There’s a great myth that is told and retold in cultures throughout the world. The story goes like this — something is harnessed, raised upwards, suspended there, until finally there is a great cracking open and then a cascade of sweetness downward. Mythologist Joseph Sansonese calls this — and not Campbell’s monomyth — the real Great Myth. Today on the podcast we explore myths of rupture — from the cracking of Krishna's butter pot to the collapse of Troy — that invoke the yogic process. Th...
Apr 07, 2020•44 min•Season 1Ep. 30
More and more pandemic experts are saying that humanity's disruptions of natural environments are responsible for outbreaks of new viruses. This sense of disease as intimately tied to imbalances that occur within nature is found in traditional Indian and Tibetan understandings, in which local nature goddesses are seen as both bringers and dispellers of disease. If there is something to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps it is that we need a deep re-evaluation of how we interact ...
Mar 25, 2020•39 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Eyes have always held sway over the human imagination — mesmerized us, scared us, inspired us. The windows to the soul, they’ve been called. They’ve been the subject of song and poetry, folklore and myth. Consciousness, in the Indian texts is repeatedly described in relation to eyes. These glorious visions of eyes and consciousness reach their culmination in the 8th century Netra Tantra, the Tantra of the Eye, which opens with a playful question about the nature of eyes and spirals into somethin...
Mar 03, 2020•39 min•Season 1Ep. 28
We often assume that Paleolithic people lived in a world that was fundamentally less than ours because they didn’t yet have what we have. We assume that their existence was incomplete, because it hadn’t yet culminated in us. Yet new findings on our ancestors' culture, physiology, and physiognomy paint a very different picture. This episode takes us deep into the Paleolithic era, in which 97% of our ancestors lived, and dispels notions about war, violence, primitivism, chaos, and the minds a...
Feb 18, 2020•41 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Bette Midler recently made headlines for tweeting a picture of three girls at a museum distracted by their phones instead of admiring the art. Yet the context in which we view art tends to be just as compartmentalized and distracting as a phone. Today on the podcast, we look at varying visions of art in cultural context — from the paleolithic caves to Indian temples to modern performance art — and move towards a conclusion that art, perhaps, isn’t just in the object. It’s in the state and qualit...
Jan 21, 2020•37 min•Season 1Ep. 26
A few weeks back, wizard-yogi-talkshow host Russell Brand interviewed scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast Under the Skin. It’s the November 1st, 2019 episode and it’s highly worth listening to. On the show, Neil puts forward some commonly held suppositions about western science — that the scientific method is the only valid method of arriving at the truth. That subjective reality has nothing to offer the discussion on truth. That science itself is ultimately objective. And that the proo...
Jan 07, 2020•46 min•Season 1Ep. 25
In this poetic ode to the animate vision of the cosmos that has been so central to humanity for so long, we explore the idea that the ritual heart of both culture and cosmos itself is poetry, and that poetry is the only way to accurately convey and invoke a cosmos that is ultimately artful. Poetry exists so humans can be propelled into states where we feel one with nature. Hence the gods “clothe themselves in poetic meter,” say the Vedas, and in doing so, give us a direct vehicle through which t...
Dec 24, 2019•37 min•Season 1Ep. 24
The power of myth exists beyond representation and symbolism. Myths grow out of a time when to utter the word ‘sky’ around a fire at night would transmit something directly to the listener, something very different than the experience of reading the word ‘sky’ on a page from the comfort of a library. Today on the podcast we explore the somatic dimension of myth, the idea that the great myths take place within the body. Myths invoke somatic journeys, focusing on one somatic journey in particular,...
Dec 10, 2019•35 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Bears have been right at the center of pan-global belief systems for a very long time, causing some anthropologists to speak of a circumpolar bear cult dating back possibly over 100,000 years. Given the role that animals have played in shaping human imagination, it's not a stretch to say human beings have, over the ages, learned a whole lot from bears. And it may not be a stretch even to posit that some of our deepest spiritual archetypes and practices — including the practice of meditation...
Nov 26, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 22
What's the point? Well, far from being an image of smallness or insignificance, the single point, the dot communicates a lot. In fact, in India, there are songs devoted to the point, texts that extol its radiant qualities, practices designed to link to it as a focal point of meditative awareness. The importance of little dots takes on even greater significance when we realize that all life forms — and even the universe itself — began as a little round dot. In Indian cosmology, Bindu, the po...
Nov 12, 2019•35 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Cauldrons — cooking vessels — have been part of the human experience and have captured the human imagination for a very long time, from the ancient Celtic cauldron myths to Shakespeare's archetypal vision of three crones and their bubbling brew to the cauldron cults of the African diaspora. But far more than a simple vessel, the cauldron becomes in many cultures synonymous with larger internal and external processes — with the alchemical journey of the transformation of the soul, with yoga,...
Oct 29, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 20
In this episode we take a deep dive into the abyss — the seemingly unbridgeable gap that exists between science and spirit. Are there places where science — which sees the universe as something that, to quote physicist Stephen Hawking, doesn’t need God in order to exist, and spirituality, which sees an animate universe created with consciousness and perhaps infused with consciousness — can find commonality? What are these places, these commonalities? How far do they go? And are these two worldvi...
Oct 15, 2019•35 min•Season 1Ep. 19
The active practice of imaginative visioning has been utterly central for many societies. Far from being fantasy, such practices reinforce a deep understanding of the cosmos in which the active cultivation of imagination relates directly to tangible actualization — the ability to do, to see and understand, to shape one’s mind and therefore one’s life, to reap the benefits of spaciousness, luminosity, and calm in the mind, to bridge the inner and outer worlds, to understand oneself, the place of ...
Oct 01, 2019•36 min•Season 1Ep. 18
The word 'enchanted' is used a lot, from old fairy tales to modern pop culture. But enchantment is not something reserved for fairy stories or for vague tingling feelings when we encounter something mysteriously wonderful. What if I were to tell you, for example, that enchanted land is an actual thing, a very real thing. I’ve been to dozens upon dozens of places that are enchanted. You’ve probably walked unknowingly across enchanted land yourself. There is enchanted land on at least si...
Sep 25, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 17
He’s stirred the imagination of poets and writers and artists for 30 centuries. Rilke wrung his pale heart out to him. He finds his way into Shakespeare and Nietzsche, into the librettos of Stravinsky and Lizst. He’s the subject of ballets and sonnets and even avant-garde films. I’m speaking, of course, of Orpheus. In this episode of The Emerald, I speak with author Ann Wroe about her remarkable book Orpheus: The Song of Life. In the book, Wroe explores Orpheus from his Thracian shamanic roots i...
Sep 17, 2019•58 min•Season 1Ep. 16
It’s easy to dismiss the practice of sacrifice as brutal, but the fact is that sacrifice, enacted in varying degrees in both external and internal ritual, has dominated human traditions for thousands of years in cultures around the world. Today on the podcast, a look at humanity’s relationship with sacrifice — its prevalence, its permutations, and how modern culture, without ritualized forms of sacrifice, compensates for what has been a driving force for humanity for thousands of years. Perhaps,...
Aug 27, 2019•39 min•Season 1Ep. 15
In the modern western understanding of consciousness, certain states are afforded the status of more important, or real, than others. The visionary state of meditative trance, which has been critically important for many cultures, takes a back seat to 'Normal Waking Consciousness.' Yet is the visionary state really less important than what we call Normal Waking Consciousness? And how have we historically treated those states of consciousness that veer from what has been termed ‘normalc...
Aug 20, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Modern yoga has put forward a vision of the whole human being that revolves around comfort, ease, freedom from pain, and the healing of trauma. Yet in many cultures, what we call discomfort is actively sought out as a portal to the state of spiritual revelation. In fact, almost all traditional rituals that lead to the revelatory state of trance involve deliberate discomfort or some form of ritually induced trauma. In this episode, we journey to what can be a very uncomfortable place — the cremat...
Aug 13, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 13
In his classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, about four-dimensional alien beings and a protagonist that has come unstuck in time, Kurt Vonnegut describes death as 'violet light and a hum.' The state of absorptive consciousness has been associated with the color violet, and with the sound of the hum, in many cultures around the world for many thousands of years. In this episode, we look at the relationship of the trance state to this place of the violet hum, exploring Zen koans, Greek myth...
Aug 06, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 12
This week on The Emerald, a conversation with author Robert Tindall on Homer, Tolkien, Paleolithic cave art, Zen koans, Shakespeare, sacred song, and the visionary, animistic consciousness that connects all of them — a 'once universal mode of consciousness' in which 'reality is understood to be pervaded and structured by powerful numinous forces and presences that are rendered to the human imagination as the divinized figures and narratives of myth'. You don't have to be...
Jul 30, 2019•49 min•Season 1Ep. 11
Sacred stones are ubiquitous across India. You find them in villages, in rural shrines, and in major urban temples that see tens of thousands of pilgrims a day. Shiva, the third most popular deity on the planet, is worshipped in the form of a smooth black stone. Many of the Indian goddesses too are worshipped as stones. Why? Why should such a simple object receive so much attention? To really understand this, we have to edit out a whole lot of cultural clutter and take ourselves to a more direct...
Jul 24, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Animals have not only ‘shared the planet’ with human beings as we often hear on nature shows, which of course is a noble description intended to cultivate empathy for animals and urgency around their preservation. But animals are much more than this — more than just co-inhabitants of the world. In this episode, I explore the idea that the human mind, thought, imagination, language, and ingenuity are utterly dependent upon — and grow directly out of — our experience of animals. In fact, it is dif...
Jul 16, 2019•30 min•Season 1Ep. 8
"I mean seriously, what's more out of touch with objective reality? The Lakota sense of Wakan-tanka, mother and father nature, mirrored in cultures and traditions around the globe. Or, say... Wal-Mart?" Who gets to claim objective reality? Scientists, leftists, rightists, capitalists, religious types, the spiritual-but-not-religious, atheists, modernists and ancients alike have all tried. Ultimately it may be that the only thing that can lay claim to objective reality is mystery i...
Jul 09, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Ancient visions of cosmic dismemberment and ego destruction meet modern yoga practice with its focus on self-care and self-worth in this episode of The Emerald. In creation myths around the world, from Scandinavia to India to Mexico, dismemberment is a central theme — a vision in which a primal oneness is torn into pieces to create this universe of diversity. This cosmic dismemberment is also reflected in the experience of the individual practitioner, who, in their journey towards finding wholen...
Jul 03, 2019•33 min•Season 1Ep. 7
In this mytho-poetic look at one of the defining modern political issues, Josh explores ideas of freedom, empathy, and responsibility and how they are viewed in various cultures, cosmologies, and mythologies around the globe. In the west, freedom tends to be seen solely in terms of the material freedom to follow our wants and impulses free of external interference. In yogic traditions, freedom is seen as moving beyond these same impulses towards a deeper vision of peace. Ultimately, questions ar...
Jun 25, 2019•31 min•Season 1Ep. 6
What can we learn from those who can read the ocean like we can read words on a page? How can we transform how we view culture when modern western culture likes to position itself as the top of the cultural pyramid? What does a vision of sacred geography have to offer us? What are its implications for planet and person? A discussion with anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis. If you don’t know the work of Wade Davis, you should. Davis is a Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, an...
Jun 18, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what it feels like to have whiskers? Those bristling antennae, so bright and alive... Or have you put your hand on one of those globes at a science museum and felt the energy surge through the very ends of your hair? Today on the podcast, we’re going to talk about hair. Tumbling, cascading, curling, radiating — hair holds a very special and very energized place in the imaginative mind. Across the world, visions of the divine involve wild-haired godde...
Jun 11, 2019•31 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Today on the Emerald, we dive a little further into the topic of wonder. Not wonder as just a fleeting feeling, but rather wonder as a state of consciousness deliberately architected through creative ritual. Wonder that is pursued systematically, stoked, as our interviewee says, in order to break open our day to day experience and get us to something deeper. In this way, wonder becomes a form of resistance to the current state of the world. Join us as Josh interviews professor and author Tulasi ...
May 26, 2019•44 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Today on The Emerald. How did paleolithic and neolithic peoples see the world? What if, as an increasing number of anthropologists now think, they had access to a trance state — a vision-space — that is all but missing from the modern mind? A state that we don’t miss or see as vitally important because it’s like a relative we never knew we had. Gone out of mind and memory. Join Josh for this look at the human relationship with trance and imagination and how these essential states of consciousnes...
May 26, 2019•34 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In this inaugural episode of The Emerald we take a look at some of the more mythic implications of the 2019 Notre Dame fire, the place that buildings hold in human consciousness and myth, as well as the little-known history of the cathedral which involves a popular goddess of the ancient world. Architecture can tell many stories — at its best, it reflects a synchronous relationship between human beings and nature. The great temples and mosques of the world are designed to convey the proportions ...
May 26, 2019•32 min•Season 1Ep. 1
