Manda is a novelist, a former veterinary surgeon, a shamanic practitioner of more than forty years, and the host of the Accidental Gods podcast. She also completed a master’s in regenerative economics, which she says she never expected to do. That combination made her an unusual partner for a conversation about the Third Attractor, and it produced some of the sharpest questions I have been asked since starting this series.
Here is what stayed with me.
The question I could not answer quickly
After sixty conversations, one pattern is clear to me: most guests agree that we cannot plan our way into a new system. We have to be present, listen to what wants to emerge, and act from there rather than from strategy.
Manda agreed. Then she asked a question that I had been circling for months without naming it so directly: how is that different from waiting for a benevolent dictator to tell us what to do?
It is a fair challenge. At our retreat on the Third Attractor, we worked with the voice in each of us that is drawn to the first two attractors. One voice wishes a wise authority would simply set the direction. The other would not mind if everything collapsed, because then nothing would be our responsibility. Both voices are strong, and both are ways of handing responsibility away.
Manda’s answer was that a dictator, however benevolent, speaks to the thinking mind with ideas for making the current system work, while listening to the larger living system engages a different faculty altogether. My answer came from my non-dual background. When I listen to the evolutionary impulse, the aspiration is that there is no separation between the one listening and what is heard. The listening and the responding come from the same place. A dictator, even the wisest one imaginable, always creates two parties: one who knows and one who follows.
I still think this distinction is real. But I want to be honest about its limit. It is an inner criterion. From the outside, a movement that claims to follow a deeper intelligence can look exactly like a movement that follows a charismatic leader. What interested me is that Manda’s own vision includes an outer answer as well: decisions made at the lowest possible level, every meeting public, and the right to recall a representative immediately if they stop representing what was agreed. Those are safeguards you can observe and test. I have come to believe we need both: the inner discipline of listening, and structures that protect against anyone who only claims to be listening.
The gap in my own lineage
I asked Manda about something I rarely raise in public. In transcendent and non-dual teachings, there is often a gap where trauma work should be. Awakening does not automatically heal the conditioned patterns we carry.
Her response clarified why this matters for the Third Attractor specifically. If the path forward depends on listening, then the quality of that listening depends on the state of the listener. She works with Internal Family Systems, which describes most of us as living in a kind of internal civil war: many inner parts pulling in different directions, often freezing us into inaction. In Western culture in particular, we are trained from early childhood to always have the answer. Those parts rush in whenever we ask a real question, and what we hear is then our own anxiety or ambition rather than anything new.
She told a small story about sweeping her yard. An inner voice was telling her she was useless because the yard was never tidy. Instead of agreeing, as usual, she suggested to that part that it could relax, since two ponies, chickens, a dog and a cat make a tidy yard impossible. The voice stepped back. As a Swiss woman, I recognised that voice immediately.
The insight for me is simple and demanding: intuition is not automatically trustworthy. It becomes more reliable as we do the unglamorous work of understanding what in us wants control. Emergence without inner work is likely to be old patterns in new language.
Why we cannot avoid new stories
A recurring objection in my conversations is that we should not create new big narratives, because the old ones hardened into dogma. Manda disagreed firmly, and her argument was more precise than I expected.
Humans are a storied species. We cannot not tell stories; even the non-dual view is a story. She explained it through neurophysiology. Imagining tomorrow morning is easy, because memory holds plenty of mornings to draw from. Imagining a morning in 2079 is hard, because we can only assemble the future from what is already stored. Her image: if all you have are black and white building bricks, you can build extraordinary models, but they will all be black and white. Stories are how new colours get in.
Her further point was uncomfortable and, I think, correct. Refusing to offer new stories does not leave us story-free. It leaves the existing story in place, and that story is one of scarcity, separation and powerlessness. The alternative she works with is connection, agency and sufficiency.
She also offered a simple sequence for what a useful story has to deliver: motivation (a future worth wanting), agency (real choices), direction (the next concrete step) and empowerment (enough freedom from daily survival to act at all). I suggested agency should come first, since so many people do not believe they have any. Her reply: agency without a vision can just as easily build a fascist state. Agency needs to serve something. I accept that.
Coherence is the harder problem
Manda believes a shift could happen very quickly once enough people are grounded, in the same way that one settled person can steady a whole group. I challenged this. It works in a circle that already shares purpose and values. Our world does not.
Her response complicated my view. She described family members who welcomed Trump’s election, and when she asked what they hoped for, they said they wanted people to be kinder to each other. Most people share basic values like compassion and integrity. What divides us is the story of how to get there.
That reframed something for me. The divide may be less about values than about narratives of the route. That is still a large problem, but it is a different one, and perhaps a more workable one.
Where I remain stuck
Two questions stayed open at the end.
The first is power. Stories can motivate many people, but they do not automatically reach those who hold political and financial control. Manda’s view is that we should not fight the old system but build a new one that makes it obsolete, as Buckminster Fuller put it, and that changing how money works belongs near the top of the list. She pointed out that many prototypes already exist, in participatory governance, regenerative agriculture, and cities like Amsterdam adopting doughnut economics. I agree the prototypes exist. I am less sure we have understood how they reach the scale at which they actually displace something.
The second is connection between initiatives. There is an enormous amount of good work happening, but everyone is deeply absorbed in their own project, and there is little space to connect. Manda noted, with some frustration, that reactionary movements build alliances easily because they accept hierarchy and set aside internal differences for a shared goal, while progressive movements tend to fracture over small disagreements. I do not think the answer is to copy their hierarchy. But I do think we need to be much more willing to work alongside people who are close enough in values, rather than waiting for complete agreement.
Neither of us had a clear answer. Manda’s position is that her own mind cannot hold that level of complexity, so she keeps asking what is being asked of her and acts on it. I recognise that position. I was successful in the old paradigm, as a businesswoman and in public administration, and I know how strong the reflex is to solve this through analysis and planning. Letting go of that reflex has been the hardest part of my work since.
What I take from this conversation is not a resolution but a sharper set of questions. How do we tell genuine listening from a new form of following? How much inner work does a movement need before its intuitions can be trusted? And how do the many prototypes already in existence become one coherent alternative before the window closes?
These are the questions I will carry into the next conversations.
