Jeff Carreira: I'm excited to talk to you because I realized today that I've been studying your work for about 10 years, and you've had a big influence on my thinking. In preparation for our conversation I've been looking at two of your books, The Ecological Thought and Dark Ecology. And this interview follows one we did a few months ago in which you shared an experience of Christian conversion that you had. As I reread your books in light of that, I can see how the experience you had was deeply aligned with, and to some extent the inevitable outcome of, everything you've ever talked about.

Timothy Morton: A lot of the experience I've been having, as far as it's in line with the way that I was already thinking, has been an acceptance of a hitherto unthought logical structure. I can't help thinking about the subtitle of that book, Dark Ecology. The subtitle is For a Logic of Future Coexistence. The way that phrase rings inside of me has very much to do with logic per se. Logic, if it's anything, is the way things hang together. That's what logic is. Before and beyond logical operators and styles of logic, logic is a way for things to hang together. I’m really curious to know how you see what has happened to me.

Jeff Carreira: When we last spoke you mentioned that while serving vegan meatballs to your son you became aware of an energetic field that was emitting from your body. You saw how it was extending into a more generalized field, and how that was a manifestation of the interconnectedness between all things. As I was preparing for this interview, I was struck by how you described weird essentialism in Dark Ecology as the recognition that although all things are connected they are also distinct. Reality isn't one big mushy oneness. There are distinct things, but the boundaries between things are fuzzy and overlapping and interconnected.

When I was reading that in Dark Ecology, I thought about your experience of energy. Our skin is a distinct boundary, a definitive end of yourself materially. But energetically, we extend out, not infinitely, perhaps, but some distance from our bodies into the field of everybody else's extension, and we overlap and interpenetrate with other people. I think that your spiritual experience is a very natural extension of the way you were thinking then.

Timothy Morton: Yes, we interpenetrate with people in another way too. I'm recording myself right now, very far away from you, but we're talking and hearing each other. There are things that are empirically far away. You could measure them as billions of light years away. There's a black hole in the middle of the Milky Way Galaxy. As we're talking about it, to use the fancy terminology, it is phenomenologically near in a way that some things that are very close to me are actually far. Many philosophers talk about this. Recently I've been writing about the phrase “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. When you look at the original Greek, what is generally translated as “kingdom” can also be translated as “substance”. The energetic field is a substantial thing, in a sense a physical thing. Heavens can also refer to outer space. The heavens was the fixed outer sphere of Ptolemaic astronomy. “At hand” comes from Greek roots that mean “what is next”, which could be translated as proximate, in terms of what is coming in the next moment. My mystical experience opened up my awareness to the disturbingly close proximity of everything. If we look at Aramaic, and if Jesus really said this he would have been speaking in Aramaic, the translation of the phrase “at hand” would be the proximity that happens when something is malfunctioning, which is the proximity of things that you have to think about because they stop working. Your software is breaking or glitching, or something like that. You're aware of it because you have to fix it.

The theological term “metanoia” is generally translated as “repent”, but that is actually a bad translation. Metanoia means to change your mind, or more literally, “to bend your mind around”. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” could translate as “the substance of outer space is imminent”. The substance of outer space is next in line. This substance, which contains Earth, is right here. You don't have to worry about it because it's right under your skin. It is your skin. At the same time, it is still proximate, still not here. Reality is not here, it’s coming. And the most phenomenologically distant thing to us is the “me” that is aware of everything. The awareness of the black hole in the middle of the Milky Way galaxy is further away than the black hole itself. But if you turn your mind around you can become aware of this thing that is supposedly far away. It's heaven-like in its distance, but it is, in fact, just under your skin.

What if you could only experience the intimate proximity of yourself through a malfunction? That would mean through a realization that comes from some experience that occurs to you without your willing it. When you experience this kind of uncalled for mystical experience it is like a malfunction. It feels like something's gone wrong. It could be very pleasurably wrong. A lot of the time what I am experiencing is extremely pleasantly wrong, as opposed to unpleasantly wrong, but if I was going to give it a texture, it would be a feeling of unease. It might be pleasant, it might be unpleasant. But the unease is alerting me to the fact that there is a logically deeper layer that is not working. It's uneasy because there's a malfunction.

Jeff Carreira: I want to pick up on some of the threads that you just opened up. In terms of your energetic experience, and many of the things you were just saying about heaven and how sometimes the things that are furthest away are also closer than close, I was thinking about another term from Dark Ecology, when you refer to the arche-lithic, which you define as the realm where the primordial relationship between humans and non-humans exists. It's a realm beyond time and space, and that makes it, in a sense, nonexistent.

Timothy Morton: Very well said. The notion of the arche-lithic is like the notion of the Paleolithic. When we say Paleolithic, we're talking about the ancient Stone Age. Lithic refers to stone. Paleo means ancient. Then there's the Neolithic, which is the more recent Stone Age, Stonehenge comes to mind. Arche-lithic is referring to the fact that whatever was going on then is ongoing now. Those things are intrinsic to the format of being the things that we are, not as a universalistic transhistorical fact about human beings, but as a logically primordial relationality to the biosphere that we grew out of. Alan Watts said that we grew out of the biosphere like apples grow out of a tree. I love that. We humans grew out of a biosphere, out of the universe. Karl Marx essentially said that the biosphere is an extension of your body. You use things in the environment to live and they become part of your body. But, he also says you are an extension of the biosphere. You're still in the biosphere when you're in outer space. You have to breathe, so you have to bring the biosphere with you. If you move to Mars you have to create a biosphere. A life form is always a life form plus an environment. The life form is different from the environment, but the life form is not absolutely different from its environment. There is an uncanny overlap between the two. This would be the arche-lithic, and it is an intrinsically weird interaction that consists of strange loops that are inherently playful.

All Garden of Eden stories are about how we came to do farming. You can find them in the Upanishads, in Buddhism, in Judaism, in Christianity, and so on. These stories are self-reinforcing ideologies. We recreate them and take them with us wherever we go. We create and recreate hierarchies that exploit people. No matter how bad things get, we tend to assume that these things were great sometime before, but if they were so great, how did they end up so screwed up now? Let's just admit it: they couldn't have been that great. There wasn’t an earlier perfect state. It must have been extremely ambiguous from the start.

We actually live in farmer-centric worlds. A book called The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow talks about how farming was originally a mystical, playful, theological practice. For example, the Egyptian Gardens of Adonis were created for certain religious festivals by women who would make little window boxes and create gardens. Over time people started gardening on a mass scale and called it farming. Farming has within it an insidious hierarchy, which is the implicit conservatism of relying on an algorithm. A farming technique is an algorithm. An algorithm is a recipe for creating value. And the basic principle says if it worked last year, let's do it again next year. Why change it? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This sounds normal and benign. And it is benign. If it worked last year, why not do it this year? The trouble is it's been scaled up for over 12,000 years, and now it's almost destroyed the biosphere. We've got fascism around the world rising up with an anti-intellectual quality, and I think our religious traditions have the potential to restart our thinking.

When in the gospel it says “metanoia”, it means “reflect”. Think about it. You can't just live life on autopilot. It's not going to work like that. It's going to cause a lot of destruction. Think about Hannah Arendt and her beautiful idea of the banality of evil, which really means that evil is banality. Things are banal when they are unoriginal and that is evil. If you retweet, you don't have to believe in the horrible ideas you might be spreading, you just have to hit the button. That's what it is about. “I was just following orders” is exactly how evil works. This is the Ikemen defense. What if that was spread globally? The trouble with AI is the A. Everyone's focusing on the I. What happens when machines become intelligent? The trouble with AI is the A, the artificial, which really means automation. It's the fact that you can ask ChatGPT to write an essay that would take you a few hours and have it done in five seconds. ChatGPT is using every other essay that's ever been written and it's patching yours together out of the past. That is the farming algorithm.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that farmer-centric societies took over because they were very productive and created a lot of wealth based on efficiency. We think dominator hierarchies are the problem. But in a world where the monarch lives far away in a different village and it's actually rather irritating to be the monarch, or in the Inuit world where you have to be a communist in the winter because you need to huddle together for warmth, and you go back to being a monarchy in summer, hierarchy, per se, isn't the problem. It's the conservatism that says, if it worked before we must not deviate from the program, because following the program is how we survive another year. That's the issue. Doing that, you spin out and sever your connection to your actual existence by just following habitual patterns over and over again.

When you scale that up to planet scale over thousands of years, it doesn't work so great. What if religion was holding the political instructions for what to do next? Many people, such as Gandhi and King, seemed to think so. What if ideas like, “love is the way,” and “give peace a chance,” that we automatically dismiss as too soppy, were actually political instructions that could be scaled up? What if “love thy neighbor” was an essential part of any future politics? Would we be able to transcend the situation that we're in?

Jeff Carreira: Another idea you wrote about in Dark Ecology is agri-logics, and I think that's what you're talking about now. Agri-logics is the way of thinking that developed through agriculture, and you say that we need to move from this way of thinking to ecognosis, which is a way of allowing truth to reveal itself rather than deducing truth from parts.

Timothy Morton: I want to correct you by saying that the term is agri-logistics, but that small error is indicative of something important. We live in a pharma-centric society that confuses logic with logistics. The fact that it worked last year and the fact that therefore we're going to do it again is a logistical plan, but we come to see it as simply logical and it becomes embedded in how we think. Rather than celebrating and enjoying paradoxes and anomalies, we try to eliminate them. We are confusing logic, the way things hang together, with logistics, executing a plan of action.

There is a certain La-Z-Boy approach to knowledge, especially amongst, and I'm pointing to myself here, white men. People who during my exams try to finish as quickly as they can, slam it down on my desk, walk out, and shut the door behind them. Their attitude seems to be, I don't have to work for this. I don't have to sweat. Somebody else should be sweating. You see where I'm going here? Somebody else should be working hard. It’s all about cheating. It's all about finding a workaround. How can I get this done X times faster so I don't have to think about it? That's what logic devolves into. Logic devolves into computation. Computation devolves into efficiency. The most efficient computation is seen as the most intelligent. Our current systems treat reflection as if it were a rather sinister, expensive, optional extra that only wealthy people should do, and everybody else should be learning how to compute, which means becoming more efficient. The people who think most efficiently should be in charge because they think like engineers, but engineering is all about creating better ways to do things that are already happening. Whereas we need to imagine things that are currently impossible. Unless the people who are in charge know that the future must be different, they're going to just make things worse.

The La-Z-Boy approach is very much based on a master-slave duality. A lot of what we're talking about has to do with manipulating the world to make it more efficient, which eventually implies mastery. And mastery implies slavery. A silicon wafer is a pretty good visual model of a plantation. It's perfectly organized rows of electrons. I'm not a Luddite, I'm just saying that as long as we are using a template designed to get enslaved beings to create La-Z-Boy workarounds for us, we're going to be stuck in this wash cycle, and the more the people who benefit from this duality try to hold on to it, the nastier it will get. This is where the confusion of logic with logistics actually gets you. Logic is about how things hang together. Logistics is about how to use the existing way things hang together more and more efficiently so we can master it. And like I said, mastery implies slavery.

Jeff Carreira: In your writing, you give hints toward a different way of thinking, which you called ecognosis. In your earlier book The Ecological Thought you defined the ecological thought as interconnectedness, but only if you understand that interconnectedness is not something that exists outside of the things it connects. When I read that sentence I realized that the core of everything I have learned from you is in that statement.

Timothy Morton: Well said again. The idea of knowing is dislocated from the notion of efficiency. One of the problems in the world is the assumption that things have to have a point, that they have to have a telos or a goal or an end. The idea that we need to be working towards something with greater and greater efficiency. The biosphere, purely scientifically, is a non-teleological system. Human beings are not the climax or the end product or the best. What happens when you impose a teleological system on top of a non-teleological system? And right now the dominant teleological system is called capitalism, but earlier in history it was called feudalism. It was still teleological then because in the big picture it was about creating more and more efficient ways of getting corn. When you put a teleological system on top of a non-teleological one, the obvious happens: the teleological system munches the other one down to nothing.

Going back to the idea that we need to change our minds because the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Metanoia means changing our minds; how come we can change our minds? The fact of changing your mind implies that something happened to make you hesitate, to break the pattern of your thoughts or behaviors. Have you ever been in the middle of an argument and thought, wait a second, what am I doing? I don't need to be right. This is stupid. This is ridiculous. I'm just going to stop. Of course, in that moment you always have the option to double down, but you also have the option to change. How come we can do that? How come in a supposedly mechanical universe, hesitation can occur? In a funny way, life itself is chemistry, hesitating. Under the normal circumstances of the universe, the chemicals would just destroy one another as efficiently as possible, but somehow life is a place where impermanence allows you to heal. It means you can grow physically and psychologically. It means that everything doesn’t have to wind down to nothing. It can be the opposite.

When you use the phrase, the ecological thought, it starts with hesitation. Wait a second. I'm part of the biosphere, not in an obvious way, but in a very uncanny way that makes me feel weird. My attempt to transcend my material conditions makes my material conditions worse. That's odd. It's uncanny. We’ve all had a moment when we hesitated for a second because we realized we forgot to switch the kettle off and had to go downstairs to check it. That's a baby transcendence. In similar ways, you know that you're growing out of a biosphere because you have these strange, uncanny, hesitant, malfunction-flavored thoughts.

I'm very opposed to the idea that the whole of which you are a part makes you disappear, or less important. A lot of ecological thinking focuses on populations rather than individuals, or wholes rather than parts. In my opinion it is proto-fascist to think that the whole is more important than the parts. The whole is not necessarily more important than the part, it's just bigger. That doesn't mean it's ontologically better. We've gaslighted ourselves into thinking this way by saying things like the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Jeff Carreira: In your books you deemphasize interconnectedness in a certain way, not to say that it doesn't exist, but to point out that it doesn't exist outside of the things it connects. It's in us. It's not outside of us. I think that's the ecological thought.

Timothy Morton: Yes, it's inside of us and so it manifests as uncanny. I called it the ecological thought and I want to explain why. When you read certain realist novels, like The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, the first sentence starts, “The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses.” Similarly, Virginia Woolf starts the novel Mrs. Dalloway with “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The studio, the flowers? Wait a minute. The studio and the flowers must have existed before I started reading. Realism is a hallucinogenic artform. It makes you hallucinate. Calling it the ecological thought implies that it's uncannily already there before you started thinking about it. That's the deal. Thought is always late to the party. My basic head, shoulders, knees, and toes sense of myself is a late-arriving inversion of the signal coming from the registration of the biosphere on this thing that grew out of it called my body.

Worms will get stuck in the tunnels they're digging unless they can differentiate themselves from the tunnel. Here's the interesting thing: the awareness of the tunnel comes to the worm’s sentience a few hundred milliseconds after the tunnel that the worm touched. The worm touches the tunnel, and the nerve signal enters the sentience a couple of hundred milliseconds after. It gets inverted backwards so that a silhouette is generated that allows the worm to feel itself. The worm feels itself touching the wall after the fact, but uses that information to generate a picture of itself that feels like the present. My sense that I'm here is a couple of hundred milliseconds after a sensation from the environment arrived to my body. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. What we talk about in esoteric religion is the fundamental always-already contact with beings that we can't quite see and touch in real time. I want to point out that actual religion is this strange, uncanny sensation of proximity to others who are no longer definable as separate because they are now my neighbors, whether they be human beings or cells in my body or bacteria or whatever. Meditation practices allow us not to delete that awkwardly tantalizing quality by desperately attempting to actually touch them.

There's a Christian book of the Middle Ages with the beautiful title, The Cloud of Unknowing. Just be a cloud of unknowing. The Tibetan meditation instruction of mahamudra is to meditate like a corpse. You try for a while and you can't feel it. If you have a good teacher, they’ll say, that's it! The funny, uncanny sensation that you're dislocated is it. Encountering ourselves is uncanny, and encountering another person is uncanny. Uncanny implies that the encounter is already there before I'm thinking, rationalizing, and feeling it. It's already there in what Heidegger called the pre-theoretical sense. That's why it is the ecological thought.

Jeff Carreira: You are describing a very powerful sense that I am always encountering reality and myself a little bit after the fact.

Timothy Morton: Yes, we're a little bit out of phase. Let's say that the biospherical relationships that we grew out of are the Garden of Eden. That means the Garden of Eden is always just out of reach in the future. Phenomenologically speaking, we’re always experiencing a time-delayed version of the physical world and a time-delayed version of ourselves. In fact, experience as such boils down to remembering that you forgot something. Did I just leave the gas on? Did I answer Jeff's question correctly? It boils down to conscience. This little Jiminy Cricket voice asking, “Am I actually wrong? Am I malfunctioning? Is something not right? Have we done this before, Jeff?”

What if that uncertainty about reality was the default? We experience it as abnormal because it's uncanny, but what if that was the default awareness? Remembering that you forgot something. Being dislocated means that what we call the Garden of Eden is in the future. More strictly speaking, it is the future. We are not alienated from some perfect past. How could it have gone so wrong if it was perfect? We're alienated from the future.

Jeff Carreira: Would you say, then, that the antidote to the crisis of our world is that we stop relying on the past and start moving toward the unknown possibility of the future?

Timothy Morton: When you're doing something that you don't do very often you are allowing yourself to be shaped by a new logic. Maybe you are walking down main street or through a mall late at night, and you notice a nightclub and you get involved with people who are already dancing. You're willing to allow yourself to be structured according to a new logic, a new way for things to hang together. There you were walking along the street, and you were ready to accept a logical structure that was different from what you expected. This acceptance has a feeling to it. It could be a feeling of bliss, it could be a feeling of horror. It could even be funny. Genuine logic has a feel to it.

In the Christian tradition the new logic is the Holy Spirit. The possibility that a human being can accept a logical structure based on more love, forgiveness, and kindness than they thought was possible. It's actually accepting a logic that they didn't know about before. We might ultimately find that the universe itself is a logical structure that is discovered in the chaos. The word of God is shush. Be quiet, be calm. How can you shush yourself in a nice way? How can you meditate? How can you calm down and allow things to hang together without pushing them into place?

Paradise, to me, is a form of hanging-together that contains an as yet unanticipated spaciousness to shelter and protect you while chemicals emitted by humans are turning life back into chemistry. Each life form is a little paradise garden that is sheltering from the basic welter of chaos. The word paradise is a verb. It comes from Iranian roots that mean “to build up around”. It's like creating a beautiful bowl that can contain things. Paradise is not what is in the bowl, it is the creation of it. It's not closed, it’s open. It has to be contingent. Every possible logical system, and a snail is as much a logical system as a computer program is, must be able to have this opaque, blank, blind spot in it. It's called Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Within the structure of truth itself is this beautiful opacity. Within truth itself is this weird silence. There are things that logical systems can say are true, but can't prove.

This should strike us as incredible. This means that even within truth, there is this very beautiful empty aspect of our universe. It makes us very safe. If it had a smell, it would be, for me, the smell of wet clay. The smell of damp, dark, dusk after rain. Beautiful, neutral, spacious. Paradise is a verb, the creation of a sheltering from. A musical beat is a gap. What we are talking about is being able to introduce some gaps into the chaos of the world. The wondrousness is that chaos itself can be shaped. It is not completely solid. If truth can contain gaps of opacity, then so can chaos. Chaos contains the spaciousness of possibility. If there's anything we can do to help our world, it’s to practice allowing for that spacious gap to exist inside ourselves, and in between each other.