In this conversation with Anthony Peake we discuss the bold hypothesis he calls ‘Cheating the Ferryman’: when we die we fully relive our lives again and again (a bit like the film Groundhog Day) Anthony proposes that we are composed of two entities, the Daemon who has lived our life over and over and remembers it all, who provides hints to the Eidolon who is renewed every new life. We talk about Deja vus and it’s relation to this hypothesis, temporal lobe epilepsy, schizophrenia, cannabis induce...
May 04, 2024•1 hr 53 min•Ep. 52
In this conversation I talk to Christopher Hareesh Wallis about his book ‘Near Enemies of the Truth: Avoid the Pitfalls of the Spiritual Life and Become Radically Free’ Have you ever been told, “You create your own reality”? Have you been encouraged to “be your best self” or “follow your bliss”? Nowadays these slogans are everywhere, but what if they’re doing more harm than good? After over thirty years as a scholar-practitioner of meditation and Tantric philosophy, acclaimed author Hareesh expl...
Jan 05, 2024•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 51
Anna Grear has been living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) since 1989 which has seen her confined to her bed and house for extended periods of time where she was forced to go deep into her psyche. In this interview Anna describes the profound spiritual experiences associated with her condition, and the many practical skills she has learned in how to cope with CFS. We also discuss how fatigue is a metaphor and symptom of late stage capitalism. Anna coaches people with CFS and also those wishi...
Nov 29, 2023•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 50
Dr Roger Walsh is a very wise man. Since the 1970's he has devoted his life to exploring consciousness and wisdom through a wide variety of spiritual and psychological techniques. This conversation is a camp fire chat and trans-generational gifting of the lessons Roger has learned on his long journey mastering these practices. Roger (M.D., Ph.D. DHL.) graduated from Australia’s Queensland University with degrees in psychology, physiology, neuroscience, and medicine, and then came to the United S...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 33 min•Ep. 49
Kathryn was a Mormon from the age of 2 until 42 and in 2020 she had an awakening where she realised Mormonism was…..bullshit. We talk about her life as a Mormon, the type of things she used to believe in and what the institution was like. We go into the details of exactly how she came to question the truth of Mormonism, her leaving of the church and what her current life of freedom is like. She has completed a course with cult expert Steven Hassan to help her understand the nature of cults and t...
Jul 06, 2023•2 hr 4 min•Ep. 48
Yeshe has lived a very interesting and unusual life. She has lived of-grid her whole adult live in basic hand made shelters called benders, yurts and for the last 12 years a round house which she built with her partner and raised a family in. All of these homes have not been connected to the electricity grid and services such as running water, mains gas, or sewers. It is a life close to nature and offers many benefits and challenges alien to the average modern human. She also spent 12 years trav...
Jun 06, 2023•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 47
Lama Tsultrim Allione was the first American to become a Tibetan Buddhist nun in 1970. For several years she lived in sacred places, caves and hermitages in the Himalayas. Later she disrobed, married and had four children. She maintained a deep practice and studied with many of the most important Tibetan teachers of the last 50 years. She is now a renowned teacher and one of the only female lamas in the world today. In the early 1970’s she was initiated into the Chad practice which was developed...
May 14, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 46
Sally Adnams Jones is a therapist, author and artist living in Canada. She grew up in Durban, South Africa. She has studied human transformation with several of the great Indian gurus who moved to America, where she did her post graduate work in transformative Yoga Education. Later in Canada she became the director of a residential, Yoga Education Centre, and a teacher of Transformative Art Education at University. She has written the book ‘Art-Making with Refugees and Survivors: Creative and Tr...
May 04, 2023•1 hr 50 min•Ep. 45
The short answer to what MetaModern spirituality is that it is what comes after New Age spirituality. The New Age, popular from the 1970’s onwards, was strong in the sense that its progressive outlook brought together all the various spiritual traditions of the world, but weak in the sense that it was rather shallow and whimsical in this approach. The MetaModern view keeps the openness to the rich variety of traditions and practices from around the world but makes a point of situating that withi...
Aug 14, 2022•1 hr 38 min•Ep. 44
Kim Barta is an experienced and versatile developmental psychotherapist, specialising in delivering specific therapeutic techniques to the different developmental stages humans grow through in their lives. He is skilled in working with the ‘shadow’ a term coined by Carl Jung to denote the parts of ourselves that our outside of our conscious awareness. Often the shadow is treated from a single perspective addressing only one aspect of the shadow with a bias towards integration. Kim breaks the sha...
Jun 19, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 43
In this conversation with Dr Jude Currivan we discuss her book ‘the cosmic hologram: in-formation at the centre of creation’. Jude is a cosmologist, planetary healer, and futurist. She was previously one of the most senior business women in the UK as CFO and on the Executive Boards of two major international companies. She has a master’s degree in physics from Oxford University specialising in quantum physics and cosmology and a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Reading in the UK r...
May 24, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 42
Jahan Khamsehzadeh, Ph.D. completed his dissertation on psychedelics in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. His book, The Psilocybin Connection: Psychedelics, the Transformation of Consciousness, and Evolution of the Planet—An Integral Approach, was his dissertation. He earned his Masters in Consciousness and Transformative Studies from John F. Kennedy University, and his Bachelors from the University of Ar...
May 04, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 41
Chris Lewis (Chris walks the UK) is walking the entire UK coastline (20,000 miles). He has been walking for four and a half years so far and covered 16,000 miles. For three of these years he was walking solo in the wildest parts of the UK with hardly any money and foraging for wild food. The Highlands and Islands of Scotland in particular have large expanses of very wild country with extreme weather conditions and dangerous terrain. Solo time in the wilderness is one of the most ancient techniqu...
Apr 25, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 40
Bernardo Kastrup is the executive director of Essentia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effe...
Apr 12, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 39
This conversation is a comprehensive exploration of psilocybin mushrooms and their impact on our psychology, biology, and social development. How—and why—do psychedelics exist? Did psilocybin catalyze our early human ancestors’ social evolution? How humanity has co-evolved alongside “magic” mushrooms—Jahan Khamsehzadeh, PhD, explores our historical and ancestral relationship to psychedelics and presents new and exciting research about what psilocybin can mean for us today. Supported by archaeolo...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 27 min•Ep. 38
Mary Finnigan and Rob Hogendoorn have co-authored an amazing book exposing the corruption and abuse perpetrated by Sogyal Rinpoche and his multinational Tibetan Buddhist organisation Rigpa. Sogyal was probably the 2nd most famous Tibetan Buddhist in the world, after the Dalai Lama. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying is a hugely successful book, selling millions of copies and being translated into many languages and in fact started my own spiritual journey in the 1990’s. Mary and Rob show that ...
Feb 12, 2022•1 hr 56 min•Ep. 37
Zhal’Med Ye-Rig is a teacher in the Aro gTer which is a Vajrayana (Tantrik) lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. The teachings of the Aro gTer descend from a lineage of enlightened women, beginning with Yeshe Tsogyel who founded the Nyingma tradition of Buddhism with Padmasambhava. The lineage is now represented in Britain, America and Europe by several Lamas and their senior ordained students. These teachers are Westerners which gives them some advantages over Eastern teachers in terms of understanding...
Feb 09, 2022•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 36
Emergent Dialogue empowers you to participate in a new culture of creative togetherness. Through this collective practice, you become an agent of emergence, discovering how to make yourself available to what wants to become known between us. Neither simply a method nor a technique, emergent dialogue takes the most fundamental human activity—speaking with each other—and transforms it into a powerful shared space of curiosity, reverence, meaningfulness, and potential. Emergent Dialogue brings to l...
Feb 07, 2022•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 35
Damien Walter is a writer and storyteller. His work has appeared in The Guardian, BBC, Wired, Independent, Aeon and OUP. He teaches the rhetoric of story and writing the 21st century myth to over 35,000 students worldwide. He is also the host of the superb Science Fiction podcast. In this episode we discuss science fiction as the mythos of the modern scientific worldview. We feel that the best science fiction makes conscious use of both the logos (rationality) and mythos (the imaginal and non-ra...
Jan 23, 2022•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 34
Voice dialogue is a psychotherapeutic technique based on the view that we are composed of many sub-personalities or ‘voices’. That is why it is referred to as the psychology of selves as opposed to the mono-self view. Through the help of a facilitator we learn to speak in the 1st person from different ‘voices’, exploring their unique wisdom, benefits and downsides. Ultimately we discover we are not actually identified with any one of these sub-personalities but rather all of them held within awa...
Dec 15, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 33
Voice dialogue is a psychotherapeutic technique based on the view that we are composed of many sub-personalities or ‘voices’. That is why it is referred to as the psychology of selves as opposed to the mono-self view. Through the help of a facilitator we learn to speak in the 1st person from different ‘voices’, exploring their unique wisdom, benefits and downsides. Ultimately we discover we are not actually identified with any one of these sub-personalities but rather all of them held within awa...
Dec 06, 2021•58 min•Ep. 32
In this episode I talk with Michael Garfield (host of the Future Fossils podcast, and Complexity podcast) about the Weirdness of this moment in history. Technology is steadily making its way towards, and eventually inside our bodies (desktop, to laptop, to smart phone, to brain implants, to biological computing) and this is causing many people to freak out. This process began with the use of the first tools but has gained momentum in the last 50 years. Michael challenges our assumptions about th...
Nov 22, 2021•1 hr 58 min•Ep. 31
In this episode we explore the relationship between Shiva and Shakti in Non-Dual Tantra in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives. Non-Dual Tantra playfully mixes and harmonises these fundamental perspectives: 1st person (I am Shiva and Shakti), 2nd person (I worship Shiva and Shakti as deities) and 3rd person (Shiva and Shakti as described in the rich philosophy and theology of Non-Dual Tantra). Ben Williams is a scholar / practitioner of Indian religions and the history of Śaiva tantra. He has r...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 31 min
In this conversation with author and Integral philosopher Steve McIntosh we explore the practice and cultivation of the 7 classic virtues (justice, prudence, temperance, courage, love, hope and faith) that have been central to Western culture for the last 1000 years, and prior to that in simplified form dating back to ancient Greece. These virtues are the tools for harnessing the value energy of 'The Good' (as in the Good, the True and the Beautiful as described by Plato) this leads to the creat...
Sep 11, 2021•2 hr 15 min•Ep. 29
Iboga is a potent psychedelic plant native to Central West Africa. For the Bwiti and Pygmy people, Iboga has been used for thousands of years for physical and spiritual healings, self-discovery, and to study the Art of Living. It is also very successful in freeing people from addictions to substances like opiates and negative behaviours like OCD. Levi Barker has been working with Iboga for 12 years, and has worked at the Iboga Wellness retreat centre in Costa Rica for the last 6 years helping ma...
Aug 07, 2021•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 28
In this conversation with spiritual teachers Linda Groves-Bonder and Saniel Bonder we discuss some of the key attributes of a 21st century spiritual practice. We pay particular attention to healing the spirit / matter split that is so prevalent in many pre-modern traditions East and West and continues into modernity where spirit is completely stifled and we are left with an entirely mechanistic view of life. We also explore the different experiences of Awakening: waking up as transcendent formle...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 45 min•Ep. 27
In this conversation with Integral psychotherapist Mark Forman we explore the differences between psychotherapy and spiritual practice and the specific contexts when each of these methods is most appropriate. For example your meditation practice may bring up psychological issues that your meditation teacher will likely be unqualified to help you with and you would get more effective help from a psychotherapist. If you are having transpersonal experiences with meditation or psychedelics then a ps...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 49 min•Ep. 26
In this conversation with Donald Clark we explore his 4 year journey with the Wim Hof method and cold water therapy. Donald has been working with the Wim Hof breathing techniques in conjunction with cold showers, ice baths and his experimental modifications to a chest freezer creating a plunge pool with temperatures as low as -7 degrees centigrade. We focus in particular on the psychological and transpersonal experiences that can be opened up by cold water techniques and what to do with them. Fo...
May 24, 2021•1 hr 54 min•Ep. 25
This is a recording of a lesson I taught on the panoramic awareness technique in meditation. This technique is different to the use of focused attention as used in following the breath for example. Panoramic awareness is effortless, always in the present moment, luminous, free and endlessly fascinating. We don't make awareness happen as it is simply a fact of our identity and we find out through practice that it is actually the essence of our sense of self. For more information about my work ple...
May 16, 2021•59 min•Ep. 24
In this conversation with Jeff Salzman we explore how incorporating the three major worldviews of Traditionalism, Modernity and Postmodernity into ourselves can expand our identity, making us stronger, wiser and more empathetic. These three worlviews are tearing each other apart in the 'culture wars' out there in mainstream culture. This culture war is repeated inside the psyche of individuals too. We can heal these wounds by understanding and feeling the unique benefits of each worldview while ...
May 14, 2021•1 hr 25 min•Ep. 23
