All Episodes
Previous Next
April 24, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:24:31
Terry Boardman
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
I love Denny Paul.
Come and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Denny Paul.
And there's another time subscribe with me.
I love Denny Paul.
Welcome to the Denny Paul with me, James Denny Paul.
I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I'm really, really looking forward to this one with Terry Boardman.
And I apologize in advance if the sound quality is crap out.
I'm recording it in a different room and the internet's not perfect, but I'm hoping that we get enough of Terry's words of wisdom.
Terry comes highly recommended.
Recommended by Alex Thompson, no less.
Alex Thompson is one of the most The cleverest people I think I've done a podcast with.
And if he rates Terry's intellect, then Terry must be quite... not just intellect, but background knowledge.
So, Terry, welcome to the podcast.
Thank you, James.
Before I start asking you crazy questions, which I'm going to, and by the end I'm hoping you're going to solve the secrets of the universe and tell us exactly what's going wrong, but can you just tell me a bit about yourself, a bit about your background and your education and how you know so much stuff?
Well, I was born in Newport, Gwent, and from the age of three until university at 18 I was brought up in Chester, which of course is an ancient Roman city.
And in Chester, in the teenage years, I went to Chester City Grammar, which was a kind of a In those days, this was in the 60s, it was one of those grammar schools which fancied itself as a boarding school, a public school, and so it was very much, if you've seen the movie If by Lindsay Anderson in, I think it was 1968, then our school was not much worse than that.
It was the same kind of thing.
A lot of corporal punishment.
And at that school, one of the effects, for example, there were several effects for me attending that school for what, six years, was that it was good in its English education.
So I got a lot of, I was taught to read and write well.
Allies text and so on.
And that stood me in good stead for my later career in writing and translating.
The history is very boring.
I was very interested in history already at that time.
And the school also was good in the sense that it sent us, this was 1964 already, it sent me on my first trip abroad, which was to Austria, a school trip.
It was rather unusual for a provincial grammar school in those days.
But it was extremely heavy on corporal punishments, as I've said, and that was one of the things that put me off organized religion, because we used to have, for example, prayers and hymns every morning, and then after that the head prefect would call all the boys who were to report to the prefect's room at break for being slippered.
So that you would then wait outside the prefect's room and get six of the best, and then you would go to the teachers, back to your classroom, and then you would get beaten by the master for being late for class.
So, you know, six years of that, or at least, what, five years until O-Levels.
The hypocrisy of that was something that put me off Christianity for quite a few years.
I came back to Christianity later on.
I went to university then to study history at Manchester.
And then after Manchester, after my degree, I then went to Japan to study, sorry, to teach English.
And I was there for seven years and came back in 1981.
And my girlfriend, now my wife, lived in London for three years.
And then we moved here to Stourbridge in the West Midlands, where we embarked on a four-year full-time training in the art of Eurythmy, which is a kind of art of movement.
And then after that we went back to Japan for three years, where again we worked there as Eurythmists and translators.
our teachers and then we came back again to Starbridge.
By this time we had a son, we have one son, he's now 34 and we've been living in Starbridge here since 1994 and for a number of years I taught English he's now 34 and we've been living in Starbridge here since And for a number of years, I, for a number of years, I taught, I taught English.
And then since 2005, I've been freelance and I've been translating and writing throughout this period.
So this, these are my, my main jobs at the moment.
I, I work mainly as a translator for working for two, two magazines.
One of them is this quarterly, which is called New View Magazine.
That's an English magazine and the other is a Swiss Swiss magazine called the present age.
That's a monthly and So that's that's basically what I do and then during that time since I've been self-employed I've done a lot of lectures both in this country and abroad in various countries and Right.
So in a nutshell, that's my career to date, as it were.
Right.
But none of that really captures just how deeply imbued you are in all manner of esoterica stuff.
But I mean, before this podcast, I checked out one of your lectures, I think the three biggest threats of the 21st century, something like that.
And actually, You raised something not to do with the three main problems facing us in the 21st century, although it was quite prescient given that you recorded it in 2019, and I think you fingered the main problems as being technocracy or transhumanism, war, possibly nuclear war, and environmentalism, and I think you'll agree
Everyone will agree that these are the three things which are really coming to a head in 2020.
But you mentioned something and I'm almost tempted to start there because it's so fascinating and it aligns with something I've often wondered about, which is this.
First of all, where are you on Christianity now?
Are you a practicing Christian?
Believing Christian?
What?
Right, well, my return to Christianity, if I could put it that way, came at the end, really, of my seven years in Japan.
Because after those seven years in Japan, and experiencing, like a lot of people of my generation, you know, I had spiritual urges at the end of my teens and in my early 20s, The first, when I went to Japan, I first looked to Buddhism.
And so I experienced Buddhism.
That was a Zen Buddhist tradition.
And also I explored Shintoism in Japan and also some Taoism to a certain extent.
But at the end of that period, one thing I noticed that even in Japanese culture, and there are only 1% of Christians in Japan in the total population.
It's only small compared to, say, Korea, where it's about a quarter of the Korean population are Christian.
But what I noticed coming through even the popular media was the theme of what you could call crucifixion and resurrection, James.
And this was coming through almost also in very modern contexts, films, TV dramas and the rest of it.
And it was clearly recognizable as a crucifixion resurrection impulse.
This and other things, such as the whole question of reincarnation, for example, raised in me, by the time I left Japan, it raised really three questions in me.
One was, what is Christianity?
Because I realized that in school, in England, I rejected, as so many of my generation had, I rejected Christianity without really understanding it.
Yes.
As a result, as I've said, of my experiences at school really, I hadn't met any, shall we say, genuine representatives of the Christian tradition.
That had just been my fate up to the age of, you know, by the time I left England.
Certainly not at school.
And so that question, What is Christianity was one big question I had, and secondly was what is natural science?
Because I realized in trying to bridge these two cultures, I mean you're living there for seven years, you know, I mean all kinds of stresses and tensions and problems had arisen in me, and I've been, because I had such an interest in history, in trying to understand what is the relationship between England and Japan, between East and West, how can these two very different cultures bridge to each other?
And And one thing that came up very strongly was the question of reincarnation, because in Japan it still, of course, lives from the Buddhist background.
Again, it's almost taken as read within the context of popular culture, again, in TV dramas, movies, and so on.
That was the question.
What happened to reincarnation in the West?
Why?
I was vaguely aware, for example, that there had been an understanding of reincarnation, of transmigration in Celtic culture, but what happened to that in the early Christian centuries, you see?
So that was a question I had.
And then the third, well those are the three questions really, Christianity, what is Christianity?
What is natural science?
Why didn't the East develop natural science in the way that the West did?
And thirdly, what happened to reincarnation in the West?
And I came back to the West in 81 with those three questions, and almost immediately, in London, I came across the work of Rudolf Steiner.
And I'd met a number of spiritual, or rather I'd come across the work of a number of spiritual teachers in Japan, as I've said, and met A Daoist teacher and a Buddhist teacher, but I hadn't really found satisfactory answers that could bridge those questions, you see.
The answers that I'd been given had been essentially, well, along the lines of very politely expressed, mind you, but always along the lines of, well, your culture is a mistake.
Your Western culture is a historical mistake.
You have to come to where we are.
You have to come, as it were, back to where we are from this mistake that you've made in Christianity.
And I, already in Japan, I just knew that, in my bones, I just felt that that wasn't right.
So then when I came back with these three questions, that's when I came across the ideas of Rudolf Steiner.
And very quickly I noticed that he, compared to other esoteric teachers like Gurdjieff and others, was left out, was omitted from general, shall we say, New Age or alternative discussion of spirituality.
And I quickly realised that the reason for this is because his approach to esotericism is rooted in Christianity.
So that was the reason, you see.
That's where, for example, people like Gurdjieff and Blavatsky are welcome, so to speak, but Steiner is just quietly left aside because the intellectual classes of the West, since over the last hundred years, basically they feel they've left Christianity at the wayside and they don't wish to go there.
Yes.
Yeah?
So that's where I gained understanding of these three questions and I was able, I was helped to understand, get to the answers to the three questions I'd sought the answers to.
What is Christianity?
What is Natural Science?
And what is Reincarnation or the Western approach to Reincarnation?
Good.
So now you're going to tell me in two sentences Shall we deal with the first one?
What is Christianity?
Right, what is Christianity?
Well, Christianity is the incarnation of the Solar Logos in the human being, Jesus Christ, at the baptism in the Jordan.
That's how I see it.
Christianity is not the birth of God from the Virgin Mary, a human being.
The Christ was incarnated at the baptism in the Jordan.
So in other words, the event at the age of 30 that Jesus underwent when he met John the Baptist.
And so then you have three years when the Solar Logos, the Word, Christ, is incarnated in the human being Jesus.
And Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus, then goes about in the Holy Land for those three years and then undergoes the events of Golgotha, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection and the Ascension.
Now, I recognize that, you know, that is already there from a dogmatic Christian point of view.
The traditional teachings of the Church is already heresy because they would say, well, That Christ was born of Mary, and that's there in the Creed already, the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.
Yeah.
But this, how can I say?
There were many, many disputes, as I'm sure you're aware, particularly in those four centuries, when the early Christian beliefs of the Church were put together.
And one thing that, for example, Steiner helped me to understand is that in the ancient times, before Christ for example, that human beings in a certain sense weren't really thinking for themselves.
The spiritual world, the gods and the goddesses and the spirits and so on, were thinking through them.
But it was only gradually that human beings, let's just restrict our conversation to the Western world for the moment, although I could speak about Japan, The human beings only gradually became individuals.
And I think you can see that quite clearly, for example, in the world of art, how the art of Egypt and then of Greece is portrayed, the sculpture, for example.
And then you come into Rome and you begin to see in the painting and the sculpture of Rome how an individual, how a personality is there.
And as the human beings came, as it were, more down to earth and became more individualized, They actually lost real insight, clairvoyant insight, spiritual insight, into the spiritual world.
So they sort of lost one thing and gained another.
They learned how to think for themselves, but they lost an actual real spiritual vision.
So what you then see in the early Christian centuries is they try to understand the Christian revelation, In pre-Christian terms, for example in Gnostic terms, or they try to understand it in these new intellectual capacities they have, and that's what leads to all the theological disputes and arguments about the nature of God and the nature of the Trinity and so on and so forth.
And of course it also leads to the heresies and the anathemas and the damnations and so on and so forth.
But the view that Steiner brings forward, that Christ incarnates at the baptism and not in the birth of Jesus 30 years earlier, makes more sense to me, and has made more sense to me.
And I sense that there's a certain residual sensing, if you will, still of that in the Orthodox tradition, in the way, in the respect which they pay to the Epiphany and to the Baptism, to the events of the Epiphany and the Baptism, far more than we do in Western Europe, where of course we're very much more focused on Christmas.
Which is the birth of the Jesus child, in a sense.
In that sense, I think that's an important thing.
But for me then, that Jesus Christ was not born as a human being, but was incarnated, the Christ is the solar being of our universe, of our solar system, incarnates in Jesus at the age of 30.
So it's the incarnation of a spiritual being for those three years.
So before then, the first 30 years of his life, he was just a human, just like the rest of us.
I mean, you know, absolutely human.
Well, I wouldn't say he was just like the rest of us, James, in the sense that, in a sense, the whole history of the Jewish people since Abraham was necessarily, was preparing a vessel.
a human vessel.
And if you consider that we're talking here about the creative logos, if you think of the prologue of Saint John, the creative logos is going to enter into a human being.
What was necessary for the creative logos to enter into A human being, a man in this case, yeah?
An enormous preparation was needed for that.
And the whole history of the Jewish people was in fact needed for that.
And I think one can see something of this when you look at the bloodlines which you see in the Gospels.
The two bloodlines which come down to eventually the birth of Jesus.
So, that's quite a remarkable thing in itself.
The human being Jesus already has a tremendous preparation behind him.
So, what are the two bloodlines?
Well, the bloodline is the kingly bloodline and the priestly bloodline.
And that goes, of course, back very far in the history of the Jewish people.
Yeah.
And, yeah.
Yeah, I mean...
Sorry, go ahead.
No, I'm immersed in the Old Testament at the moment and one of the things one becomes very conscious of throughout is it's obsessed with bloodlines, genealogy, and also with God favoring certain races.
Well, I mean his chosen people, the children of Israel or whatever.
And really being quite happy to wipe out any other, you know, sort of rival tribes or ones he considers polluting or whatever.
Which is quite odd reading in the 21st century where we've all been taught to think of ourselves as equal and that God is pure love and etc.
Can you tell me a bit about that?
Can you make sense of that?
Certainly.
Let me start in perhaps a bit of a strange place, James.
One of the first experiences I had when I was in Japan in the first, say, two years.
I travelled a lot around Japan.
I learned fairly conversational Japanese quite quickly.
Travelled a lot around the country and by myself.
Places where there weren't any other foreigners.
Of course, had to speak Japanese.
Met lots of Ordinary Japanese people, all kinds of people, taxi drivers, fishermen, maths professors, you name it, yeah?
In bars and such places and all over the place.
And one of the things I very quickly noticed was that they would say to me things like this, whatever their educational level, they would say questions like this.
What do you Westerners think about such and such?
We Japanese think such and such.
And as a 21-year-old, I'm sure you could appreciate this, as a 21-year-old Englishman, I would invariably answer like this.
Well, I can't speak for the other 55 million English people, but I think this, right?
Now, James, it took me about, and maybe I was slow, but it took me about two years for that penny to drop, that they truly believed and felt that they were a collective being, that they belonged to a collective entity, the Japanese people.
And we think, we Japanese, this was so often prefaced their statements.
And then I also, that made me then realize, well, I as an English person, then I suddenly realized, why do we write I with a capital letter in English?
No other Europeans do that.
We're the only people in Europe who write the first person singular with a capital letter.
I didn't know that.
Capital I. Is that so?
Yeah, we are.
Yes.
Yeah.
Check it out.
It really is.
Why is that?
Yeah.
And it is because I would argue, and after all, we are an I-land, you know, an island.
It is that this country is the most individualistic of a very individualistic continent.
It's the most individualistic part of an individualistic continent or culture, European culture.
And so if you go back far enough, you see gradually... I mean, James, in Japan, you can see the whole development from ancient tribal times.
I visited, for example, ant shrines, James, where there were no buildings at all.
You simply went into like a holy precinct.
And there were ants there, ants' nests there, and the place was sacred to the god of the ants.
I mean, that's pretty ancient stuff, you see.
And then there was something from there, and then every other stage of human religious experience, really, because obviously then when you go on to Shinto, you've got another development.
The god, the tutelary god of a particular village, for example, of human, group of human beings, and who lives up on the mountain above the human, the village, and then you come to Buddhism, which is a much more internal thing, and so on, and then you come right up to modern Japanese professors who have a, you know, your normal Western modernist intellectual way of thinking and lifestyle.
So all, all of these could be viewed, and this, and still alive there, And this made me realize that gradually, this is before I knew anything about Steiner, this made me realize that the human story is one of a movement from the collective through time to the individual.
And this of course is why we in the 21st century, as you said earlier, find it so hard to read the Old Testament and we see these genocides.
We read of these genocides, what the Israelites did to the Canaanites and so on.
And this is because in those days, tribal peoples thought of themselves as collective groups.
That the further back in time you go, the more The more collective, the closer in a certain sense to animal existence they were.
And they lived with their gods and they did what their gods said.
And their gods behaved to them sometimes like, well, as we see in the Old Testament, like naughty children.
And if the children behaved badly, well, then they were punished accordingly, you know.
That's how it made sense to me, and you can gradually see that from that time, as we come from the East to the West, that in Western culture, and again there's a difference here between even Eastern Europe to Western Europe, that we come down to, by the time of the Reformation and up to today, a culture of extreme individualism.
And if you go over to America, then of course that's even more accentuated.
So that's how I sort of make sense of that.
It's a development over 5,000 years at least of this move from of collectives to the culture of the individual.
Yes, but so how can we make sense of that?
I mean given that the thinking, the whole sort of world of the Old Testament is so far removed from us Emotionally and intellectually and culturally.
And yet we look to those books for guidance on how to live our lives.
How does that work?
Well, I mean, first of all, For myself, in my own spiritual life, I must admit I don't look to the Old Testament so much for guidance in how to live my life.
Not even Proverbs and the Psalms?
Because I find them very, very helpful and relevant.
Yeah, they're moving and we could also appreciate them as works of art, certainly.
But for me, it's very much more the New Testament that I look to.
Does the New Testament make sense of the Old, though?
I mean, don't they work symbiotically?
Well, in the sense that, you know, that the Old Testament was, as I said, this preparation for the incarnation of Christ in Jesus.
And then the collectivist, if you will, mentality that was there in the ancient peoples of the Near East, then moves into the next phase with the Greco-Roman culture of the Mediterranean, which then becomes Christianized.
And then we see, of course, Christ speaking of how it's necessary to cut the connection with the blood and with the family and really to find yourself as an individual and follow him in that basis.
Right.
I see.
So Christ is, in a way, the transition from the collective to the individual.
Well, not only is he, I would say, the collective, the transition, I mean, he is He's the one who has accompanied us throughout this whole process.
I mean, one can even see how, for example, the God who is called in the Old Testament Yahweh, or what we call Jehovah, speaks to representatives of the ancient Israelite and Jewish people in different ways.
And you can see how this being comes closer and closer to the human being, first as it were out in the elements, or in the burning bush, and then the voice within.
You know, it comes closer and closer into the human being, and then when it's come to the point where it speaks to the human being within, right within the human being, then we see that Christ incarnates in Jesus 2,000 years ago.
And so that is a process whereby that humanity, I would say that humanity itself, James, has actually incarnated deeper and deeper into Earth life, into material existence, rather in the way that the little child does.
The little child recapitulates this whole process, after all, from birth and infancy to, for example, teenage years.
So by the time you get to the teenager, the little child is now somebody who, you know, shuffles around and looks at his feet and the voice has dropped and he only thinks about what's between his legs and everything's become rather gross, yeah?
The little child who was happy and sun-like and skipping and smiling and open-minded and so on has, by the age of 15 and 16, really fallen to earth.
In a very, very, almost literally you could say.
Yeah.
And well, physically, I mean, we know that anatomically, physiologically.
So the child, the individual child recapitulates this colossal, this colossal historical process.
And Christ has accompanied us through that entire process.
But then comes the crucial point where If that process goes on falling, so to speak, into matter, and doesn't go through a resurrection, then we as humanity are going to essentially fall into the depths.
We're going to fall into the abyss.
And that's where we are as a culture right now.
And that, I think, is the significance of the 21st century.
That after 21 centuries of Christianity, humanity is now at the point, rather like the human being in its 21st year, where we've left home, so to speak.
We've left behind the traditional authorities.
We've left behind our peer groups.
We're perhaps all alone in the big city.
We're trying to find our way in the world.
We're trying to become responsible.
We're trying to take responsibility for our lives.
But it's a very dangerous time.
And if we're not careful, we fall even deeper than we did at puberty.
We can fall into drugs or crime or the worst, suicide.
Around 21 is a very difficult time, and that's the real ego time for the human being, to find himself or herself.
And that, I feel, is where humanity is at the moment.
And Christ came 2000 years ago, at that point, to provide the model, as it were, for the whole of humanity, to give the whole of humanity, the upsurge to resurrect.
So that we don't carry on falling down into matter, which we had in all the centuries before he came.
Right.
Of course, you could argue that we continued falling for another, what, let's say 1900 years until the Industrial Revolution.
But he came, as it were, a little ahead of time to give us the seed which would enable us, through him, to resurrect.
Right.
That's how I see the whole process of evolution, if you will.
Yes, okay.
So we've strayed from God.
We sort of think we've, I mean, largely, I think, abandoned God.
Yeah, yeah.
And we can all see that this is not going to end well.
Yeah.
Many of us can, but others not yet.
Yeah I was, because some of the things you say inevitably will be seen by the establishment church as heretical.
Certainly.
But you've, I mean the reason I'm sort of taking your view seriously apart from everything else is that I've listened to you talking about the early The early church and the decisions made I think in the 9th century by the various councils sort of decreeing which way the religion would go.
And that makes sense to me.
That makes sense that this is the work of men not God.
And there's no reason to suppose that people in the 9th century were any less any less flawed and self-interested than, say, the modern clerisy or the scientific curia, as you call them.
So tell us a bit about what happened in the 9th century.
Right, well, in the 9th century, this was the specific event here that Rudolf Steiner drew attention to.
was the 8th, what's called the 8th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople.
So it took place in Constantinople, in Hagia Sophia itself, in the year 869-870, over the winter there.
Started at the end of 869 and finished early 870.
And it actually was, the purpose of that council, in a sense James, was political.
Because the Emperor of Constantinople was having a difficult political He had political difficulties at that time, not least with the Patriarch, who was called Photios, or Photias, Photios in Greek.
And Photios was a very, very powerful intellect, a very extremely knowledgeable and well-educated man.
He hadn't even been particularly religious, he'd been fast-tracked to the position of Patriarch, but he was tremendously knowledgeable.
And as Patriarch, he became a bit of a problem for the Emperor at the time.
And the Emperor felt that he had to call on the rivals, because Rome was already a rival at that time to Byzantium, to Constantinople, And so a council was called, and the purpose of the council was to anathematize, was to condemn Photios, in effect, to push him out of the church in the East.
And they invited over representatives from the church in Rome to help them to do this.
And for this reason it's often called the Antiphotean Council.
And by the way, I should mention that because Photios is so highly regarded within the Orthodox tradition, this particular council is not even recognized by the Orthodox tradition.
It's not even included in the list of councils by that, but it still is in the Roman Catholic tradition.
And into this council was slipped a particular canon, the church law.
So at the end of the council they then enunciate the various new laws and dogmas and anathemas that have been passed.
And they slipped in a particular dogma there, at which they accused Photios of having taught a particular doctrine called the Doctrine of the Twin Souls.
And this is not really right, because Photios didn't believe in this doctrine himself.
He simply discussed it in order to, in effect, criticize it.
It wasn't that he firmly believed in this doctrine, but he discussed it.
And because he discussed it, because he brought it forward and raised it, this became, for his opponents, an excuse to anathematize him.
Now, what was this doctrine?
Well, these twin souls was what you might call the very last remnant of the old Greek teaching of the threefold nature of the human being.
That is, πνεύμα, ψυχή, σωμα, spirit, soul, and body.
So the human being is a trichotomy of spirit, soul, and body.
Yeah, that was the old Greek teaching going back to Plato and Aristotle's time.
What's the difference between a spirit and a soul?
Right, well, okay, I'm coming to that.
Okay, good.
The spirit is that which enables you, that's the, in effect, the thought world through which you can communicate with the divine.
The soul world is that which we share with the animals, because animals like us can feel, they can have emotions, if you will.
And then, of course, we have the body, the soma.
Now, the soul world, because it's called the twin souls, because in this soul world, you can, for example, in English, we can say, I feel hungry, I feel ill.
In other words, our feelings can look to our bodies, to our inner processes, our inner physiological processes.
Or we can say, I feel that's not right.
I don't feel good about this.
I feel there's something wrong with that.
When you're not looking at the inner physiological process of the body, you're looking at something intuitive, moral, ethical.
And what that meant was, by that time in the 9th century, the feeling for the pneuma, P-N-E-U-M-A, the English In English we use, for example, the word pneumatic, breath, spirit.
That had been lost to the point where already most Christians really only were feeling, well, I'm a dichotomy, I'm a being of body and soul.
Can I just pause you there?
Does the word pneumonous come from that as well?
No, numinous, that's another root.
Numen.
Yeah, that's a different route from Pnefma.
So, but this council had the effect where the church put a kind of imprimatur, the church put a fixed, made it a fixed dogma that the human being has only one soul and that this made it a fixed dogma that the human being has only one soul and that this one soul has certain what That's all they said.
We have one soul and it has certain rational and intellectual capacities.
They didn't speak any longer about the Spirit.
And that's why from that time on, within the Christian world, particularly here in the West, you hear again and again this dichotomy referred to, this twofold being of human being, body and soul, body and soul.
And that still crops up in advertisements even.
It's become part of the language.
And Steiner's point was really to highlight this and show that this is the point where Western culture loses its relationship with the individual spirit.
Because the Church basically said, what the Church was saying in this reduction of a trichotomy to a dichotomy from three to two nature of the human being, was that you cannot find your way to God through your own thinking spirit, your own meditative contemplative spirit.
You must rely on the dogmas and teachings of the authorities of the church.
Right.
In other words, the priestly class.
And that, of course, then goes on right through the Middle Ages and we see all the persecutions and the heresies that result from that.
And then finally, however, that wasn't, although that had happened in the 9th century, that knowledge, that Still was there, James, in the underground.
It was never entirely lost in the underground of the Christian world.
And so you see in these underground streams of the Christian world this knowledge that the human being as an individual spirit continue on throughout the Christian centuries of the Middle Ages, and then of course it bursts out finally in the Reformation.
That I can find, I am free to find my own way to God.
I am free to interpret the Word of God for myself.
I do not need to rely on the priest interpreting it for me.
I mean, after all, the Catholic Church didn't even allow the people to read the Bible for themselves.
It was all in Latin.
The Mass was in Latin.
So the Reformation was really revolutionary in that it restored Christianity to its pre-late 19th century system, in a way.
Pre-9th century, yeah.
Except, James, unfortunately, I mean it did and it didn't.
What it did do was it gave this tremendous, what Luther did and those who came with him and after him, it gave to Christianity this tremendous impulse to individual freedom and individual communion with God.
However, What it didn't really do was it basically carried on the teaching.
It didn't recognize what had happened in the 9th century.
And the reason why, even in the Protestant world, people still talk about body and soul is because the Protestants took on some of those teachings of the Catholic Church councils.
They didn't, for example, say, well, they didn't understand what had happened at the Council of 869.
869-870.
And they didn't change it.
They didn't say, well, actually, the dichotomy was, sorry, the trichotomy was abolished there, or removed, and we became a dichotomy.
But no, actually, we are a trichotomy.
No, they continue to speak about body and soul.
And that's a kind of tragedy, really, that that was lost sight of at the Reformation.
And still goes on to today.
And one of Rudolf Steiner's main efforts was to try to bring back a sense for this threefold nature of this Trinitarian picture of the human being.
Yes.
I was going to shut the doors.
blowing in the wind is really annoying me.
If not you.
But before we move on, have you got a kind of analogy that can help me better understand these three things, the soul, particularly the soul and the spirit?
Because I'm still not quite there.
I can't visualize them.
Right, okay.
Well, I'm sure you can visualize and appreciate that, for example, we can share our feeling life with the animals.
Yeah.
We can feel happy and sad.
We can feel hungry or thirsty.
All these things that we regard as our feeling life.
And that feeling life is very particular to you yourself.
It's entirely It's entirely particular to you, James.
So you and I could look at a painting or whatever it might be, or we might go to a party or whatever, and it's the same outer experience, but we might have entirely different feeling, experiences, reactions to that, right?
Yes.
But if you want to investigate something in the spiritual world, or in the spiritual life, or in the scientific life, in the academic life, the intellectual life, then we need to share, we need to rise in our world of thought.
And share that world of thought, and we can only do that if we share the world of thought.
And it's that world of thought, the world of thinking, which enables us to understand the world.
And you could look at it in a certain sense as the world of thought as the, to say it crudely, the anteroom or the lobby, if you like, the lowest part of the spiritual world per se.
But it's that through which we can begin to rise into the spiritual world, per se.
And that, I feel, is the essential difference between that and the more inner, personal, enclosed world of our feelings.
Okay.
So, to be clear.
Does that make it a bit clearer?
Yes.
So, the feeling world is what?
That's the soul?
Yeah.
And the thinking world is?
Is the spirit.
This is the spirit.
Okay.
Yeah.
Now I'm world of the spirit.
Yeah.
I'm with you now.
So, so when scientists, when scientists try to understand the problem, they have to do that by understanding it.
Um, you know, they can't allow themselves to be affected by their personal feelings.
The question is what is the, what is the truth about this issue?
And similarly with, with theologians or with people who are approaching a spiritual question, They have to look at it in terms of that which is beyond us.
It's something we share with all human beings, so to speak, potentially.
Yes.
And it's in that realm where we raise ourselves to the spirit.
Yes, I'm with you.
Your point about scientists, I think Charles Darwin said that a scientist must have a heart of ice.
In other words, that you must keep emotions out of it.
You must be rigorous in your research.
Yes, but Steiner would not have agreed with that, because he saw that what had happened from the 17th century onwards, from the time of Francis Bacon,
And of course, this is very, very deep-rooted in our English culture, is precisely this, that there was a kind of almost, as you say, an ice-cold excision of the inner life of the human being from the outer objective world of nature, so to speak.
And when one looks at nature, one has to, as it were, leave your inner life entirely out of it.
Steiner would say, no, that's not the case.
And he, for example, pointed very often to the difference between, say, Goethe, Wolfgang Goethe, in his scientific work, and Isaac Newton in his scientific work, or Francis Bacon, both of them in the 17th century, Goethe obviously in the 19th.
And you see with Goethe an attempt to bridge the inner world and the outer world.
And this is always Steiner's concern, to actually see, well, how is my inner world, which of course includes my soul life, related to the spiritual world?
How is the inner and the outer related, so that they don't remain two forever separate, completely separate worlds?
So you see, for example, how Goethe, in trying to understand, well, what is the nature of colour?
Or what is the nature of the plant?
What is the gestures of the plant world?
He would approach these outer phenomena in an almost contemplative, meditative manner.
And he would take those into himself, not only analyzing in an outer, dissecting way, but actually would really take a long time to meditate upon them.
And in this sense, seek to bridge the gap between the inner and the outer.
And then you're able to bring some sort of warmth, as it were, some human warmth from your heart to your appreciation of nature.
And Steiner was very concerned that this is what has to happen in the world of science.
So he really felt that the arts need to become more scientific and science need to become more artistic.
The feeling life has to become more into the sciences and the more object cool objectivity has to go more into the arts.
So that they both begin to speak to each other like this and don't remain forever two separate, completely separate worlds.
Right.
Can we take a step back a bit?
I'm on a mission to be a good Christian but one of the problems I have is that I don't know exactly where to look because I look at the churches, I look at the Church of England, you know, I look at Look at the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and I think he's actually working for Satan.
I think the same thing of the current Pope, and actually quite a few Popes have been guilty of that.
I look at some of the dogma of the Catholic Church and I think, nah, that doesn't strike me as... Then I look east and I see I think I see more spirituality in the Eastern tradition than I do, more connection with the Numenus.
I read my Bible and I hear what you say about the New Testament versus the Old Testament, but how do we find, where do we look for the truth?
What do we need to do, in your opinion?
Where do we go?
Well, as I said, that question, what is Christianity?
How can I understand Christianity?
I can only say that I was given the greatest help in understanding the Gospels through the various lectures and books that Steiner wrote and gave about them.
He opened my eyes to remarkable things in relation to the Gospels that I'd simply not seen before.
So that's been a tremendous help to me, but I can appreciate that other people will find their own paths.
But when I read and meditate upon those, as I've been doing for what, nigh on 40 years now, and then I look at the world and current events, then it seems to me that it's very much reflected in what I find there.
Before I move on to the main event, the thing I was dying to ask you about ever since I've watched you talking about it, Alex mentioned that you can tell me a bit about Ephesians 6 and about What is the spiritual wickedness in High Places and who are these rulers of the darkness of this world?
Who does he mean by that?
What are Archons?
Are they anarchists or are they demons or what?
Again, I think we need to go back to this question of what happened in the first four centuries of the Christian era, culminating, as it were, where things again kind of get frozen by the Nicene Creed.
I'm particularly interested in the Nicene Creed because it was finally promulgated on my birthday.
Which also happens to be the birthday of Boris Johnson, by the way.
The 19th of June.
But anyway, so what happened there in those first centuries where, as I said, the Christian Church lost sight of the reality, I would argue, of the actual realities of the spiritual world.
In other words, it no longer could really grasp the actual realities and relationships of the beings of the spiritual world, whether these are the beings in that part of the spiritual world, which traditionally we call Hell, or of Heaven, both of them.
The beings of light and the beings of darkness, the beings who are seeking to help humanity and those who are seeking to help us in a different way by providing us with resistance and opposition.
Because in a way, that's what they're doing.
And we don't have freedom without those beings either, after all.
The beings of opposition, the beings of Satan, Lucifer, these beings are seeking... Sorry?
This is the nature of free will.
Yeah, exactly.
That we don't get to free will without the opposition from these beings.
And this is why God enables them to do what they do.
So, this meant then that the Church, however, St.
Paul still had an understanding of these beings of the hierarchy, of the heavenly hierarchies, and that knowledge was passed on from him through his pupils and then resurfaced centuries later in the writings of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius.
So these are supposed to stem from the teachings of Dionysus, a pupil of Saint Paul, and then they emerge in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius in his book On the Celestial Hierarchies.
So we see there the nine hierarchies arranged in three broad groups.
So again, it's very Trinitarian.
You've got three ranks, nine ranks, as it were, in three groups.
And there are names which are familiar to us, like Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones.
And then names which are not so familiar to us, perhaps, like Curiotatis, Dinamis, Exusiai.
Exusiai is the same as Elohim.
And then names more, that's the second hierarchy.
And then the third hierarchy are those beings which are more familiar to us, Archai, Archangels, Angels.
Those are the beings who are particularly concerned with us, with affecting our human existence.
Whereas the beings of the second hierarchy have more to do with the governorship, if you will, of the powers of nature.
And then the beings of the first hierarchy, who are closest to the Godhead, are those who are, as it were, into what's the word not mediating it's not such a good word but they're the ones who are really giving the whole uh impulses to the other two hierarchies so to speak from from the highest from the highest godhead yeah and they're also particularly this these this nine higher
this picture of the nine hierarchies comes ultimately from saint paul but it's coming it's coming from his pupils which is then passed on later and emerges in centuries later in the writings uh in the book in english called on the celestial hierarchy - Okay.
When was that written?
Now let me see, I rather think that was written in about, I may be wrong here, the 5th or the 6th century, but it was particularly taken up again in the 9th century.
So that's an interesting fact in itself, that the 9th century is a very critical point in the time of the development of Christianity.
Both for what I mentioned earlier, the end of the three-fold picture and the freezing into the two-fold picture, body and soul, but also that by the ninth century, you have very concretely the teachings of the nine celestial hierarchies, and they again continue to go through the Christian centuries thereafter.
Yes, I'd often wondered, well it doesn't preoccupy me, but occasionally I've wondered where we got the idea of cherubim and seraphim.
So Paul, who was Saul, Presumably, if we're to believe it's true, which I think it is.
I mean, I certainly believe in angels.
I know two people who've seen angels in the last year, both from listeners to this podcast.
But assuming that Paul got it right, presumably this must have been This understanding of the celestial world must have been transmitted to him by God or by divine forces of some form or another.
Yeah, I mean in his relationship with Christ himself.
What about, presumably there is an equivalent demonology, a sort of hierarchy of devilish forces.
Indeed.
Yes, this is very, very important to understand, because Steiner pointed out that one of the main tasks of humanity in our time is to fully comprehend these forces of opposition which stand against us.
Because as I said before, we're in this critical time in the 21st Christian century, where we are right up against these forces and they are struggling to... this is the key time where they have to prevent us from making the breakthrough into our future progressive evolution, if you will.
This is really the critical time.
This takes us into, although I don't know how much time we have, James, but this takes us into very other, you know, very significant areas about the nature of the 21st century and also what's happened over the last hundred years or so.
But if I may say, Steiner points out that there are three beings, in a sense, who frame the history of the last 5,000 years.
A key point here, a very important point here, is understanding the nature of the relationship between Lucifer and Ahriman, or Satan, as he's traditionally called.
Einstein used this Persian word, Ahriman, who in the Zoroastrian faith was the being of lies, the being of untruth, the being of darkness.
So Satan and Lucifer are completely different?
Yes.
Yeah, that's really important to understand.
These two beings are very different.
And if you look at how they are, you're studying the Old Testament, you said.
If you look at how they appear, or how they're referred to in the Old Testament, that's very, very important to do.
And to see how, for example, well, there's a certainly hint even in the names of these two beings.
As I'm sure you know, Lucifer literally means Lightbringer.
But what kind of light is it?
And then Satan, There's quite a difference between the word Satan in Hebrew and then Ha-Satan.
Satan meaning accuser or adversary, a bit like a prosecutor really.
And you'll find in the Old Testament that God appoints Satans Even angels can be a Satan, can be an accuser of humanity.
So God sometimes uses an angel to accuse the Israelites of certain things.
As you know, Constantly falling away from what God wants them to do.
So he sends his angels, sometimes as Satans, accusers.
But that's different from Hasatan, which means the Satan.
And the Satan is the being that we in the West call Satan, as it were, with a capital S. That is the being of darkness.
And Steiner is very clear that these two beings, it's absolutely vital that we understand that these two beings are completely different.
And the one being of Lucifer is that being which seeks to emancipate humans into a freedom which is entirely self-centered.
So that freedom is a freedom which existed in the pre-Christian era, which is an era which you can see in the Old Testament, very much so, where God creates the collective love, if you will, the collective law and the collective love which binds the Jewish, the Israelite people together, and not only them, by the way, but all the peoples of Asia.
We're bound by these blood relations, and blood relations are an early form of love.
Collective love.
And that collective love, love evolves.
And that collective love was one of the ways in which the spiritual world gave love, communicated love to us human beings.
It's an early form.
Sexuality belongs to that.
It's not the same as the personal love, which comes later, agape and so on.
but it's an early form of love.
And Lucifer, however, tries to emancipate people out of that collective form of love so that they will only go their own way They will turn away from the tribe, but in a selfish way.
In a self-centered kind of way.
And when they do that, Lucifer can capture them for himself.
And I think we can see in our modern society, James, a very good example of this.
In many people who I would say are secular atheist people, particularly in the realm of the arts.
The arts and philosophy.
These people are attracted particularly by pride.
And they're drawn by this Luciferic gesture of pride into the Luciferic realm.
Now the Satanic realm is completely different.
The Satanic realm is a realm, unlike the realm of Lucifer, Lucifer never denies the spirit.
Lucifer says, there is a spiritual world, it's my world, and you come with it into my world.
But the satanic world is the world where Satan tries to convince us there is no spiritual world.
There is only a world of matter, a world of calculation, a world of the five senses.
And that's the world of the temptation of the sciences.
The temptation of the scientist, the world of measure, number, and weight, and to get lost in that world.
And so the satanic impulse is to draw us.
There is no spiritual world.
You remain bound to the earth.
After death, nothing happens.
You rot, and that's the end of it.
And the Luciferic temptation is, there is only you and I will make you great and wonderful and powerful, and you will bind yourself to me and come into my world.
These are two very different temptations.
Steiner pointed out that before Christ, the Luciferic temptation was mankind's major temptation.
It hasn't stopped since then, but it was his major temptation.
But after Christ, the Aramaic becomes man's major temptation.
And we see even a picture of these two beings, James, in what I think is one of the most incredible pictures in the New Testament.
And that is the picture of where Jesus stands between Caiaphas and Pilate.
Between the representative of ancient Asian spirituality, which is Caiaphas the High Priest, and between the representative of the coming modern, more earthbound power, which is Rome.
The military and political power of Rome.
And then he's judged, and then he's sent out to Golgotha, and then he's crucified between two thieves.
And these two thieves take, again, two different attitudes towards him, don't they?
The one accepts him as Lord, and the other rejects him.
And so one, in other words, accepts his spiritual reality and accepts when you are with me in heaven.
So he accepts the reality of the spiritual world and the other does not.
So again, this Christ between these two forces is a picture which is very powerful.
And Steiner points out that all three of these beings have incarnated in human history.
The Lucifer being incarnated into human history 3,000 years before Christ in China.
Obviously under a different name, not known as Lucifer.
Whereas the Ahriman, the Satan being, is going to, excuse me, the Satan being is going to incarnate into human history now, early in the third millennium.
And that's, I believe, what we're now looking at.
Right.
So we're actually facing the incarnation of Satan at the moment.
But we've got so many to choose from.
We've got Anthony Fauci, we've got Bill Gates, we've got so many potential candidates as Satan.
That's interesting.
I think most of us We're not as well read as you, and religious teaching is not what it should be.
But we think of the devil as this kind of generic character whose names include sort of Beelzebub and Satan and Lucifer, and they're sort of kind of the same thing.
He's got a forked tail, and a goat's head, and he makes you do bad things.
But I just think that it's more... It's all a mishmash.
Those are a mishmash, you see, of the two beings.
I really could happily talk to you for hours because this is a fantastically deep rabbit hole and I'm just loving it.
The reason I was so excited when you mentioned reincarnation There's a very good friend of mine, he's now dead, called Jonathan Miles Lee.
He died of cancer recently and he was at school with my brother and me and he sort of tracked us down later on.
We'd lost touch with him and he was very keen to get back in touch and I realise now he was like a kind of Spirit guy.
I mean like a spiritual guy.
He was there to show us the way.
He did many wonderful things.
He was blessed with psychic powers, I suppose.
And you know, he was clearly connected to God as well.
He was particularly drawn to St.
Peter's in Rome and would go and touch St.
Peter's, the statue of St.
Peter, the foot or whatever.
He was drawn to truth and beauty and all manner of things.
One of the many strange things about him was that he could remember vividly, vividly, even though he was a very keen Christian, not necessarily a sort of regular Christian, he remembered very, very vividly and could talk about it, his previous life.
In India, in a particular village in India, he knew where it was.
He remembered the feel of his mother's sari.
He remembered a special orange colored drink that they used to drink.
He remembered his sister.
Eventually speaking to an Indian person from that area, he managed to track down what drink it was and stuff.
Unfortunately, he never went to the area to revisit his He knew for certain that he had been reincarnated and yet he was a Christian.
Now you do not get many Christians, many people who work within the established church talking about this.
It's anathema.
It's just the thing that as Christians we are not supposed to believe.
So tell me a bit about that.
What's happened?
Yeah, by all means.
Thank you.
Thank you for asking because this is so important.
That there was a reason, a profound reason, why reincarnation had to, as it were, disappear for a while from the West.
And that reason, I think, was that if it had not disappeared, James, that humanity would not have developed the scientific and technological culture which we have developed.
Because none of this was developed in the way that the West has developed it in India, or China, or Japan, or these Asiatic cultures.
They remained in touch with the spiritual world, more or less.
You can also see a kind of fall occurring in those cultures too.
And as I said, I could speak about that Japan, in the Japanese context, for quite a time.
There's a certain parallel.
However, they still kept faith, in a certain sense, with the fact that the human being has lived before and lives again.
Whereas in the West, this knowledge was lost.
And I'm firmly convinced that there were very wise people in the Church who knew, or at least sensed, that it had to be lost, that it had to be suppressed for a while.
Steiner points, for example, to Pope Nicholas I. Again, that's the Pope in the middle of the 9th century.
And his close advisor, Anastasios Biblitikarios, who was present at the Council of 869, by the way.
And that they knew that this was coming.
They must have been quite advanced beings, because they knew that there would be a time in the history of the West where the West had to go through this real spiritual darkness.
And in that darkness, the West would do two things.
One would be that the West would really find its way to a personal freedom.
But that would be a dangerous freedom.
And secondly, it would be the development of what we call today materialism.
And this had to happen.
And so from about 3000 BC, Steiner points out, around about 3000 BC, so we're going back to the time of the incarnation of Lucifer in China, round about that time, you start to see what he called the closing of the doors of perception.
So that means that human beings stopped being born with natural clairvoyance.
So until that point, human beings, when they were born, they automatically could experience the spiritual world to some extent.
And gradually, that happened to fewer and fewer and fewer human beings, until finally, by the time of Christ already, you only had a few wise women or wise wizards, and then people began to become afraid of them, and then in the West they were later called wizards or witches, and then they became persecuted and so on, because people were afraid.
of these abilities which some of them had.
My stepfather had some of these abilities and his brother also.
They could actually see ghosts, for example, and my stepfather could actually experience, when he went to the Colosseum in Rome, he could actually hear the voices that were present from 2,000 years ago in the Colosseum.
And froze and couldn't move, you know, there's still people and he was very he was not at all well educated But he had this through his bloodline You see and there have always been people like that in the West who have a remnant of these capacities But for most of us they were lost but then Steiner points out that due to the development of Materialism in the West it had got to such a point where the doors of perception need to reopen again
And that began to happen around about 1900.
So from 1900 onwards, you're beginning to get, in the West, people are being born who have, again, it's not, you know, I'm not talking about hundreds of millions of people here, but it's going to be more and more and more people who will have this natural ability, as children, that they perceive something.
And they will grow up, James, but the tragedy will be that because of our traditional religious and scientific education, they will not understand what they're experiencing.
Because the traditional Christian teaching will not help them to understand what they're experiencing.
They will be severely confused.
That's already been happening since the 1960s.
That's been happening.
People have been having all kinds of experiences, even without drugs, I'm saying here, that they cannot make sense of.
But this is part of it, that the doors of perception are opening, are reopening again.
Stein has said that this means that humanity is crossing a threshold.
And that we're beginning to re-experience the spiritual world.
And the lowest element of this spiritual world, which we're beginning to experience, is what's called, in esotericism, the etheric world.
In the 19th century, it was called the world of the ether.
Natural scientists banned the ether.
They decided, well, it doesn't exist.
But that's an illusion.
That we're beginning to re-experience what the etheric is.
The world in which the world of the plants live, the world which is informed by water, and the world which is closest to the angels.
And that's why so many people are beginning to have angelic experiences now.
Right.
As we've seen in the last 20 or 30 years, they're beginning to feel this communication with the angels.
And this will just grow and grow and grow.
And precisely for this reason, The spirits of opposition, the spirits of the demonic forces, have to make their move now, and the incarnation of Satan has to happen now, because if it doesn't happen now, there will come a time in the future where so many human beings will be having these experiences, they will know that the spiritual world is true.
Yes.
So this is why reincarnation has come back, as it were, and it started to come back around that time in Western culture, around 1900, where people began to start talking about it, at first within an Indian-Hindu context, because of the British Empire.
It was picked up there.
But Steiner brought it very much in a Christian context.
And this was why he was rejected by, for example, Western intellectuals in those days, Western scientists, even though he was a PhD scholar and a philosopher.
They rejected him and saying, well, you're talking about all this esoteric nonsense.
Yeah.
Is there any mention of reincarnation in the Bible, for example?
Was it understood then?
Well, in the Bible, I think you'll find that there are very, very tentative cases.
As far as I'm aware, you cannot find... I mean, I've tried this with various biblical scholars, you know, whether it's Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and so on, people who think they know the Bible backwards and can quote it, you know, chapter and verse, yeah?
Where in the New Testament is reincarnation, as it were, forbidden, damned, denied by Jesus Christ?
It is not.
It is not.
But you'll find some very interesting situations, particularly in relation to the being of Elijah.
Questions which are put to Jesus in relation to Elijah.
Are you Elijah?
Come again.
Questions like that.
Why are these kinds of questions asked?
You'll find various hints there that that awareness was still somehow there in the culture.
But as far as I can see, Jesus Christ did not forbid that and did not speak against it.
It's just that at that time, in the evolution of humanity, it needed to disappear for a while.
And so it did, particularly in the West.
But now it has to come back.
And the whole question of the spirituality has to come back, because otherwise we plunge into this materialistic nightmare that we can see all too clearly is happening.
Right.
Terry, that's been... I've absolutely loved this conversation, and we haven't even talked about the modern world, but barely.
Maybe you've got a lot to say about that as well.
So, should we do another one?
We'll do a follow-up where we can talk about... By all means!
And enlarge upon some of the points you've made.
It's been really great talking to you.
Where can people find your stuff?
Right, it's, my website is called, well, www.3man.org, that's letters, so t-h-r-e-e-m-a-n, one word, 3man.org.
That's brilliant.
That's where all my, that's where all my things are posted, or rather uploaded, and then otherwise I've got two books, I've written two books.
I don't know if you know of them.
One is called, this is called Mapping the Millennium, which is behind the plans of the New World Order.
So that's trying to relate some of the things which I've been speaking about today to the modern world of politics and what's going on in the world.
And then the other is a book about the very fascinating being Kaspar Hauser, a story from the 19th century.
Kaspar Hauser, where did he come from?
Which I think is a very important story to understand European history in the last 200 years, particularly in what happened to Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.
So I've written those two books, and then I wrote the introductions to these lectures by Rudolf Steiner, which I found very interesting to understand the First World War.
which I regard as the crucible, in a way, of the 20th century.
So these are 25 lectures he gave in 1916, 1917, The Karma of Untruthfulness, two volumes, and I wrote quite long introductions to them.
So, yeah, a number of other things as well, but perhaps that's enough for now.
That's brilliant, Terry.
And I must seize this moment, dear viewers and listeners, to, among other things, plug an amazing event we've got coming up on April 29th, if you're watching this podcast in time.
I'm doing a... The Delling Pod is going live.
It's going to London.
6pm starts and I'm doing a podcast with Majid Nawaz.
I mean, Terry, you're welcome to come as my guest, but I imagine it's a bit far from Stourbridge.
But I'm really excited to be talking to him because he's one of the few people with public profile who's really been Bang on the money about the pandemic, about vaccines, and about Ukraine actually.
He's brave and he sticks to first principles and he does what so many journalists don't do these days, which is he speaks truth to power and is not afraid to contradict the The mainstream media narrative, which seems to be all enveloping at the moment.
I think you'll agree, Cherry.
So you can get tickets for that with Eventbrite.
Just go to Eventbrite and you'll find the details of Majid Nawaz and James Delling Pong podcast live.
And do also, I really appreciate all the people who support me on Patreon, Subscribestar, Substack and Locals.
Terry, I would definitely, definitely have you back.
There's so much more I want to talk to you about.
Thank you for being such a brilliant, brilliant guest.
Thank you, James.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Great.
▲
Export Selection