The word resonance is commonly used these days to convey agreement with a point of view or perspective. But resonance is much more than this. Resonance implies a universe that is sonorous and reverberatory and that operates according to the principles of harmony. Within this, many cultures have seen the role of the human being to become an instrument to cultivate, through ritual repetition, a resonance with our fellow beings, with land, and with cosmos. This vision is not metaphorical. Science i...
Oct 12, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast Sophie Strand describes herself as a writer, an animist troubadour, and a giant pile of composting leaves. Her lyrical, eco-centric vision of the mythic has gained her a wide following, as she blasts monomyths wide open into swarms of glittering spores. With essays entitled 'My Saint is a Weed,' 'Confessions of a Compost Heap,' and 'Becoming a Ruin,' Sophie's work brings the mythic into the tangible, helps myths regain their body, and places stories deep in the...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like. Yet mystic experience might be indescribable in modern culture simply because weve failed to culturally describe it. For those cultures historically who tread the mystic space with great regularity, theres nothing indescribable about it. Mystic unity has been mapped. The people who have tread its spaces for thousands of years describe in s...
Aug 31, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Author Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that stories have shapes that there are a few common wave-trajectories that underlie all of our stories. This episode builds on Vonnegut's thesis and explores the energetic shapes and trajectories of myths trajectories that serve, within oral myth telling cultures, to take the listener on an experiential journey of scattering and rejoining, of rupture and cascade, of coiling and release, and of journey and return. These wave dynamics exist throughout natur...
Aug 05, 2021•1 hr 14 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast Trance, traverse, transformation, tradition, transcendence, transgression all come from a single Indo-European linguistic root TRA, which signifies some type of crossing over. Crossing over is something human beings have always been inclined to do populations migrate across great expanses as explorers seek new horizons. Too much emphasis on crossing over, however, can lead to worldviews of transcendence, in which the purpose of existence is to 'get past' rather than exist in harmony wi...
Jul 15, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word trauma. Yet addressing trauma is nothing new traditional cultures across the globe have historically had their own forms of trauma work, without ever labeling it trauma work. For many cultures for many years, cathartic ritual practice that bypasses the conditioned mind has served multiple purposes as it regrows and re-patterns brains and bodies and communities. These ritual...
Jun 22, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Reflections of gratitude, some info on ongoing study opportunities, and a little bit about the long-term vision as The Emerald turns two years old. Support the Show.
Jun 01, 2021•17 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, author, teacher, artist and Apalech clan member Tyson Yunkaporta presents a model of five minds kinship mind, story mind, ancestor mind, pattern mind, and dreaming mind that together form a way of seeing, knowing, and interacting with the world in a relational context. This episode looks at the rampant fragmentation in the modern world which impacts everything from spiritual movements to transhumanist science to conspiratorial wo...
May 26, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Stories of lightning and lightning-bearers pervade global mythology. With so many tales of mighty gods who punish mortals with lightning it can be easy to view the presence of lightning in the myths as simply a metaphor for power or brute force. Yet the lightning myths go a lot deeper than this. Across the world, the traditions most familiar with states of ecstatic rapture use a common language of lightning. This lyrical episode re-awakens the story of Semele, mother of Dionysus herself incinera...
May 08, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deliberate and unintentional offenses and generally mess with established orders. Yet they are often seen as indispensable to these orders they are renewers and cultural innovators and often pave the way for great change. So in many cultures, Tricksters, despite their shenanigans, are seen as sacred. In modern society, we have no such ritualization of cultural...
Apr 21, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast With the announcement that water futures have begun trading on the stock market, it's time to take a deeper look at our relationship with water. Water challenges us to ask how we are in relationship to something that is both continuous and discrete, something that flows, moves, evaporates, seeps, and pours forth. Yet rather than honor this multivalent nature of water, humans have tended to treat water as an object and a servant. Water is compartmentalized, sequestered, and marginalized, bot...
Apr 02, 2021•1 hr 23 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessaryrole in human culture and in the shaping of human history,causing some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonial animal' that is the human being. Trance states traditionally help communities reinforce shared bonds, establish values, gain insight into the nature of reality, establish reciprocal relation with the natural world, and even heal. Yet in...
Mar 12, 2021•2 hr 39 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast Water is life all life on planet earth depends on it. So it is no surprise that in the mythic visions of all peoples, water teems with personhood and agency and speaks with many voices. The Ancient Greek world was populated with water beings, who existed not just as abstract concepts but as living entities that were deeply tied with ecstatic trance rituals. The Greeks heard the voices of hundreds of distinct animate forces in the sea, voices of melancholy and bliss and rapture. This joyous longi...
Feb 04, 2021•1 hr•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast The link between music and trance is so deep that many ethnomusicologists will say that every single culture on the planet has some form of musically-driven trance tradition. Right at the heart of these traditions sits the drum. Far from being a 'primitive' instrument, the drum is advanced technology more often than not, it is the essential instrument that opens up the doorway to states of rapture. This long-known power has led to the development of intricate cultures of trance drummin...
Jan 19, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast Telling people to 'just listen to reason' or 'just look at the facts' in a post-fact world mired in addictive consumption is akin to telling an addict 'just stop using.' Well intentioned, but not ultimately addressing the root of the issue.So while rational analysis of factual sources is certainly necessary to combat conspiracy and widespread untruths, there are deeper forces at play within human minds, hearts, and societies that ultimately must be addressed in orde...
Dec 30, 2020•54 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate. Imbued with lifeforce. Inhabited by and permeated with forces, with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasnt a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasnt, actually, an -ism. It was felt experience. It ...
Dec 01, 2020•58 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast Spontaneous expressions of gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day, and a look at the role that gratitude plays in consciousness, community, and cosmos. Support the show
Nov 26, 2020•34 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast Light, within nature, has always drawn us in, held our attention, and revealed marvels through its variegated displays. Coleridge said that the eye is to light like lover to the beloved. Light and human attention share a very deep relationship. And with our attention increasingly drawn towards a luminous focal point that is manufactured, it becomes more and more difficult to experience something essential that exists in the meeting point between us and the light of nature around us. This meeting...
Nov 15, 2020•49 min•Ep 43•Transcript available on Metacast Who remembers Medusa? Hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseus that Medusa. She's in the news again, because a sculptor has re-imagined the story of Perseus and Medusa as a tribute to the #MeToo movement and this time, Medusa's the one doing the beheading. Some have embraced this re-telling, but the founder of #MeToo has spoken out strongly against it, saying that #MeToo isn't about vengeance or simply 'turning the tables.' Lost in the current dia...
Nov 01, 2020•42 min•Ep 42•Transcript available on Metacast The defining characteristic of the postmodern capitalist world is a cycle of decontextualization for the sake of monetization. It happens everywhere with the products we buy, the food in our grocery stores, and the spiritual traditions we import from other lands. Modern Yogic and Buddhist practices have been removed from the deep context of their original practice and often what is lost in the process is the living, breathing, animist heart of tradition. This episode explores how consciousness n...
Oct 08, 2020•52 min•Ep 41•Transcript available on Metacast Conspiracy theories abound these days. The Yoga and wellness communities have come under fire for being particularly prone to indulging these theories. Yet the teachings of Yoga ask us ultimately to look deeply at the difference between focused presence and spiraling mental agitation. This is how, in indulging conspiratorial world views, the yoga world is overlooking a profound treasure that lives at its very core. For right at the heart of yogic teaching is perhaps the greatest conspiracy of al...
Sep 16, 2020•48 min•Ep 40•Transcript available on Metacast Honey was revered across the ancient world found in Egyptian tombs and Chinese apothecaries and referred to glowingly in ancient Sumerian medical texts. The myths and stories that come to us from the ancient world are soaked in honey. Honey is certainly a remarkable substance. But is that enough to explain the presence of liquid nectar in myth upon myth upon myth? There are strange commonalities in the myths and stories about nectar and honey. The association of honey and immortality. The descri...
Sep 01, 2020•40 min•Ep 39•Transcript available on Metacast Human beings have a complicated relationship with want. For some traditions, desire, want, or longing sits right at the heart of creation itself, providing the spark that sets the universe in motion, and is inherent to what it means to be human. Yet unchecked want has also resulted in untold suffering for people and planet. Renunciate traditions have put forth practices and philosophies designed to get rid of the want altogether. But is getting rid of want even possible? Is longing inextricably ...
Aug 18, 2020•49 min•Ep 38•Transcript available on Metacast These are mythic times. And what are we called to do in mythic times? What is the deep mythic transformation we are seeking? Often the mythic journey requires something very simple of us. Often, it asks us to cultivate the simple acts of paying attention and remembering. Remembering, in a chaotic age, who we are and what we want, what we truly long for. This episode of The Emerald draws upon the bhakti or devotional traditions of India and their profound relationship with longing to explore the ...
Aug 04, 2020•49 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast Wonder of wonders, words have started arriving for my 13-month old son! Their arrival is a deep reminder that words are more than detached concepts they are somatic, they invoke, they carry with them the power and potential of transformational magic. Speech, or voice, in the Vedic vision is the goddess herself, and poetic discourse is a river whose ultimate promise is to allow us to 'step in tune with being', or to 'find the angel' that lives between us and another. Yet these...
Jul 21, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Ep 36•Transcript available on Metacast Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland Australia. He's the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World . Sand Talk looks deeply at the basic pattern of nature and how that pattern reflects through all of creation, informing not only how natural systems operate, but reflecting into systems of law, harmonious conduct, and relational communication. Join Tyson and me as we take a journey t...
Jun 30, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep 35•Transcript available on Metacast "We dont go to other planets because our planet is dying. Our planet dies, specifically because we perpetually want to go somewhere else." Today on the podcast, we look at humanitys increasing obsession with transcending planet earth, in the context of the mythologies of human restlessness. How human beings, whether through certain religious visions of transcendence, or through the increasing transhuman and supernatural focus of modern science, are ultimately looking to be anywhere but...
Jun 24, 2020•48 min•Ep 34•Transcript available on Metacast The third book of the Patajali yoga sutras, the Vibhti Pda, is often skipped over in modern yoga teacher trainings. Why? Its descriptions of supernatural powers of yogis who can shrink to the size of an atom, fly, and read minds can cause cognitive dissonance or discomfort in the modern mind. Yet right in the heart of this discussion of the extraordinary powers is an animate, rapturous vision that is concurrent with the experience of human ritual culture dating back in an unbroken line to the Pa...
May 19, 2020•1 hr 7 min•Ep 33•Transcript available on Metacast The poet/bard/singer holds a special place of reverence in many cultures and traditions. Far from being seen as 'escapism,' sung music, incanted verse, and told story was essential technology for transporting people to a place of greater presence, awareness, focus, and timeless vision that ultimately could assist in navigating life well. This is why story, poetry, and song are more vital now than ever. On this live storytelling episode of The Emerald, we conjure up the old bards and si...
May 06, 2020•43 min•Ep 32•Transcript available on Metacast In this live storytelling episode, we look at mythological visions of the world axis or central column across a range of cultures. Starting with the simple upright alignment of the human spine, and journeying to the central mountain of the Indian mythologies and the world tree of the Norse and Siberian cultures, we explore stories and ritual practices that illuminate 'center' and our relationship to it. Support the show...
Apr 22, 2020•42 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast 
