Sacred Wisdom

I am joined today by Dr Bruce  Greyson, to discuss the phenomenon of the Near-Death-Experience, and what this may tell us about consciousness.
Dr. Bruce Greyson is the Chester Carlson Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia.  He was previously on the medical faculty at the University of Michigan and the University of Connecticut, where he was Clinical Chief of Psychiatry. Dr. Greyson has consulted with the National Institutes of Health and addressed symposia on consciousness at the United Nations and at the Dalai Lama’s compound in Dharamsala, India. He has earned awards for his medical research and was elected a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, the highest honor bestowed by that organization.
Dr. Greyson’s interest in near-death experiences began just a few months after graduating from medical school, when he treated an unconscious patient in the emergency room who stunned him the next morning with an account of leaving her body. That event challenged his beliefs about the mind and the brain, and ultimately led him on a journey to study near-death experiences scientifically, leading to more than a hundred publications in medical journals. He co-founded the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), an organization to support and promote research into these experiences, and for 27 years edited the Journal of Near-Death Studies, the only scholarly journal dedicated to near-death research. Through his research, he has discovered common and universal themes in near-death experiences that go beyond neurophysiological or cultural interpretations, as well as patterns of consistent aftereffects on individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, values, and personalities.
Dr. Greyson is the author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal About Life and Beyond. The book challenges our everyday ideas about our minds and our brains and offers key insights on how we can begin to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
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I am thrilled to present my guest on today's show:  Professor Allan Combs, PhD.
Professor Combs is a consciousness researcher, neuropsychologist, and systems theorist at California Institute of Integral Studies where he is the Director of the Center for Consciousness Studies. He is the author of over 200 articles, chapters, and books on consciousness and the brain, and is the founder and past President of the International Society for Consciousness Studies, as well as the recent recipient of their Lifetime Achievement Award for advances in consciousness studies. This award was personally delivered by Deepak Chopra. He is Editor of the journals, CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century, and The Journal of Conscious Evolution. He was also the winner of the 2002-2003 National Teaching Award of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies.
Professor Combs' most widely read books include Consciousness Explained Better: Towards an Integral Understanding of the Multifaceted Nature of Consciousness; Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster (with Mark Holland); and Thomas  Berry: Dreamer of the Earth (with Ervin Laszlo).

Show Notes:
Animal consciousness; past lives; morphic resonance; ghosts; sacred places and spaces; the Imaginal Realm; Virginia Woolf and phenomenology; consciousness is not confined to the brain; brain is a transceiver; the relationship between fractals, consciousness and poetry, and what this tells us about the nature of Reality

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Combs 

Carter Phipps is an author, speaker, and thought leader who works at the intersection of business, personal development, and culture.His recent book Conscious Leadership – which he co-wrote with Wholefoods founder John Mackey and Steve McIntosh–  was selected as a Financial Times Fall Book Pick 2020 and has been praised by some of the business world’s leading thinkers, including New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant, who called it “Living proof that we don’t have to choose between purpose and profits.”
Carter could be described as a visionary writer, business futurist, and evolutionary. He co-founded of the Institute for Cultural Evolution, a non-profit social policy think-tank based in Boulder, Colorado, and inspired by the insights of Integral Philosophy, which seeks to better understand and influence the cultural roots of America’s challenges.

In this episode we discuss: Evolution and culture; Carter's think-tank that looks at evolution and politics, and addresses polarising issues within the united states of America; the notion of political progress; why it’s neither good nor realistic to wish for an entirely new paradigm without tackling our current systems; conscious leadership and conscious capitalism, and the counter-argument to the anti-capitalist stance; are we being pulled by the future or pulled by the past?; the notion of Telos and a teleological universe; the Omega Point and Teilhard de Chardin; the miniature worlds theory in quantum mechanics and carter’s opinion on it; whitehead’s notion of adjacent potential; why we have reached a stage when mysticism needs to participate in the evolution of humanity; is consciousness involved in cosmological evolution?; the intelligence involved in ontogenesis – i.e when chemistry becomes biology; transhumanism and the supplanting of the Sacred through AI. 
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Debashish Banerji is the Haridas Chaudhuri Professor of Indian Philosophies and Cultures and the Doshi Professor of Asian Art at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is also the Program Chair for the East-West Psychology department. Prior to CIIS, he served as Professor of Indian Studies and Dean of Academics at the University of Philosophical Research, Los Angeles. He has taught as adjunct faculty at the Pasadena City College, University of California, Los Angeles and University of California, Irvine. His interests lie in postmodern, postcolonial and cross-cultural approaches to Indian philosophy, psychology and culture. 

His most recent books are Integral Yoga Psychology: Metaphysics and Transformation as Taught by Sri Aurobindo and Meditations on the Isha Upanishad: Tracing the Philosophical Vision of Sri Aurobindo 

Among other things, Professor Banerji and I discuss his notion of integral anthropology and the mystical experience; the life and teaching of Sri Aurobindo; the concept of a Supermind, and the existence of a cosmic consciousness; the trajectory of evolution, Being and Becoming, animal consciousness, and yoga.
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I am thrilled to welcome Stef Sifandos as the guest on today's show. Stef is a trained educator and relationships expert with a background in behavioral science. He is passionate about leading people to closer to their highest potential and to each other.
Stefanos’ philosophy merges the best of Eastern and Western methodologies to promote spiritual balance and empower people in life and love. From trauma release to navigating the murky waters of modern masculinity, to helping women understand the men in their lives, he helps people escape negative patterns and cultivate a positive sense of self. Stefanos has worked with thousands of men and women from all walks of life; special forces soldiers, Olympic gold medalists, elite fighters, and everyday people have relied on him to restructure and reframe their relationships.
Today we deep-dive into the meaning of masculinity - its healthy embodiment as well as its shadow expression. Stef tells us about how we can understand what it means to 'be a man', exploring cultural and biological contexts. We examine how the loss of healthy rites of passage for boys and young men has had a devastating impact on the masculine expression. We talk about the Father wound - which is something close to my heart - and the way this plays out for men and women. Toward the end of the conversation we move onto sacred ecology and the concept of a more regenerative world.
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The Irish Poet and mystic William Butler Yeats is the central topic of today’s show. For any of you interested in poetry, mysticism and the occult, then you are in for treat. I discuss Yeats with Danny Rhodes, a Yeatsian academic who completed his PhD at Queen Mary University – titled ‘Radiant Matter: Alchemy, Radium and Field Poetics in W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound’. Dannyhas given multiple papers on the alchemical interpretation of radium, ectoplasm and anti-atomist theories of matter, all in relation to modernist poetics and the work of Yeats and Pound.

In this episode, Danny and I talk about Yeats’ life and work including the influence that the visionary William Blake had on him; his relationship with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; Yeats’ thoughts on consciousness, individual, collective, and cosmic, and how that exactly co-insides with Carl Jung’s theories; the micro and macro nature of reality, and how for millennia mystics intuited what science then proved to be true. Danny also explicates Yeats’ entangled love life, and offers analysis of the poem Leda and the Swan and how this tells us about the mystical shift in society that was occurring at that time.
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This episode is a solo riff on Power and Empowerment. This subject is of endless fascination to me - the true meaning of what it is to be powerful. Unfortunately our society has conflated power with material wealth and exertion of control over others - which is a corrupted vision of power. What we need, more than ever, is to recalibrate our understanding of power. We all need to become fully empowered - to free ourselves from our own shackles and limiting beliefs.
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My guest is Dr Miles Neale, a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner and psychotherapist in private practice. Miles is also a faculty member of Tibet House in New York, and author of Gradual Awakening: The Tibetan buddhist path to becoming fully human.

Miles has more than twenty years integrating the mind-science and meditative practices of Tibetan Buddhism with psychotherapy, trauma research and neuroscience. Today in the show Miles and I discuss the path of Lam Rim, that is, the path of gradual awakening, as well as the meaning of Nirvana, transforming trauma, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and its application to the individual's life, fatherlessness and forgiveness, shadow integration, and what Miles calls 'the sickness of paradigm'.

This episode is a must-listen for those of you who sense there is more to reality than meets the eye, but are struggling to navigate a path forward. When we come to understand that our individual life is as much of a heroic journey as Odysseus or Hercules or Harry Potter, then we are much better placed to handle the obstacles and challenges that come our way. For it is through difficulty that we realise our destiny. I hope you enjoy the show.
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My guest today is Bruce Parry, an English documentarian, film-maker, author, trek leader and Royal Marines commando officer. Bruce rose to prominence for the various series he did for the BBC, most notably ‘Tribe’ and ‘Amazon’, in which Bruce explored extreme environments, lived with remote indigenous peoples and highlighted many of the important issues being faced on the environmental frontline. Although brought up in a devoutly Christian environment, Bruce’s extensive exposure to indigenous tribes opened his spiritual horizons. He now describes himself as a born again Rational Animist delighting in the mysteries of Being. 

Spirituality and the meaning of the Sacred is something we get into in the podcast, but the main focus for the conversation is the theme of egalitarian societies, and re-connecting with our deep ancestral wisdom – because, contrary to popular belief, humans have not always been patriarchal and hierarchical.
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Professor of Archaeology at Durham University, Paul Pettitt, joins me  for a riveting discussion on Ice Age Cave Art, and the origins of humanity's artistic expression.

Professor Paul and I deep-dive into the lives of the pre-historic peoples who walked the Earth many tens of thousands of years ago. We discuss the art that these people were painting, often kilometres into remote and dangerous cave systems – how they did it, and what it meant for them. Professor Paul tells us about the scientific methodologies used to discern such information, as well as the philosophical theory of mind, animism, totemism, Palaeolithic funerary rites, and what the Sacred might have meant to these ancient people.

This is one of my favourite episodes; because, along with language, human creativity and the artistic urge is what makes us so fundamentally different from other animals.
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