On animism and the modern human: a conversation with Alexander Beiner and Josh Schrei
Highlights from our co-hosted conversation with Alexander Beiner, co-founder of Breaking Convention and author of The Bigger Picture, and Josh Schrei of The Emerald podcast. We’ll be back in conversation with Alexander and Douglas Rushkoff discussing the psychedelic origins of the internet and the future of AI on July 1 at &Soul, Shoreditch, London.
When we first advertised this event as "an evening exploring animism, myth and technology," I wondered if we were being too ambitious. Could one conversation really weave together such vast themes? I was so excited when the opportunity to host this came up - I'm a huge admirer of Beiner's work whose book The Bigger Picture helped inspire a reshaping of our mission at the Psychedelic Society, and The Emerald played a large role in my personal journey. Josh is a modern bard, a weaver of intellect, soul, and story in a way that we rarely encounter these days.
But what unfolded last Tuesday evening at Number 90 in Hackney Wick was something quite magical - a conversation that meandered through ancient wisdom and modern disconnection, landing on profound insights about our relationship with the animate world around us. The venue sold out, and by the end of the evening, I understood why.
The Land is the Dragon
Josh opened with a story that immediately transported us to the mist-covered mountains of Wales where he’d just been travelling. He shared the mystical idea that "the land is the dragon, and the mists are the breath of the dragon." When driving with his children, watching mist pour over a dragon-tooth mountain at 9:30pm in golden light, this wasn't mere metaphor - it was lived experience.
This became a thread throughout the evening: how do we move from seeing nature as backdrop to experiencing it as alive, breathing, responsive? Josh's children asking "Are they real dragons?" and his response - "You have to feel them with your heart" - captured something essential about animacy that our culture has largely forgotten.
Beyond the Individualised Burden
Many of us today feel an overwhelming pressure to single-handedly solve the world's problems. "We've gone in the blink of an eye from the hyper-individualist pressure of: I have to have an amazing career and show myself for my true potential to: I have to solve all the world's problems myself."
"And if I don't do that, I'm bypassing and worthless. It's just a self flagellation."
This shift from personal achievement to planetary salvation, whilst well-intentioned, keeps us trapped in the same individualistic framework.
The alternative? Recognition that love "is not a quantifiable force." When we sit with another human being and break bread, "the force of the entire cosmos pours through in a broken loaf." These moments of connection - looking into a child's eyes, sharing genuine presence with another - aren't measurable increments of change, yet they represent what Josh called "universe-shattering change."
The tension of separation
We often blame modernity or the Western world for our feelings of emptiness, isolation, and disconnection. ‘It’s true,’ he acknowledges, ‘that every step of the way we chose the path of isolation from nature and spirit.’ But the pain of separateness is the human condition. The intense longing for union is what drove our prehistoric ancestors to worship and paint. Separation is the spark of all art, music, and poetry. He spoke of the many gods and goddesses across the world who were dismembered, their body parts separated and strewn - Dionysus, Osiris, Ymir. The work of a human life is to re-member. To remember to come back into wholeness with the divine, only to become lost once again in the eternal cycle, a universal pulse of separation and union.
What we are seeking is not a state but a practice. Just as meditation is not an exercise in having no thoughts but noticing the thoughts and time and again and remembering to return to the present. Over and over and over again.
The Power of Voice in a Vibrational Universe
Perhaps the most embodied part of the evening came when Josh spoke about sound and voice. "Words are powerful and sounds are powerful," he began, "and if we want to harmonise with the animate forces around us then the easiest, most direct, simplest way to do that is with our voices."
Drawing from traditions across cultures - from Greek oracle priestesses singing prophecies in river caves to Aboriginal songlines that maintain the landscape - he reminded us that we live in a vibrational universe.
"There's a difference between thinking gratitude, right? Thinking 'I'm thinking that I'm really connected today,' and voicing it aloud. Because we don't live in oral tradition... but this is a vibrational world, and so when we speak aloud, the world harmonizes along with us."
"There's not a culture that I've ever heard of that doesn't sing," he said, referencing even the Taliban's futile attempts to ban women's voices. "They try and prevent people from singing... and it never works. You can't take the music away from people. It doesn't work, because we sing."
The stories he shared of songs literally calling down weather, of voices that could bow heads to the ground with their power, weren't presented as supernatural phenomena but as natural expressions of our proper relationship with the living world.
Through stories of goddess stones across the Indian subcontinent - simple rocks that have been sung to, cried over, and celebrated with for generations - Josh painted a picture of how human presence can actually complete rather than diminish the natural world.
This challenges the modern environmental view that positions humans as inherently destructive. "Most indigenous traditions you talk to will not say that humans are a virus, aberration... human beings have an absolutely key and vital role to play in the functioning of the cosmos."
Their gifts? Singing, praying, giving milk and tears and food to the stones and trees that anchor the land.
"Custodial doesn't mean standing out there with a shepherd's crook. Custodial means singing. It means honouring through ceremony. It means artistry that is designed to give back and to replenish relationships."
Questions That Linger
Alexander's documentary work with Leviathan (premiering this week in London) explores similar terrain - how do we reclaim our role as participants rather than observers? How do we move from the "intolerable endpoint of disconnection" towards what he calls "the art of arrival" - bringing ancient wisdom into contemporary life without losing the genuine benefits of modern civilisation?
These aren't questions with simple answers, but they're questions that matter. As one audience member noted, we live in a world that values quantity over quality, measurement over experience. Yet the things that truly matter - connection, presence, love - exist in the realm of the qualitative, the felt, the transmitted.
This isn't about adding more items to our spiritual to-do lists.
Instead, it's about recognising what's already here: "The first thing we need to do here, now in this space, which is all there is right now, is take a breath together and feel the reverberation between the hearts. Connect."
In a world increasingly mediated by screens and algorithms, there's something radical about gathering in person, about voice and breath and shared presence. The evening ended not with grand proclamations but with an invitation to continue the conversation - to keep feeling into these questions together.
As Josh reminded us, quoting his teacher from Brazil, the perils of appearances, of Instagram, and spiritual signalling: "People who try too hard to show who they are really only show who they aren't."
The deepest magic lies not in performing spirituality but in simply showing up, present and authentic, to whatever wants to emerge in the quiet moments we share.
The dragon is still breathing. We just need to remember how to feel its breath with our hearts.
Join us on July 1st for Alexander Beiner’s next conversation with renowned media theorist, author, and professor Douglas Rushkoff,
