BioCharisma x InnerVerse Swapcast | Errything We Like To Taco Bout w/ Topher Gardner & Chance Garton
The long-awaited BioCharisma/InnerVerse swapcast is finally here! This is an in-person hangout Topher Gardner and I recorded awhile back, that we lost due to technical difficulties but managed to resurrect without video. It's a deep energy soul massage transmitted through a goofy and heartfelt mind meld between two great friends.
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In this episode
Core themes
Mind As The Ground Of Everything
Chance Garton argues that your mind is not in your body, your body is in your mind, and that mind is the only foundation for cosmology you can prove experientially. Every philosophy rests on an unprovable ground, whether that is the Big Bang or something else, so he picks the one he can verify by perception. Topher Gardner pushes back gently from his Vedanta Advaita practice, defining mind as activity and placing is-ness, pure sentience, beneath it as the still thing that sponsors all action. They settle on being as the real floor.
Isis Is Jesus And Other Phonetic Ghosts
Asked about Isis, Chance goes straight to philology. Isa, Isu, Esau, Yeshua, the Aesir, the Etruscan Iser and Isaiah all carry, he argues, the same is-ness, the word for existence itself, and Eve means life for the same reason. He points to the mother who is her own son and husband, Cybele and Attis, the Nag Hammadi Eve who calls herself mother of her own self, and doubts the Rosetta Stone. Topher admits he tunes out of language work and leaves it to Chance and Dylan Saccoccio, whose books he says teach you how to think rather than what.
Hero Worship Dressed Up As Culture
The pushback syncretism attracts is not really about culture, Topher says. People want their heroes untouched, and culture is a polite word for hero worship. Chance agrees that showing Norse runes to be, in his view, Punic triggers meltdowns, and adds that the Disneyfication of mythology exaggerates cultural differences between versions of the same story and breeds special boy thinking. He recommends old sources like George Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry, written before movies and video games, and uses Marvel breakdowns on The Marvelous Demystifiers, from Project Pegasus in The Avengers to Moon Knight, as symbolic literacy practice.
The Realm As An Alchemical Battery
Chance lays out his favorite cosmology. In it, this realm is an egg shaped electric cell with sun and moon as cathode and anode, and its charge runs down over time, which is what the Kali Yuga and the world ages describe. George Wiseman's AquaCure is his clue, because electrolysis produces sludge matching the stainless plates without the plates losing weight, suggesting new matter and new water are generated. Topher matches it with John Bedini's back EMF battery reclamation, electrical cavitation, and liquefaction events he witnessed in Costa Rica that swallow well built structures into the ground.
Trust Surprise And The Savior Inside
Both men land on trust as the operating system. Topher describes his Saturn return, when letting go of preconceptions left him caretaking a Central American estate, and credits Nassim Taleb's Black Swan for showing how outlier events, not plans, shape a life. Chance offers the Witcher law of surprise and The Neverending Story as warnings that wishes granted out of alignment only widen the distance from yourself. The savior, he says, is the innermost ring of your own tree rather than an external figure, and Topher says biofield tuning reads injuries as messages the body is sending.
Quotes
“Well, that's the simple truth is your mind is not in your body. Your body is in your mind. What is mind? It's the floor. It's the ground. I mean, that's what I think.”
“So mind, to simplify it from my perspective, mind is activity. And so there's an aspect of self that is non-active. It just is. And its is-ness observes all these other things.”
“Because the Disneyfication of mythology has really started to set things apart from each other, in a way, and accentuate the cultural nuance or cultural differences between versions of a story that is essentially the same story.”
“People wanna identify with their heroes. Everybody wants to externalize the authority. We were talking about this over dinner and it's quite obvious. If you challenge somebody's hero, you're in a world of hurt with them. They don't want their heroes to be challenged.”
“So what does a creator do? It creates. So if there was any meaning of life or purpose of life, it's really ultimate freedom to create and to exist. And within that, that applies to everything that you might wanna do that is not an infringement on someone else's ability to create or exist.”
“So it's electrical cavitation, essentially, is what he was creating, because in nature, whenever you create a gap, like you create a flow of energy going in one direction, whether that flow of energy is water, whether it's air, whether it's a current of electricity, if you abruptly stop it, nature abhors a vacuum.”
“In the law of surprise, this is something that when witchers are hired to slay a monster and the folk that hired them don't have coin to pay the fee, the witcher may invoke the law of surprise, which is when you return home, you will give me that which you find there but did not expect.”
“And that's actually the moment in my life. It was during my Saturn return. And that's when I actually started to really trust. I saw the more that I let go of all my preconceptions.”
Topher Gardner hosts the BioCharisma Podcast, blending permaculture, alternative construction, and body work in his exploration of resilience and wellness.
See all Topher episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
