, as it were, the rational and arrive at this understanding of it being something that we simply cannot fathom despite the depth we've gone to.

And yet the consequence could be that we've built a building that the majority of people who pass through this experience as a deeply connecting building that that, um, and, and he has a wonderful way of describing how people respond to, to such things.

And what he did for me is he articulated a western cosmology that doesn't sound airy fairy, that allows us to explain the entire universe, but not from a physical or chemical or particle perspective, but from a perspective of life.

And he says that for him, the entire universe is a living structure.

It is more or less living.

And in places like Planet Earth, it is more living than it is in others.

But this living structure is the same matrix if you want everywhere.

And now we are able to understand wholeness as a function of living structure.

When things are more alive, they are more whole.

And when they are more whole and more alive, we can experience them as more beautiful.

And we can experience the quality of life in a way that isn't just in the eye of the beholder, but is something that we actually recognize in, in fellow human beings and fellow creatures, like at the bird feeder.

And so, uh, the, this, this surrender that, that really the tan, this is the tangent I'm off on, is that the, the surrender to a universe that is capable of bringing about life, and that I can play a tiny little role in that, which is that I can make things a little bit more whole in myself and in, in my connection to other people, and in my engagement with the environment, with, with my ecology, and I in, when, when I do that, they also become more beautiful.

And, and that, that, um, is something that only five years ago probably would've embarrassed me to say because I wouldn't have had the legs to stand in that truth with with.

But having discovered these kind of articulations and recognized other people are wrestling with this too, and they've found against the odds, an ability to have faith in that and to just experience themselves as emerging out of that source has, has allowed me to, to get to a place of, well, you know what?

Whatever you think, this is how I experience it.

This is my, this is the privilege to be me.

Uh, huge amount in there.

Uh, really kind of feel everything you're saying.

Kind of very, very resonant and kind of very inspiring too.

The kind of invitation, I think as you sort of articulated it early on, the, the, the courage to speak sort of in the, kind of the, the horse race of competing interests.

The courage to speak somehow kind of nosed ahead of the fear to hide, or the fear that kid keeps hiding and that, you know, just even that, that kind of idea feels, um, feels kind of really important actually for, for very important for me to hear and important for others to hear too.

You know, to kind of, I guess I was gonna say do the work, but maybe that's the, the thing actually just to kind of, to trust in the idea that actually, you know, the time for courage, uh, you know, will, will call, will call through, and that opportunity does exist.

And seeking the courage to speak out is important.

Well, I think that the recognition of one's mortality, um, has a, has a role to play in this.

I see a lot of people around me who, are so afraid of their mortality, that the focus becomes on an extreme kind of living better, which is, um, which, which, which ends up with very extreme views of food.

Now we live in an extreme culture of very bad food anyway, but, but somebody once said that the alchemists, confus.

outer led, um, with sort of the inner led of the, the pursuit was not to actually create gold, but to purify themselves.

I, I, and our culture has this, this whole technology powered idea of understanding the metrics of a better life.

And we get lost in the metrics and become stressed about the metrics , as opposed to, leading from a place of feeling, how, how do I actually feel What is good for me, let alone what the, what, what the metric says.

I'm, I am not just part of big data.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I am, I am more than my 10,000 steps or my sort of eight hours sleep.

Doesn't that drive you crazy?

In fact, I feel more comfortable with nine hours sleep

Exactly.

Exactly.

on a really trivial note.

In preparation for, so, so we, we had a, an agreement we would meet at 10:30, and you kindly sent an, an email yesterday with a link and so forth.

So, so there was an anticipation, right?

I'm going to be in the, um, I'm gonna have a conversation with Ben and I really like his blog and, oh, I've already heard myself once and there was a le an aspect of me that got, um, nervous in so focused but also nervous.

And I prepared myself some drinks just before so that I, if I got thirsty, would have something to drink.

And I noticed on walking back up from my kitchen that I was so nervous, I was spilling my drink down my trousers,

And I decided that I needed to breathe for a moment and that I would.

Turn up anyway.

And, um, that I would have compassion with that aspect of myself that was feeling it had to perform and that it could say bad things or wrong things and that it would be judged for what it would say.

And so those things are all here as well, and they're very welcome.

So we're all having a conversation with you, but I, by, by having that compassion, they've also quietened down and they've allowed me to speak to you from a different place.

Can I read you, uh, the email that you sent me after our last conversation?

Um, so on, on reflection.

Uh, I regret that I didn't take the bait at the right moment to segue into my writing, which is before all else what I return to when I dunno which way to go and need to reconnect with the source.

What happened was that I ended up too carefully and unnecessarily filtering and centering myself for various audiences, including co-founders, investors, et cetera.

This hiding aspect is something I thought I'd outgrown, but here it is once more in action.

I wouldn't have wanted to say much, but simply that my writing is my refuge, my place of processing and reconnecting with my inner journey.

Maybe we have an opportunity to make up for it, which is what we're doing now.

Uh, and, um, if I had the opportunity to do it again, this is the thing I would want to do differently.

And then you go offer a, a quote, great quote by Wendell Berry.

Uh, on that note by the way, and motivation for every entrepreneur out there, it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work.

And that when we no longer know which way to go, we've come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings

What?

I, no, I didn't go back to that email in our conversation, but, um, it couldn't be more true.

Did I write that?

Yes, you did

Thank you so much for bringing that full circle because our entire conversation has been precisely about.

Really appreciate your attention to that, that, that aspect, which strikes me as both particular and universal.

There, there are aspects in that that probably affect most people, and yet then the individual expression is so, so different.

Yeah.

I mean, a a, absolutely.

I think, you know, everything that we're talking about affects.

All people went, you know, to varying degrees of consciousness.

The am I turning up?

Am I in my own way?

Am I hiding?

Am I not hiding?

And also, I really like the, the, the Wendell Berry quote, it sort of as a sort of summarizer for that, uh, you know, was hugely resonant for me today.

In fact, what I was journaling about this morning was actually exactly what that speaks to as I thought it was very kind.

And I'd only read that email after I.

Done my journaling this morning, but that's exactly, almost exactly what I was writing about, you know, which we touched on at the beginning, you know, in a way the response to the question, what do you do actually, you know, maybe the, maybe the, actually the response that I want is that I don't know what I do.

You know, I don't know what I do, I don't know, you know, and it's actually where that goes and or you know, and I dunno what I do and I dunno, kind of where I fit and I dunno what my role is and I dunno what my work is and I don't have a job.

And all of those, those sorts of things.

And it kind of really felt to me that actually what the, the Wendell Berry quote as a sort of part of the email that you wrote for it was like, when I read it.

So I'd done my journal this morning.

I then came home and I was, you know, saying, kind of preparing for the conversation was looking back over and thought, oh, Marcus sent me a note after the last one, didn't.

He must check what that note was.

And it was like, oh wow, look, that's what it is.

For me, it takes me back to what you said earlier about a discomfort when you are asked, what do you do?

And it suddenly struck me that maybe it's worth paying attention to the discomfort.

As opposed to finding a better answer that's going to comfort us, maybe the discomfort is ta saying quite a lot, and because it could, it could be seen as something negative.

Ben is uncomfortable talking about what he does, but it could also be that Ben's discomfort actually expresses a much wider philosophy that generally goes unexplored, which is that we reduce our being to a tiny fragment of what we do.

And maybe Ben just wants to turn up open to what is un uninformed by things that he thought yesterday.

He wants to be open to what is now.

And so that discomfort actually turns around.

You can turn it on its head and it becomes an openness to things as they are, as opposed to how you saw them yesterday.

Yeah.

I mean that is, that is a really powerful insight.

Cuz actually what I was then articulating as I went through my journaling is that, in, in said, in, in, in kind of other words, it's like, actually, yeah, it's not about the, the story that I think I should have.

It's not about the identity that I think I should have.

It's not about the limiting idea of those things.

It's about a kind of a wish, a will to kind of step into the kind of much bigger place, which I think in many ways is, is what you are also referencing, articulating, expressing through this thing around, through, through the source and all of the ways the source inspires you to turn up all the ways the source inspires you to contribute and create.

Uh, absolutely.

uh, it is such a shame that we seem to have hit, hit, hit, hit the, the, the end of the all allotted time.

Um, um, but, but it's, um, then, then again, boundaries create flow and, um, uh, limitations allow for creativity.

Indeed.

So, yes, Marcus, thank you.

Thank you for continuing the conversation.

Well, I, I actually, you, you, you are the role model.

Thank you for making it possible.

I really, really enjoyed this.

Thank you for the meeting.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Marcus.

As much as I enjoyed having it.

I went into that really without a clear structure or set of questions or clear idea about where we would go and probably broke all the podcasting rules in terms of be clear about one thing you want people to take away from this.

Didn't really get there, but I hope you found the conversation as nourishing and as inspiring as I did.

Uh, as ever, if you like this, if you like the conversation, you think other people would benefit from it, please feel free to share.

Uh, and also if you like what we're doing on Peripheral Thinking, what would really help us is if to help us play the the algorithm game, please subscribe to these on your usual podcast channels.

Please leave a review.

Tell us what you think.

This is what we need more of.

This will help us get the message out there.