Evolving Spiritual Practice

Evolving Spiritual Practice

Spiritual practice, like everything else in life, is evolving. What does this mean? By ‘Spiritual Practice’ I mean any activity that expands your sense of identity, for example meditation, contemplative philosophy, prayer, yoga, martial arts, psychedelics, transpersonal psychotherapy, fasting, visualisation, lucid dreaming, conscious parenting, forgiveness and much more. By ‘Evolving’ I mean that everything develops and adapts over time. Most of the spiritual traditions that have spawned these transformational practices emerged hundreds and often thousands of years ago in the pre-modern era. Modernity (rationality and science) and post-modernity (cultural diversity and the information age) are hugely influential historical periods that have happened since then, and I believe that contemporary spiritual practice needs to integrate the insights of these two worldviews as well as the premodern in order to keep being relevant and adaptive in a changing world.

Episodes

May 4, 2024 113 mins

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 h...

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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 o...

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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 st...

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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, phys...

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July 6, 2023 124 mins

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 ...

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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...

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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. I...

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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. Sh...

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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 practice...

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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 ...

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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 do...

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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 Studi...

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April 25, 2022 83 mins

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 dan...

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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...

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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 exciti...

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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 ...

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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 w...

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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 cur...

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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 co...

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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...

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