91: Richard Rohr– The Universal Christ; ego development, forgiveness, & non-dual consciousness by John Price

Interview begins @ 4:43 The Red Book, also known as Liber Novus, is a manuscript created by Carl Jung between 1914 and 1930. It is a highly personal and symbolic work that documents Jung's exploration of his own psyche through active imagination and dream analysis. The book contains a wealth of material, including paintings and calligraphy, that Jung created as part of his self-exploration, and it is considered to be one of the most important works of Jung's career. The Red Book was not...

Interview begins @ 8:08 Today Dr. Miles Neale and Dr. John explore “ego death”, and a few issues with this language, we continue discussing the nature of the ego, the Buddhist frame for soul, returning from the mountaintop or a break-through experience, nondualism, Miles reveals several of his transcendent experiences and also a personal experience with death, “cheap” nondualism, addiction to the nondual, spiritual bypassing, grief, experiencing death, trauma and the unconscious, the healing...

Conversation starts @ 4:36 In this episode I meet with Dr. Stephen Gray to discuss his latest book, How Psychedelics Can Help Save The World: Visionary and Indigenous Voices Speak Out. We begin by noting the cultural and individual issues that that psychedelic medicine is positioned to treat, we continue with the ways that we have lost our mythic and symbolic root and religious systems, overpopulation, planetary sickness, the universality of change and transformation, the Dunbar number and...

Conversation starts @ 5:47 Hermes Trismegistus was believed to be one of the wise men of his time, and a study of his texts reveals, not a general philosophy, but a spiritual path for initiates who seek to achieve gnosis by direct acquaintance of the true nature of reality as we experience it. Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff begins this analysis by guiding us into the four-core dimension of his book, Hermeticism, spirituality, historical imagination, and altered states of knowledge. All of this...

Conversation starts @ 6:31 We begin with a discussion of Sean’s shift of consciousness during a psychedelic experience at a young age wherein he could map his experience onto what the traditions of chaos theory and Aldous Huxley’s perennial philosophy explained. Following this experience and at the suggestion of a professor of mysticism, Sean followed the thread to help with his integration. With a deep history as a psychonaut combined with Sean’s interest is in music and pop culture he...

Conversation starts @ 8:25 How can we understand traditional accounts of visionary experience in terms of the neurophysiology of our brain? What are the scientific bases for shamanism and healing, cross-culturally, throughout history beginning with the Byzantine era to today? These are several questions posited by Dr. Winkelman within the first few minutes of the interview. We continue exploring the void experience of introverted mysticism and the narratives expressed in extroverted...

Conversation starts @ 4:15 The Santo Daime, a syncretistic tradition including parts of indigenous South American religion, African folk traditions, and Catholicism, is a new religion as of the early 20th century. All of this to say that in this conversation, we are invited into a deep dive to explore the nature and formation of religion in general as we look at the specifics of a sacred ayahuasca-based new religious tradition. We begin with Dr. Barnard’s first-person experience within The...

Conversation starts @ 7:26 This conversation begins with a discussion of the banisteriopsis vine (ayahuasca) featured in the background. We explore Dr. McKenna’s first adventure down to South America to study and explore psychedelics used in the Amazonian medico-religious process. This endeavor would eventually connect him with several elder medicine men who created mixtures for Dennis to study – “We want to learn everything that you know about ayahuasca.” We discuss how the indigenous folks...

Conversation starts @ 4:31 We begin our conversation exploring José’s background, and with the likes of Dr. Andew Samuels and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés as mentors, his intellectual, professional, and spiritual orientation ranges from depth psychology and meditation to attachment and spiritually integrated psychotherapy. First up is one of José’s papers on spirituality and psychotherapy wherein he takes a critical look at “Jungian” approaches and identifies some of the dangers of both...

Conversation starts @ 6:29 “Ecstasy, trance, and soul flight … these powerful and potentially transformative elements of ancient experience have long been left to the fringes of archaeological research.” Dr. Sarah K. Costello and John begin with a question exploring the often unconscious issue of projecting modern perspective onto antiquity to support a current argument. As an archeologist, anthropologist, & art-historian, Dr. Costello’s peak into antiquity is through the lens of the...

Conversation starts 5:45 Growing up within a family lineage of community herbalists and healers, Dr. Hobbs leads us through his orientation to healing and medicine starting with an overview of medical and healing systems, in particular the intersection between eastern and western medicine. The central question that Dr. Hobbs asks is: “What is medicine?” This, an obvious question that, sadly, is not often reflected upon. Dr. Hobbs urges us to cultivate and source our own medicine within our...

Conversation starts 8:36 We begin by exploring Dr. Kastrup’s history with Jung and philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries and very quickly move into antiquity through the classicist Peter Kingsley. We discuss the layers of meaning in writing throughout our cultural history, common misunderstandings of texts, positivism of the 19th at 20th century, assumptions within systems of thought and belief, the problem of abstractions and interpretations of reality, Aristotelian logic and...

Conversation starts @ 8:15 What happens when the place where expansive, meaningful, transcendental, and just simply weird conversations becomes just as important and meaningful as the conversations that began there? Esalen. We begin our conversation exploring the birth and development of The Esalen Institute and then the boundaries of the geographical container dissolve and the ideas emerge to the foreground – religion, psychology, mysticism, & psychedelics. Jeff and I discuss the...

Conversation starts @ 5:38 Dr. Miles Neale offers us his breadth of knowledge about psychology, Buddhism, suffering, and psychedelics. We begin this conversation with Miles describing his early training, teachers, and practice as he traces the path of his development as a psychotherapist and teacher of Buddhism. Dr. Neale emphasizes a multidisciplinary dialogic process that is necessary to address the suffering of our time. We discuss The Four Noble Truths, a foundational insight and...

Conversation starts @ 7:50 This conversation begins by exploring the ground-level of psychedelics and it broadens to other aspects of the relationship between religion and psychedelics, continuing through the psychedelic renaissance, science and the sacred, consciously bringing these sacraments into the broader culture to heal and support those who seek out these transformative, a brief history of psychedelics in the U.S., mystical experiences setting the stage, the Perennial philosophy,...

Conversation starts @ 4:10 This conversation begins by exploring the Dr. Laz’s early history with dreams and lucid dreaming, hypnagogic dreams, why we dream, how to approach dreams and dream work, Tibetan Buddhism and dreaming, lucid dreaming and heightened consciousness, lucid dreaming and ego control, the paranormal and dreaming, symbolic and literal interpretation, archetypes and dreams, process to lucid dream, mysticism and dreams, leaning lucid dreaming, wake induced lucid dreaming,...

Conversation starts @ 3:01 In this episode, John interviews author, book editor, meditation teacher, and psychotherapist, Dr. Connie Zweig. We begin by exploring Connie’s history with meditation and the value and importance that she places on maintaining a practice in order to be present with the often overwhelming affect of inner work. She cites the necessity of body practice to work with the shadow – the content, traits, memories, and affects that does not fit into the ego-ideal. Why do...

73: Mark Ryan – A Different Dimension: Reflections on the History of Transpersonal Thought by John Price

Conversation starts at: 6:57 Dr. Price and Dr. Smith begin the conversation with the definition of shamanism, and continue with Carlos Castaneda’s influence of shamanism in North America – noting the controversy surrounding the word of Castaneda, the mystical in the literary, Toltec principals and lineage, the complexities and ultimate mystery of reality and the universe, the layers of the “knowable” and the “unknowable,” brujerio/a: sorcery from the Oaxacan and Mazatec traditions, the...

Conversation starts at - 6:25 In this episode, Dr. Price interviews Dr. Mark Plotkin, one of the world’s renowned ethnobotanists who has studied traditional indigenous plant use with elder shamans (traditional healers) of Central and South America for much of the past 30 years. In this conversation we explore traditional Amazonian medicine, the great ethnobotanist Dr. Richard Schultes, shamanism, the modern psychedelic renaissance, the ethics of entheogens, ethnobotany 101, Western and...

Conversation starts at: 5:05 In this episode Dr. Price interviews Dr. Claire Villarreal. Claire is an expert in teaching Tibetan Buddhism, meditation, and Tantra. We discuss the relationship between the social self and the self empty of all that is not self, the connection between spiritual practice and psychedelics, what happens when the threads of our ordinary reality are “cracked open,” attachment, issues with translation in religious traditions, peak experience, obstructions and the...

Conversation starts at: 5:38 We begin this conversation acknowledging the dynamic between biological reductionism and mystical experience within the ever-growing field of psychedelic assisted therapies. The conversation continues by exploring consciousness, spirituality, the nature of religion, the expanding field of end of life care and psychedelics, mystical experience, the history of psychedelics as a healing modality, integration of mystical experience, Aldous Huxley’s influence, death...

We begin the interview by exploring Mark’s work as a translator and the artfulness of translation by grounding our discussion in one of his books, Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation, originally written in Greek. Within minutes, Mark states that religion fulfills one or two purposes: to control or to transform – our conversation explores the latter. We discuss the psychedelic nature of the Book of Revelation, the nuances of translation, living texts, Mark’s unpublished translation of the...

67: Thomas Hatsis – The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic by John Price