Is a Politics of Higher Consciousness, Wholeness, and Love Possible? At the moment, very few are anticipating the advent of a higher political consciousness. How can they be? The US has just joined Russia, North Korea, and Belarus in refusing to condemn aggression on Ukraine, or even to admit it occurred at all. Many Americans and former allies are increasingly fearful that the United States is itself becoming an authoritarian state, joining a wave of authoritarianism sweeping the globe. Such as...
Jul 09, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 34
There are two worldviews of prominence today. The oldest and wisest one our guests call kincentricity , following the late dear ancestor Dennis Martinez, who coined the term. Kincentricity defines our humanity through our inextricable connections with all there is. The second and newest worldview, dominant in the past five or six hundred years, we might call egocentricity , a view that places humanity as separate and transcendent from nature. In the first view, nature is seen as a place of bless...
Jan 02, 2025•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 33
Freedom and Equality: What Does it Mean to Be an American? The United States has long held a curious and ambivalent relationship with freedom. The American founding fathers learned much about freedom and equality from Native Americans, who lived in truly egalitarian societies, but later confined the original Americans to reservations. The founding ideals of the United States – liberty, equality, and natural rights, came largely from Native America. It was Chief Canasatego, the Onondaga chief of ...
Sep 26, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 32
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…" It is striking how much these immortal words, written by Charles Dickens in the mid-19th century at the height of the Industrial Revolution, still apply today. We live in a similarly paradoxical era, only a more...
Aug 27, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 31
A community of Earth System scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre asked a powerful question: How do we define a safe operating space for humanity with all that is currently known about the Earth’s various systems? They determined that there are there are nine critical thresholds that together define a safe operating space for humanity: biosphere integrity, climate change, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, ocean acidification, atmospheric...
Jan 25, 2024•49 min•Ep. 30
In the Northern Hemisphere, today marks the winter solstice designating a point in the year when we are afforded the shortest amount of daylight—of course, if you live in say Australia or Chile, you are experiencing the opposite. It is also around this time of year, that many of our spiritual traditions anticipate the return of light. Today we have reached our darkest moment and it is time for the light to slowly return. It is a time that represents optimism, rebirth, and fellowship. And it is a...
Dec 21, 2023•36 min•Ep. 29
Welcome to a special re-broadcast of our conversation with Deb Haaland and Sally Roesch Wagner in honor of Indigenous Peoples' Day 2023 This podcast was originally published on December 8, 2020. Deb Haaland now serves as Secretary of the Interior in the Biden Administration. She is the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet Secretary. Native Americans not only influenced the founding fathers, they also inspired the ‘founding mothers’: 19th century women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia...
Oct 09, 2023•44 min•Ep. 4
When the Buddha was asked “Are you a reincarnation of God?” he replied “No.” “Are you a wizard then?” was the next query and “No” again he said. “So “What are you?” they asked, intent on knowing. He simply replied, "I am awake.” And true enough, Buddha means “the awakened one.” Buddha’s life work was teaching how to awaken. These days, however, there is a backlash against being woke, as if being awake to what is really happening in our country is a bad thing. Many people want to go back to sleep...
Oct 05, 2023•46 min•Ep. 28
In today’s very special podcast we will re-air a discussion that was originally recorded and produced by our good friends at the East-West Psychology Department of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) for their own program, the East-West Psychology Podcast ( https://east-westpsychologypodcast.com/ ). The discussion itself is an introduction to a set of two conferences to be held at the California Institute of Integral Studies in celebration of “150 Years of Sri Aurobindo, the Pion...
Sep 21, 2023•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 27
The East Indian sage Ramana Maharshi was once asked, “How should we treat others?” He replied, “There are no others.” From the perspective of the sage, the universe is one being. It is for similar reasons that the values of respect, kinship, and love are inseparable in aboriginal culture, as are gratitude, humility, and sacred obligations to original instructions rooted in traditional stories (the Lore). Join us as we share traditional aboriginal stories and wisdom of how to practice respect, ki...
Dec 20, 2022•58 min•Ep. 26
Native Americans in professional healing professions may creatively incorporate Native ways in their work, but the path is not easy. The same is true for those coming from a Western background that realize there is something lacking in modern medicine and are attracted to Native ways of healing. Western and Native approaches to healing may seem incompatible—linear-mechanical, biological or genetic causes versus interdependent, community and natural world imbalances—but there is a way to integrat...
Sep 20, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 25
EPISODE Part 2: The renowned physicist and philosopher David Bohm once said, “The great strength of science is that it is rooted in actual experience. The great weakness of contemporary science is that it admits only certain types of experience as legitimate.” Life after death, or the survival of post-mortem consciousness, is one of the areas modern science has tended to shun despite the fact that there is a mountain of evidence that supports it. The volume of evidence is indisputable, from over...
Apr 21, 2022•42 min•Ep. 24
TWO PART EPISODE: The renowned physicist and philosopher David Bohm once said, “The great strength of science is that it is rooted in actual experience. The great weakness of contemporary science is that it admits only certain types of experience as legitimate.” Life after death, or the survival of post-mortem consciousness, is one of the areas modern science has tended to shun despite the fact that there is a mountain of evidence that supports it. The volume of evidence is indisputable, from ov...
Apr 15, 2022•42 min•Ep. 23
With the advent of the nuclear age, Western science reached the pinnacle of invention, but lacked a critical understanding of its underlying wisdom or purpose. Carl Jung framed the problem as “modern man in search of a soul.” When the Western mind turned outward, searching for what was missing, it first turned to the East. A trickle of Eastern gurus soon became a flood, and by the late 1960s, all sorts of gurus, roshis, rinpoches, and other teachers were promising some form of mastery of life - ...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 22
Marcellus Bear Heart Williams is what I call a living ancestor. A living ancestor is a person whose wisdom has not departed, but instead taken up residence in the hearts of those who loved him, and even perhaps in those that never met him – someone like myself. Living ancestors are not deceased, as in inert or forgotten. Their energy has not been destroyed; their spirit and work in the world is ongoing. Join us as we invite into the conversation the spirit of Bear Heart, his wife, Reginah Waters...
Feb 11, 2022•49 min•Ep. 21
Nancy Rhodes : Called "a champion of American Opera" by Ronald Rand, Nancy Rhodes is the long-time Artistic Director of Encompass New Opera Theatre and the librettist for The Theory of Everything , a new opera inspired by physics’ superstring theory of multiple dimensions and alternate universes. At Encompass, she has staged scores of operas, about 70 all told, including Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All , Blitzstein’s Regina , Britten’s Phaedra , Evan Mack's Angel of the Amazon , and The As...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 20
To say humanity is living unsustainably is a massive understatement. In the words of Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, humanity is like a jockey, whipping its horse faster and faster to get to the finish line, not realizing that the finish line is a brick wall. The proliferation of nuclear weapons did not make us change. The ecological movement of the 60s and 70s, ushered in by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, helped awaken us, but not enough. After some modest imp...
Aug 23, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 19
We live in an era when nearly every governor, state congressperson, or mayor supports maximum economic growth. It doesn’t matter what party you are from – or whether you support lower taxes or more social programs. Economic growth covers up all sins. Increasingly, it does not matter what country you are from. Economic growth is promoted as the way forward, the way to becoming more prosperous, the way to becoming a more “developed” nation. But economic growth is not the answer. In the words of Or...
Jul 26, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 18
This week, Glenn Aparicio Parry shares directly with listeners some of his own thoughts about current events, putting them in a larger historical context. An uplifting but realistic peek at the founding of the United States, the history of the Republican and Democratic parties, emphasizing how much they have changed over time and could change again, perhaps even become defunct and have a new party form. The questions he examines are: “Why stay optimistic during troubles times?” and “Is the world...
Jun 14, 2021•39 min•Ep. 17
A tiny virus did what climate scientists and the Paris accords could not do. It shut everything down. Mother Earth took a breath. The air and water became clearer and cleaner. More people planted gardens. We had time to think. And most importantly, to reset our thinking. What is the human relationship with the microbial world? How did we get to the brink of environmental destruction in the first place; what are zoonotic diseases and why are they emerging now; how does this crisis end? Can we get...
May 30, 2021•49 min•Ep. 16
A tiny virus did what climate scientists and the Paris accords could not do. It shut everything down. Mother Earth took a breath. The air and water became clearer and cleaner. More people planted gardens. We had time to think. And most importantly, to reset our thinking. What is the human relationship with the microbial world? How did we get to the brink of environmental destruction in the first place; what are zoonotic diseases and why are they emerging now; how does this crisis end? Can we get...
May 17, 2021•37 min•Ep. 15
The past year has brought us an ongoing global pandemic, tremendous social unrest, political polarization, the near complete erosion of truth in politics, the rise of authoritarianism and white nationalism culminating in the insurrection at the US Capitol. Amid all of this chaos and destruction, where do we find hope? And not just hope based in shallow wish fulfillment, but hope grounded in deep perennial wisdom traditions? Jurgen Kremer and Karen Jaenke, editors of ReVision Journal, decided to ...
Apr 23, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 14
Einstein once said “linear time is an illusion, but a stubbornly persistent one.“ Have we have been looking at time all wrong – that instead of looking for linear cause and effect we should be looking for relationship? The late Anishaanabe elder Tobasonakwut Kinew thought so. He preferred to think of time as: “What kinds of things want to happen together?” Is it a coincidence that some of the most innovative researchers into time and dreams think similarly? People like Monte Ullman, James Hillma...
Apr 05, 2021•51 min•Ep. 13
With all our systems – economic, political, healthcare, and more – crashing all around us, how do we even begin to imagine change? Where is the change? How do we think about it; talk about it; take part in it? Is there such a thing as systems change anymore? Or are we kidding ourselves with abstract formulas that cannot possibly keep up with the changes happening all around us? Right now, everyone is trying to figure out how to live in a worldwide pandemic. We have been in pandemics before, but ...
Feb 01, 2021•57 min•Ep. 12
Addressing the Primary Wound of Separation The primary wound at the root of social and ecological dysfunction is separation. While ancient humans understood life as a blessing and humanity’s health as inextricably tied to the health of the Earth, moderns have come to imagine that we are separate from both the natural world and each other. These expressions of separation have not only led to environmental pillaging and hoarding of resources; they have also led to existential and social isolation,...
Jan 17, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 11
Many Native Americans are still suffering from historical trauma from contact with European societies over the past five-hundred years. The negative impacts of colonization upon Native peoples have been undeniable and devastating—and the effects are ongoing. The colonists introduced numerous infectious diseases into Native populations against which they no immunity defenses. They also pushed Native populations to accept a Western education system and forced the adoption of the English language a...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 10
In honor of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, we do not have any guests on the program. Instead, Glenn Aparicio Parry offers his personal reflections on RBG in the context of American history and what he sees as America’s sacred purpose: unity in diversity, a purpose yet to be realized. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg was Jewish but she was also catholic with a small “c.” She was a Universalist. She represented the universal good in human beings. And if she were Catholic, I believe she would be canonized. I a...
Dec 14, 2020•24 min•Ep. 9
Since tie immemorial, people have been telling stories. Storytelling has served as a way of building coherent, cohesive community. It is also a way to pass down wisdom from earlier generations for the benefit of future generations. The wisdom of storytelling could be applied to today’s ecological challenges, such as climate change. But this has not occurred often enough. Ever since the invention of the printing press, the written word has rapidly eclipsed the voice of oral tradition— similarly, ...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 8
The nation appears to be on the brink of civil war, if not already in it. With polarization as bad as at any time in our nation’s history, how can we stop the violence? Discussions about “law and order” ordinarily end up promoting division and triggering historical trauma. Is there a way to stop the cycle of violence and heal victims and perpetrators alike? Can the truth set us free? If so, how do we go about telling the story? And who gets to tell it? As challenging as this time is, with the un...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 7
Under colonization, traditional forms of inclusive, consensus-based Native American governance were systematically replaced with Western forms of centralized, top-down leadership. Women, who once held an integral role in the political processes of many tribal nations, were pushed out or marginalized. Then, LaDonna Harris came along. Working with Indian societies to restore self-determination, and working with the federal government to improve the efficacy of tribal sovereignty, Harris has done m...
Dec 14, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 6
