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3 episodes with western mind
3 episodes with western mind
2 episodes with western mind
2 episodes with western mind
4 episodes with western mind
2 episodes with western mind
2 episodes with western mind
4 episodes with western mind
2 episodes with western mind
https://youtu.be/YjhHIgZzO3k Podcast audio: In this episode of The ARI Bookshelf, Jason Rheins, Ben Bayer, Don Watkins, and Alex Silverman examine two contrasting perspectives on the influence of Christianity: Tom Holland's Dominion and Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind and The Reopening of the Western Mind. While Holland's widely discussed book argues that Christianity is the foundation of science and Western values, Freeman's books present a contrary view. Our panelists bring their expertise to evaluate the arguments in both books, assessing their historical and philosophical accuracy. The discussion covered: The central arguments of the books; Why the Church feared Aristotelian philosophy; How Freeman's books provide a more thorough and philosophical analysis than Holland's; How Holland diminishes Greek influence on modernity; How Holland appropriates secular ideas and thinkers into Christianity; The role of Christianity in the abolition of slavery; The relationship between Christianity and science; Why Holland's book gained popularity while Freeman's did not. The video premiered on March 11, 2025.
In this episode of the Red Beard Embodiment Podcast, Alex sits down with Ruth Milsten, a licensed clinical social worker, yoga teacher, and trauma specialist, to explore the transformative power of safe, regulating touch and holistic healing. Ruth shares her journey from traditional social work to integrating yoga, sound healing, and somatic practices into her therapy. She delves into the unique challenges and gifts of being a highly sensitive person, offering insights into how to navigate trauma, build self-compassion, and create a sense of safety in the body. Whether you're a therapist, a highly sensitive individual, or someone curious about the mind-body connection, this conversation is packed with wisdom and practical tools.Ruth Milsten brings over 30 years of experience working with developmental trauma, complex PTSD, and highly sensitive individuals. In this episode, she discusses the importance of creating safe spaces for clients, whether through yoga, sound healing, or regulating touch. Ruth explains how trauma impacts the nervous system and shares her multi-modal approach to therapy, which includes movement, breathwork, and energy clearing. She also highlights the challenges faced by highly sensitive people, who often struggle with overstimulation and people-pleasing tendencies, and offers strategies to help them reconnect with their inner selves and build resilience.Don't miss this rich conversation on healing trauma, embracing sensitivity, and the power of safe touch. Ruth's expertise and compassionate approach offer valuable tools for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of the mind-body connection. Tune in now to learn how to create safety and regulation in your own life or in your practice.Key Highlights:[00:15] Ruth's journey from social work to somatic therapy[05:30] Understanding trauma's impact on the nervous system[10:45] The challenges and strengths of highly sensitive people[15:00] Attachment theory and mother-infant bonding[20:20] Practical self-regulation techniques for healing[25:40] The importance of integrating movement into therapy[30:10] How to develop a personalized healing practice[35:25] The role of breathwork in trauma recovery[40:50] How trauma manifests in physical symptoms[45:15] The connection between trauma and chronic stress[50:30] Tools for managing emotional overwhelm[55:00] Final thoughts and key takeaways from RuthLinks and Resources: Dr. Elaine Aron The Highly Sensitive Person: https://hsperson.com/ Eastern Body, Western Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Eastern-Body-Western-Mind-Psychology/dp/1587612259 DSM V: https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm Stephen Terrell - Nurturing Resilience: https://www.amazon.com/Nurturing-Resilience-Developmental-Trauma-Integrative/dp/1623172039 Stephen Porges: https://www.stephenporges.com/ Follow us on social media: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RedBeardSomaticTherapy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/redbeardsomatictherapy/ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandermgreene/
Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: / @history102-qg5oj Link to my Twitter-https://twitter.com/whatifalthist?ref... Link to my Instagram-https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlyn... RECOMMENDED PODCAST: Check out Modern Relationships, where Erik Torenberg interviews tech power couples and leading thinkers to explore how ambitious people actually make partnerships work. Founders Fund's Delian Asparouhov and researcher Nadia Asparouhova kick off the series with an unfiltered conversation about their relationship evolution. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id1786227593 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5hJzs0gDg6lRT6r10mdpVg YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ModernRelationshipsPod Bibliography: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzche Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler The Gulag Archipelago by Solzenitsyn Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker Humanity's Ascent by Charles Eisenstein The Unabomber's Manifesto Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung Das Kapital by Karl Marx Universe 65 by Calhoun Sex and Power in History by Amaury de Riencourt Nihilism by Seraphim Rose The Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas A Secular Age by Charles Taylor Seeing like a State by James Scott The Leviathan and Its Enemies by Sam Francis The Managerial Revolution by James Burnham The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist Atrocities by Matthew White The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler The History of Philosophy by Will Durant The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Rusell The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent Envy by Helmut Schoeck The Happiness Hypothesis by John Haidt
MINI-SERIES: Theology-Strategy-Practice for ministry teams. Stu, Tim and Joel look at the practice element of ministry teams. They explore how friendship fuels the heart of ministry.They kick things off by reflecting on Wes Huff's appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience and the cultural shift toward appreciating Christianity's influence on the West. Is this a Bob Dylan or a Jesus Christ Superstar moment?From there, they dive into the often-quoted observation that 20% of the people in church do 80% of the work. Why is it critical to talk about who is serving in the body of Christ, and how can churches value people beyond just their contributions?They share how Soul Revival Church has intentionally moved away from a professionalised or approach to ministry teams and instead embraced the idea of “ministry as mates”—where friendship is foundational to serving together. When inviting someone to join a ministry, the question isn't “Can you fill this role?” but “Do you want to be friends with us?”They discuss how Soul Revival's 10 service teams operate across seven gatherings, balancing a hybrid model of generalist and specialist pastor ministry models. They explain how this structure—organised by the Soul Revival Council—creates a space for volunteers to serve well without turning church into another workplace. At Soul Revival, friendship is the cultural engine that powers everything from preventing burnout to building a vision of Christian community that loves and serves together.Finally, they take a deep dive into the logistics: how the coordinator model and ministry pairs allow service teams to grow organically, scaling from small beginnings to larger expressions of ministry. They also highlight how the Soul Revival Council ensures all ministries, big and small, have a voice.00:00 Intro and CULTURAL ARTEFACTS: Wes Huff on Joe Rogan20:33 Who is serving the body of Christ?28:58 Friendship, service over professionalism34:52 Love being sincere. Creating something bigger than ourselves49:39 "Don't ask me to be friends with people"55:48 People don't want to turn up to work again1:08:20 Reducing frustration in churchesDISCUSSED ON THIS EPISODEJoe Rogan Experience #2252 - Wesley HuffAlex O'Connor on Wes Huff's episodeGavin Ortlund Wes Huff's episodeJoe Rogan Experience #2219 - Donald TrumpJoe Rogan Experience #2221 - JD VanceBob Dylan Recalls Moment He Met JesusAmy Grant Reflects on Christian Music Beginnings, Mainstream BreakoutThe Rest is History: ChristmasDominion: The Making of the Western Mind, by Tom HollandThe Purpose Driven Church, by Rick WarrenCONTACT USShock Absorber Email: joel@shockabsorber.com.auShock Absorber Website: shockabsorber.com.auSoul Revival Shop: soulrevival.shopCheck out what else Soul Revival is up to here
Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and the resurrection, or whether you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity are among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen. Within four centuries of Jesus's death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—half of the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world. How and why did Christianity take off, and how did it change the world in such radical ways? Here to have that conversation is historian Tom Holland. Tom is one of the most gifted storytellers in the world, and his podcast, The Rest is History, is one of the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history's most interesting characters and sagas. I can't recommend it more highly. Holland's book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind chronicles thousands of years of Christian history, and it argues that Christianity is the reason we have America. That it's the inspiration to both the French and the American Revolutions. That it's the backbone of wokeness as an ideology, but also the liberal forces fighting it. Today, Tom explains how and why the story of Christianity won, how it shaped Western culture and values, and if he thinks our vacation from religion might be coming to an end. Merry Christmas and happy holidays! If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. **** This show is proudly sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). FIRE believes free speech makes free people. Make your tax-deductible donation today at www.thefire.org/honestly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Das Buch vertritt die These, dass der Aufstieg des Christentums zur Marginalisierung des freien Denkens und zur Unterdrückung von Wissenschaft und Philosophie in der Spätantike führte. Der Autor wirft der frühen Kirche vor, ein dogmatisches System etabliert zu haben, das intellektuelle Freiheit erstickte. Christian hat das Buch gelesen und stellt seine zentralen Thesen vor. Neues Buch von Jörn Dyck: Die Morde der BibelDas Buch bietet einen fundierten und gut lesbaren Rundgang durch das Alte Testament.Kommentare? Hier lang zu YouTube...Weitere religionskritische Webseiten:Podcast: KetzerpodcastDie Morde der BibelPodcast: MGEN — Man glaubt es nichtAtheismus-TV auf YouTubeArtikel: AWQ — Answers Without QuestionsNews in deutscher Sprache: AMB — Atheist Media Blog (Blasphemieblog)News in deutscher Sprache: HPD — Humanistischer PressedienstBibelwissen und Religionskritik: Bibelkritik.chWitziges: Reimbibel.deKlassiker: Die Legende von der christlichen Moral
We LOVE to hear from you! You can text us feedback + suggested episode topics here.In this episode of the Astrology Hub Podcast, Amanda Pua Walsh sits down with renowned astrologer, author, and philosopher Richard Tarnas. Known for his groundbreaking works, The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, Rick shares insights on astrology's gifts and challenges, its role in shaping individual and collective understanding, and its future amid technological advancements. This intimate conversation highlights his profound wisdom and humility, offering listeners a glimpse into his unique approach to astrology and life.What You'll Learn in This Episode:
It's quite a time to be alive, and in this episode with incredible artist Luke Schroeder (@lukeschroederart) we explore ways to use imagination, clear communication and truth seeking, and key actions to create a better world. The transition won't be easy, but it will be incredibly rewarding! In 10 years we can be living in systems that are healthy, rewarding, regenerative - if we orient towards a future where that can come forth. We have a lot of the ideas we need as a culture, it's time to bring them into the forefront of our minds and take action on them. In this episode you will find key ways to re-engage with life, community and connection, such as: Acknowledging we are ecosystems ourselves, and honoring our microbiomes Meeting in person and having open, longer form conversations Using Nonviolent Communication - not sure where to start? Order the book! Accessing the rich plethora of plant medicines and psychedelics that exist to heal our minds and our bodies Confronting our own cynicism. Realizing that everything we buy or participate in is a vote for that thing to keep persisting. Our individual choices matter - we have so many grassroots things we can do. Don't wear polyester, don't buy from factory farms, but also know that no one is perfect. Coordinating an open flow of information, and using that to turn the marketplace we live in to a democratic system by working together in this way. Coming up with a precise set of demands of things that we want to see happen so that when we protest, we get the full spectrum of changes we want because we're so clear on our deeper set of demands and our plans. Meditation and nature connection practices. Books and Podcasts Luke recommends to help understand and navigate these times: Guns, Germs and Steel - how did the continent of Europe come to dominate the world the way it has? Overview of the society and situation we find ourselves in. The Closing of the Western Mind by Charles Freeman - Explores the rise of Christianity and fall of philosophical paradigms of Rome and antiquities. Unruly Americans Woody Holton Elinor Ostrom - Environmental writer and researcher analyzing how people solve the problems of the commons and communal resources use. Podcast - What is Politics? Great for analyzing and dissolving a lot of the dualisms that beset us. Follow Luke on Instagram Follow Jennings on Instagram Follow the Podcast on Instagram
Sintonía: "Coconut" - Manu Dibango"Lagos Go Slow" - "Du Bush a Bush" - "Walking To Waza" - "Blowin´ Western Mind" - "Groovy Flute" - "African Pop Session" - "Ponda Maloko" - "Zoom 2000" - "Aphrodite Shake" - "Jungle Riders" - "Iron Wood" - "Ba-Kuba"Todas las músicas compuestas e interpretadas por Manu DibangoTodas las músicas extraídas de la recopilación (1xLP/1xCD) "African Woodoo" (Fremeaux & Associes, 2008), con 17 grabaciones inéditas realizadas entre 1971 y 1975 para posibles proyectos y trabajos en Cine, TV y Publicidad.Escuchar audio
On this episode of the pod, my guest is David Cayley, a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster. For more than thirty years (1981-2012) he made radio documentaries for CBC Radio One's program Ideas, which premiered in 1965 under the title The Best Ideas You'll Hear Tonight. In 1966, at the age of twenty, Cayley joined the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO), one of the many volunteer organizations that sprang up in the 1960's to promote international development. Two years later, back in Canada, he began to associate with a group of returned volunteers whose experiences had made them, like himself, increasingly quizzical about the idea of development. In 1968 in Chicago, he heard a lecture given by Ivan Illich and in 1970 he and others brought Illich to Toronto for a teach-in called “Crisis in Development.” This was the beginning of their long relationship: eighteen years later Cayley invited Illich to do a series of interviews for CBC Radio's Ideas. Cayley is the author of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (2022), Ideas on the Nature of Science (2009), The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (2004), Puppet Uprising (2003),The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives (1998), George Grant in Conversation (1995), Northrop Frye in Conversation (1992), Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992), and The Age of Ecology (1990).Show Notes:The Early Years with Ivan IllichThe Good Samaritan StoryFalling out of a HomeworldThe Corruption of the Best is the Worst (Corruptio Optimi Pessima)How Hospitality Becomes HostilityHow to Live in ContradictionRediscovering the FutureThe Pilgrimage of SurpriseFriendship with the OtherHomework:Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Penn State Press) - Paperback Now Available!David Cayley's WebsiteThe Rivers North of the Future (House of Anansi Press)Ivan Illich | The Corruption of Christianity: Corruptio Optimi Pessima (2000)Charles Taylor: A Secular AgeTranscript:Chris: [00:00:00] Welcome, David, to the End of Tourism Podcast. It's a pleasure to finally meet you. David: Likewise. Thank you. Chris: I'm very grateful to have you joining me today. And I'm curious if you could offer our listeners a little glimpse into where you find yourself today and what the world looks like for you through the lenses of David Cayley.David: Gray and wet. In Toronto, we've had a mild winter so far, although we did just have some real winter for a couple of weeks. So, I'm at my desk in my house in downtown Toronto. Hmm. Chris: Hmm. Thank you so much for joining us, David. You know, I came to your work quite long ago.First through the book, The Rivers North of the Future, The Testament of Ivan Illich. And then through your long standing tenure as the host of CBC Ideas in Canada. I've also just finished reading your newest book, Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey. For me, which has been a clear and comprehensive homage [00:01:00] to that man's work.And so, from what I understand from the reading, you were a friend of Illich's as well as the late Gustavo Esteva, a mutual friend of ours, who I interviewed for the podcast shortly before his death in 2021. Now, since friendship is one of the themes I'd like to approach with you today, I'm wondering if you could tell us about how you met these men and what led you to writing a biography of the former, of Ivan.David: Well, let me answer about Ivan first. I met him as a very young man. I had spent two years living in northern Borneo, eastern Malaysia, the Malaysian state of Sarawak. As part of an organization called the Canadian University Service Overseas, which many people recognize only when it's identified with the Peace Corps. It was a similar initiative or the VSO, very much of the time.And When I returned to [00:02:00] Toronto in 1968, one of the first things I saw was an essay of Ivan's. It usually circulates under the name he never gave it, which is, "To Hell With Good Intentions." A talk he had given in Chicago to some young volunteers in a Catholic organization bound for Mexico.And it made sense to me in a radical and surprising way. So, I would say it began there. I went to CDOC the following year. The year after that we brought Ivan to Toronto for a teach in, in the fashion of the time, and he was then an immense celebrity, so we turned people away from a 600 seat theater that night when he lectured in Toronto.I kept in touch subsequently through reading mainly and we didn't meet again until the later 1980s when he came to Toronto.[00:03:00] He was then working on, in the history of literacy, had just published a book called ABC: the Alphabetization of the Western Mind. And that's where we became more closely connected. I went later that year to State College, Pennsylvania, where he was teaching at Penn State, and recorded a long interview, radically long.And made a five-hour Ideas series, but by a happy chance, I had not thought of this, his friend Lee Hoinacki asked for the raw tapes, transcribed them, and eventually that became a published book. And marked an epoch in Ivan's reception, as well as in my life because a lot of people responded to the spoken or transcribed Illich in a way that they didn't seem to be able to respond to his writing, which was scholastically condensed, let's [00:04:00] say.I always found it extremely congenial and I would even say witty in the deep sense of wit. But I think a lot of people, you know, found it hard and so the spoken Illich... people came to him, even old friends and said, you know, "we understand you better now." So, the following year he came to Toronto and stayed with us and, you know, a friendship blossomed and also a funny relationship where I kept trying to get him to express himself more on the theme of the book you mentioned, The Rivers North of the Future, which is his feeling that modernity, in the big sense of modernity can be best understood as perversionism. A word that he used, because he liked strong words, but it can be a frightening word."Corruption" also has its difficulties, [00:05:00] but sometimes he said "a turning inside out," which I like very much, or "a turning upside down" of the gospel. So, when the world has its way with the life, death and resurrection and teaching of Jesus Christ which inevitably becomes an institution when the world has its way with that.The way leads to where we are. That was his radical thought. And a novel thought, according to the philosopher Charles Taylor, a Canadian philosopher, who was kind enough to write a preface to that book when it was published, and I think very much aided its reception, because people knew who Charles Taylor was, and by then, they had kind of forgotten who Ivan Illich was.To give an example of that, when he died, the New York [00:06:00] Times obituary was headlined "Priest turned philosopher appealed to baby boomers in the 60s." This is yesterday's man, in other words, right? This is somebody who used to be important. So, I just kept at him about it, and eventually it became clear he was never going to write that book for a whole variety of reasons, which I won't go into now.But he did allow me to come to Cuernavaca, where he was living, and to do another very long set of interviews, which produced that book, The Rivers North of the Future. So that's the history in brief. The very last part of that story is that The Rivers North of the Future and the radio series that it was based on identifies themes that I find to be quite explosive. And so, in a certain way, the book you mentioned, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, [00:07:00] was destined from the moment that I recorded those conversations. Chris: Hmm, yeah, thank you, David. So much of what you said right there ends up being the basis for most of my questions today, especially around the corruption or the perversion what perhaps iatrogenesis also termed as iatrogenesis But much of what I've also come to ask today, stems and revolves around Illich's reading of the Good Samaritan story, so I'd like to start there, if that's alright.And you know, for our listeners who aren't familiar either with the story or Illich's take on it, I've gathered some small excerpts from An Intellectual Journey so that they might be on the same page, so to speak. So, from Ivan Illich, An Intellectual Journey:"jesus tells the story after he has been asked how to, quote, 'inherit eternal life,' end quote, and has replied that one must love God and one's neighbor, [00:08:00] quote, 'as oneself,' but, quote, who is my neighbor? His interlocutor wants to know. Jesus answers with his tale of a man on his way from Jerusalem to Jericho, who is beset by robbers, beaten, and left, quote, 'half dead' by the side of the road.Two men happen along, but, quote, 'pass by on the other side.' One is a priest and the other a Levite, a group that assisted the priests at the Great Temple, which, at that time, dominated the landscape of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount. Then, a Samaritan comes along. The Samaritans belonged to the estranged northern kingdom of Israel, and did not worship at the Temple.Tension between the Samaritans and the Judeans in the Second Temple period gives the name a significance somewhere between 'foreigner' and 'enemy.' [00:09:00] In contemporary terms, he was, as Illich liked to say, 'a Palestinian.' The Samaritan has, quote, 'compassion' on the wounded one. He stops, binds his wounds, takes him to an inn where he can convalesce and promises the innkeeper that he will return to pay the bill.'And so Jesus concludes by asking, 'Which of the three passers by was the neighbor?'Illich claimed that this parable had been persistently misunderstood as a story about how one ought to act. He had surveyed sermons from the 3rd through 19th centuries, he said, 'and found a broad consensus that what was being proposed was a, quote, rule of conduct.' But this interpretation was, in fact, quote, 'the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out.'He had not been asked how to act toward a neighbor, but rather, 'who is my neighbor?' And he had replied, [00:10:00] scandalously, that it could be anyone at all. The choice of the Samaritan as the hero of the tale said, 'in effect, it is impossible to categorize who your neighbor might be.' The sense of being called to help the other is experienced intermittently and not as an unvarying obligation.A quote, 'new kind of ought has been established,' Illich says, which is not related to a norm. It has a telos, it aims at somebody, some body, but not according to a rule. And finally, The Master told them that who your neighbor is is not determined by your birth, by your condition, by the language which you speak, but by you.You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds culturally, who is foreign linguistically, who, you can [00:11:00] say by providence or pure chance, is the one who lies somewhere along your road in the grass and create the supreme form of relatedness, which is not given by creation, but created by you. Any attempt to explain this 'ought,' as correspond, as, as corresponding to a norm, takes out the mysterious greatness from this free act.And so, I think there are at least, at the very least, a few major points to take away from this little summary I've extracted. One, that the ability to choose one's neighbor, breaks the boundaries of ethnicity at the time, which were the bases for understanding one's identity and people and place in the world.And two, that it creates a new foundation for hospitality and interculturality. And so I'm [00:12:00] curious, David, if you'd be willing to elaborate on these points as you understand them.David: Well if you went a little farther on in that part of the book, you'd find an exposition of a German teacher and writer and professor, Claus Held, that I found very helpful in understanding what Ivan was saying. Held is a phenomenologist and a follower of Husserl, but he uses Husserl's term of the home world, right, that each of us has a home world. Mm-Hmm. Which is our ethnos within which our ethics apply.It's a world in which we can be at home and in which we can somehow manage, right? There are a manageable number of people to whom we are obliged. We're not universally obliged. So, what was interesting about Held's analysis is then the condition in which the wounded [00:13:00] man lies is, he's fallen outside of any reference or any home world, right?Nobody has to care for him. The priest and the Levite evidently don't care for him. They have more important things to do. The story doesn't tell you why. Is he ritually impure as one apparently dead is? What? You don't know. But they're on their way. They have other things to do. So the Samaritan is radically out of line, right?He dares to enter this no man's land, this exceptional state in which the wounded man lies, and he does it on the strength of a feeling, right? A stirring inside him. A call. It's definitely a bodily experience. In Ivan's language of norms, it's not a norm. It's not a duty.It's [00:14:00] not an obligation. It's not a thought. He's stirred. He is moved to do what he does and he cares for him and takes him to the inn and so on. So, the important thing in it for me is to understand the complementarity that's involved. Held says that if you try and develop a set of norms and ethics, however you want to say it, out of the Samaritan's Act, it ends up being radically corrosive, it ends up being radically corrosive damaging, destructive, disintegrating of the home world, right? If everybody's caring for everybody all the time universally, you're pretty soon in the maddening world, not pretty soon, but in a couple of millennia, in the maddening world we live in, right? Where people Can tell you with a straight face that their actions are intended to [00:15:00] save the planet and not experience a sense of grandiosity in saying that, right?Not experiencing seemingly a madness, a sense of things on a scale that is not proper to any human being, and is bound, I think, to be destructive of their capacity to be related to what is at hand. So, I think what Ivan is saying in saying this is a new kind of ought, right, it's the whole thing of the corruption of the best is the worst in a nutshell because as soon as you think you can operationalize that, you can turn everyone into a Samaritan and You, you begin to destroy the home world, right?You begin to destroy ethics. You begin to, or you transform ethics into something which is a contradiction of ethics. [00:16:00] So, there isn't an answer in it, in what he says. There's a complementarity, right? Hmm. There's the freedom to go outside, but if the freedom to go outside destroys any inside, then, what have you done?Right? Hmm. You've created an unlivable world. A world of such unending, such unimaginable obligation, as one now lives in Toronto, you know, where I pass homeless people all the time. I can't care for all of them. So, I think it's also a way of understanding for those who contemplate it that you really have to pay attention.What are you called to, right? What can you do? What is within your amplitude? What is urgent for you? Do that thing, right? Do not make yourself mad with [00:17:00] impossible charity. A charity you don't feel, you can't feel, you couldn't feel. Right? Take care of what's at hand, what you can take care of. What calls you.Chris: I think this comes up quite a bit these days. Especially, in light of international conflicts, conflicts that arise far from people's homes and yet the demand of that 'ought' perhaps of having to be aware and having to have or having to feel some kind of responsibility for these things that are happening in other places that maybe, It's not that they don't have anything to do with us but that our ability to have any kind of recourse for what happens in those places is perhaps flippant, fleeting, and even that we're stretched to the point that we can't even tend and attend to what's happening in front of us in our neighborhoods.And so, I'm curious as to how this came to be. You mentioned "the corruption" [00:18:00] and maybe we could just define that, if possible for our listeners this notion of "the corruption of the best is the worst." Would you be willing to do that? Do you think that that's an easy thing to do? David: I've been trying for 30 years.I can keep on trying. I really, I mean, that was the seed of everything. At the end of the interview we did in 1988, Ivan dropped that little bomb on me. And I was a diligent man, and I had prepared very carefully. I'd read everything he'd written and then at the very end of the interview, he says the whole history of the West can be summed up in the phrase, Corruptio Optimi Pessima.He was quite fluent in Latin. The corruption of the best is the worst. And I thought, wait a minute, the whole history of the West? This is staggering. So, yes, I've been reflecting on it for a long time, but I think there are many ways to speak [00:19:00] about the incarnation, the idea that God is present and visible in the form of a human being, that God indeed is a human being in the person of Jesus Christ.One way is to think of it as a kind of nuclear explosion of religion. Religion had always been the placation of a god. Right? A sacrifice of some kind made to placate a god. Now the god is present. It could be you. Jesus is explicit about it, and I think that is the most important thing for Iman in reading the gospel, is that God appears to us as one another.Hmm. If you can put it, one another in the most general sense of that formula. So, that's explosive, right? I mean, religion, in a certain way, up to that moment, is society. It's the [00:20:00] integument of every society. It's the nature of the beast to be religious in the sense of having an understanding of how you're situated and in what order and with what foundation that order exists. It's not an intellectual thing. It's just what people do. Karl Barth says religion is a yoke. So, it has in a certain way exploded or been exploded at that moment but it will of course be re instituted as a religion. What else could happen? And so Ivan says, and this probably slim New Testament warrant for this, but this was his story, that in the very earliest apostolic church. They were aware of this danger, right? That Christ must be shadowed by "Antichrist," a term that Ivan was brave enough to use. The word just has a [00:21:00] terrible, terrible history. I mean, the Protestants abused the Catholics with the name of Antichrist. Luther rages against the Pope as antichrist.Hmm. And the word persists now as a kind of either as a sign of evangelical dogmatism, or maybe as a joke, right. When I was researching it, I came across a book called "How to Tell If Your Boyfriend Is The Antichrist." Mm-Hmm. It's kind of a jokey thing in a way, in so far as people know, but he dared to use it as to say the antichrist is simply the instituted Christ.Right. It's not anything exotic. It's not anything theological. It's the inevitable worldly shadow of there being a Christ at all. And so that's, that's the beginning of the story. He, he claims that the church loses sight of this understanding, loses sight of the basic [00:22:00] complementarity or contradiction that's involved in the incarnation in the first place.That this is something that can never be owned, something that can never be instituted, something that can only happen again and again and again within each one. So, but heaven can never finally come to earth except perhaps in a story about the end, right? The new heaven and the new earth, the new Jerusalem come down from heaven.Fine. That's at the end, not now. So that's the gist of what he, what he said. He has a detailed analysis of the stages of that journey, right? So, within your theme of hospitality the beginnings of the church becoming a social worker in the decaying Roman Empire. And beginning to develop institutions of hospitality, [00:23:00] places for all the flotsam and jetsam of the decaying empire.And then in a major way from the 11th through the 13th century, when the church institutes itself as a mini or proto state, right? With a new conception of law. Every element of our modernity prefigured in the medieval church and what it undertook, according to Ivan. This was all news to me when he first said it to me.So yeah, the story goes on into our own time when I think one of the primary paradoxes or confusions that we face is that most of the people one meets and deals with believe themselves to be living after Christianity and indeed to great opponents of Christianity. I mean, nothing is more important in Canada now than to denounce residential schools, let's say, right? Which were [00:24:00] the schools for indigenous children, boarding schools, which were mainly staffed by the church, right?So, the gothic figure of the nun, the sort of vulpine, sinister. That's the image of the church, right? So you have so many reasons to believe that you're after that. You've woken up, you're woke. And, and you see that now, right? So you don't In any way, see yourself as involved in this inversion of the gospel which has actually created your world and which is still, in so many ways, you.So, leftists today, if I'm using the term leftists very, very broadly, "progressives," people sometimes say, "woke," people say. These are all in a certain way super Christians or hyper Christians, but absolutely unaware of themselves as Christians and any day you can read an analysis [00:25:00] which traces everything back to the Enlightenment.Right? We need to re institute the Enlightenment. We've forgotten the Enlightenment. We have to get back to the, right? There's nothing before the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is the over, that's an earlier overcoming of Christianity, right? So modernity is constantly overcoming Christianity. And constantly forgetting that it's Christian.That these are the ways in which the Incarnation is working itself out. And one daren't say that it's bound to work itself out that way. Ivan will go as far as to say it's seemingly the will of God that it should work itself out that way. Right? Wow. So, that the Gospel will be preached to all nations as predicted at the end of the Gospels." Go therefore and preach to all nations," but it will not be preached in its explicit form. It will enter, as it were, through the [00:26:00] back door. So that's a very big thought. But it's a saving thought in certain ways, because it does suggest a way of unwinding, or winding up, this string of finding out how this happened.What is the nature of the misunderstanding that is being played out here? So. Chris: Wow. Yeah, I mean, I, I feel like what you just said was a kind of nuclear bomb unto its own. I remember reading, for example, James Hillman in The Terrible Love of War, and at the very end he essentially listed all, not all, but many of the major characteristics of modern people and said if you act this way, you are Christian.If you act this way, you are Christian. Essentially revealing that so much of modernity has these Christian roots. And, you know, you said in terms of this message and [00:27:00] corruption of the message going in through the back door. And I think that's what happens in terms of at least when we see institutions in the modern time, schools, hospitals, roads essentially modern institutions and lifestyles making their way into non modern places.And I'm very fascinated in this in terms of hospitality. You said that the church, and I think you're quoting Illich there, but " the church is a social worker." But also how this hospitality shows up in the early church and maybe even how they feared about what could happen as a result to this question of the incarnation.In your book it was just fascinating to read this that you said, or that you wrote, that "in the early years of Christianity it was customary in a Christian household to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger without a roof, a form of behavior that was utterly [00:28:00] foreign to the cultures of the Roman Empire."In which many Christians lived. And you write, "you took in your own, but not someone lost on the street." And then later "When the emperor Constantine recognized the church, Christian bishops gained the power to establish social corporations." And this is, I think, the idea of the social worker. The church is a social worker.And you write that the first corporations they started were Samaritan corporations, which designated certain categories of people as preferred neighbors. For example, the bishops created special houses financed by the community that were charged with taking care of people without a home. Such care was no longer the free choice of the householder, it was the task of an institution.The appearance of these xenodocheia? Literally, quote, 'houses for foreigners' signified the beginning of a change in the nature of the church." And then of course you write and you mentioned this but "a gratuitous and truly [00:29:00] free choice of assisting the stranger has become an ideology and an idealism." Right. And so, this seems to be how the corruption of the Samaritan story, the corruption of breaking that threshold, or at least being able to cross it, comes to produce this incredible 'ought,' as you just kind of elaborated for us.And then this notion of, that we can't see it anymore. That it becomes this thing in the past, as you said. In other words, history. Right? And so my next question is a question that comes to some degree from our late mutual friend Gustavo, Gustavo Esteva. And I'd just like to preface it by a small sentence from An Intellectual Journey where he wrote that, "I think that limit, in Illich, is always linked to nemesis, or to what Jung calls [00:30:00] enantiodromia, his Greek word for the way in which any tendency, when pushed too far, can turn into its opposite. And so, a long time ago, Illich once asked Gustavo if he could identify a word that could describe the era after development, or perhaps after development's death.And Gustavo said, "hospitality." And so, much later, in a private conversation with Gustavo, in the context of tourism and gentrification, the kind that was beginning to sweep across Oaxaca at the time, some years ago, he told me that he considered "the sale of one's people's radical or local hospitality as a kind of invitation to hostility in the place and within the ethnos that one lives in."Another way of saying it might be that the subversion and absence of hospitality in a place breeds or can breed hostility.[00:31:00] I'm curious what you make of his comment in the light of limits, enantiodromia and the corruption that Illich talks about.David: Well I'd like to say one thing which is the thought I was having while you, while you were speaking because at the very beginning I mentioned a reservation a discomfort with words like perversion and corruption. And the thought is that it's easy to understand Illich as doing critique, right? And it's easy then to moralize that critique, right? And I think it's important that he's showing something that happens, right? And that I daren't say bound to happen, but is likely to happen because of who and what we are, that we will institutionalize, that we will make rules, that we will, right?So, I think it's important to rescue Ivan from being read [00:32:00] moralistically, or that you're reading a scold here, right? Hmm. Right. I mean, and many social critics are or are read as scolds, right? And contemporary people are so used to being scolded that they, and scold themselves very regularly. So, I just wanted to say that to rescue Ivan from a certain kind of reading. You're quoting Gustavo on the way in which the opening up of a culture touristically can lead to hostility, right? Right. And I think also commenting on the roots of the words are the same, right? "hostile," "hospice." They're drawing on the same, right?That's right. It's how one treats the enemy, I think. Hmm. It's the hinge. Hmm. In all those words. What's the difference between hospitality and hostility?[00:33:00] So, I think that thought is profound and profoundly fruitful. So, I think Gustavo had many resources in expressing it.I couldn't possibly express it any better. And I never answered you at the beginning how I met Gustavo, but on that occasion in 1988 when I was interviewing Illich, they were all gathered, a bunch of friends to write what was called The Development Dictionary, a series of essays trying to write an epilogue to the era of development.So, Gustavo, as you know, was a charming man who spoke a peculiarly beautiful English in which he was fluent, but somehow, you could hear the cadence of Spanish through it without it even being strongly accented. So I rejoiced always in interviewing Gustavo, which I did several times because he was such a pleasure to listen to.But anyway, I've digressed. Maybe I'm ducking your question. Do you want to re ask it or? Chris: Sure. [00:34:00] Yeah, I suppose. You know although there were a number of essays that Gustavo wrote about hospitality that I don't believe have been published they focused quite a bit on this notion of individual people, but especially communities putting limits on their hospitality.And of course, much of this hospitality today comes in the form of, or at least in the context of tourism, of international visitors. And that's kind of the infrastructure that's placed around it. And yet he was arguing essentially for limits on hospitality. And I think what he was seeing, although it hadn't quite come to fruition yet in Oaxaca, was that the commodification, the commercialization of one's local indigenous hospitality, once it's sold, or once it's only existing for the value or money of the foreigner, in a kind of customer service worldview, that it invites this deep [00:35:00] hostility. And so do these limits show up as well in Illich's work in terms of the stranger?Right? Because so much of the Christian tradition is based in a universal fraternity, universal brotherhood. David: I said that Ivan made sense to me in my youth, as a 22 year old man. So I've lived under his influence. I took him as a master, let's say and as a young person. And I would say that probably it's true that I've never gone anywhere that I haven't been invited to go.So I, I could experience that, that I was called to be there. And he was quite the jet setter, so I was often called by him to come to Mexico or to go to Germany or whatever it was. But we live in a world that is so far away from the world that might have been, let's say, the world that [00:36:00] might be.So John Milbank, a British theologian who's Inspiring to me and a friend and somebody who I found surprisingly parallel to Illich in a lot of ways after Ivan died and died I think feeling that he was pretty much alone in some of his understandings. But John Milbank speaks of the, of recovering the future that we've lost, which is obviously have to be based on some sort of historical reconstruction. You have to find the place to go back to, where the wrong turning was, in a certain way. But meanwhile, we live in this world, right? Where even where you are, many people are dependent on tourism. Right? And to that extent they live from it and couldn't instantly do without. To do without it would be, would be catastrophic. Right? So [00:37:00] it's it's not easy to live in both worlds. Right? To live with the understanding that this is, as Gustavo says, it's bound to be a source of hostility, right?Because we can't sell what is ours as an experience for others without changing its character, right, without commodifying it. It's impossible to do. So it must be true and yet, at a certain moment, people feel that it has to be done, right? And so you have to live in in both realities.And in a certain way, the skill of living in both realities is what's there at the beginning, right? That, if you take the formula of the incarnation as a nuclear explosion, well you're still going to have religion, right? So, that's inevitable. The [00:38:00] world has changed and it hasn't changed at the same time.And that's true at every moment. And so you learn to walk, right? You learn to distinguish the gospel from its surroundings. And a story about Ivan that made a big impression on me was that when he was sent to Puerto Rico when he was still active as a priest in 1956 and became vice rector of the Catholic University at Ponce and a member of the school board.A position that he regarded as entirely political. So he said, "I will not in any way operate as a priest while I'm performing a political function because I don't want these two things to get mixed up." And he made a little exception and he bought a little shack in a remote fishing village.Just for the happiness of it, he would go there and say mass for the fishermen who didn't know anything about this other world. So, but that was[00:39:00] a radical conviction and put him at odds with many of the tendencies of his time, as for example, what came to be called liberation theology, right?That there could be a politicized theology. His view was different. His view was that the church as "She," as he said, rather than "it," had to be always distinguished, right? So it was the capacity to distinguish that was so crucial for him. And I would think even in situations where tourism exists and has the effect Gustavo supposed, the beginning of resistance to that and the beginning of a way out of it, is always to distinguish, right?To know the difference, which is a slim read, but, but faith is always a slim read and Ivan's first book, his first collection of published essays was [00:40:00] called Celebration of Awareness which is a way of saying that, what I call know the difference. Chris: So I'm going to, if I can offer you this, this next question, which comes from James, a friend in Guelph, Canada. And James is curious about the missionary mandate of Christianity emphasizing a fellowship in Christ over ethnicity and whether or not this can be reconciled with Illich's perhaps emphatic defense of local or vernacular culture.David: Well, yeah. He illustrates it. I mean, he was a worldwide guy. He was very far from his roots, which were arguably caught. He didn't deracinate himself. Hmm. He was with his mother and brothers exiled from Split in Dalmatia as a boy in the crazy atmosphere of the Thirties.But he was a tumbleweed after [00:41:00] that. Mm-Hmm. . And so, so I think we all live in that world now and this is confuses people about him. So, a historian called Todd Hart wrote a book still really the only book published in English on the history of CIDOC and Cuernavaca, in which he says Illich is anti-missionary. And he rebukes him for that and I would say that Ivan, on his assumptions cannot possibly be anti missionary. He says clearly in his early work that a Christian is a missionary or is not a Christian at all, in the sense that if one has heard the good news, one is going to share it, or one hasn't heard it. Now, what kind of sharing is that? It isn't necessarily, "you have to join my religion," "you have to subscribe to the following ten..." it isn't necessarily a catechism, it may be [00:42:00] an action. It may be a it may be an act of friendship. It may be an act of renunciation. It can be any number of things, but it has to be an outgoing expression of what one has been given, and I think he was, in that sense, always a missionary, and in many places, seeded communities that are seeds of the new church.Right? He spent well, from the time he arrived in the United States in 51, 52, till the time that he withdrew from church service in 68, he was constantly preaching and talking about a new church. And a new church, for him, involved a new relation between innovation and tradition. New, but not new.Since, when he looked back, he saw the gospel was constantly undergoing translation into new milieu, into new places, into new languages, into new forms.[00:43:00] But he encountered it in the United States as pretty much in one of its more hardened or congealed phases, right? And it was the export of that particular brand of cultural and imperialistic, because American, and America happened to be the hegemon of the moment. That's what he opposed.The translation of that into Latin America and people like to write each other into consistent positions, right? So, he must then be anti missionary across the board, right? But so I think you can be local and universal. I mean, one doesn't even want to recall that slogan of, you know, "act locally, think globally," because it got pretty hackneyed, right?And it was abused. But, it's true in a certain way that that's the only way one can be a Christian. The neighbor, you said it, I wrote it, Ivan said it, " the neighbor [00:44:00] can be anyone." Right?But here I am here now, right? So both have to apply. Both have to be true. It's again a complementary relation. And it's a banal thought in a certain way, but it seems to be the thought that I think most often, right, is that what creates a great deal of the trouble in the world is inability to think in a complementary fashion.To think within, to take contradiction as constituting the world. The world is constituted of contradiction and couldn't be constituted in any other way as far as we know. Right? You can't walk without two legs. You can't manipulate without two arms, two hands. We know the structure of our brains. Are also bilateral and everything about our language is constructed on opposition.Everything is oppositional and yet [00:45:00] when we enter the world of politics, it seems we're going to have it all one way. The church is going to be really Christian, and it's going to make everybody really Christian, or communist, what have you, right? The contradiction is set aside. Philosophy defines truth as the absence of contradiction.Hmm. Basically. Hmm. So, be in both worlds. Know the difference. Walk on two feet. That's Ivan. Chris: I love that. And I'm, I'm curious about you know, one of the themes of the podcast is exile. And of course that can mean a lot of things. In the introduction to An Intellectual Journey, you wrote that that Illich, "once he had left Split in the 30s, that he began an experience of exile that would characterize his entire life."You wrote that he had lost "not just the home, but the very possibility [00:46:00] of home." And so it's a theme that characterizes as well the podcast and a lot of these conversations around travel, migration, tourism, what does it mean to be at home and so, this, This notion of exile also shows up quite a bit in the Christian faith.And maybe this is me trying to escape the complementarity of the reality of things. But I tend to see exile as inherently I'll say damaging or consequential in a kind of negative light. And so I've been wondering about this, this exilic condition, right? It's like in the Abrahamic faith, as you write "Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all begin in exile.And eventually this pattern culminates. Jesus is executed outside the gates of the city, nailed to a cross that excludes him even from his native earth." And you write that "exile is in many ways the [00:47:00] Christian condition." And so, you know, I've read that in the past, Christian monks often consider themselves to be homeless, removed from the sort of daily life of the local community in the monasteries and abbeys and yet still of a universal brotherhood. And so I'd like to ask you if you feel this exilic condition, which seems to be also a hallmark of modernity, this kind of constant uprooting this kind of as I would call it, cultural and spiritual homelessness of our time, if you think that is part of the corruption that Illich based his work around?David: Well, one can barely imagine the world in which Abram, who became Abraham said to God, no, I'm staying in Ur. Not going, I'm not going. Right? I mean, if you go back to Genesis and you re read that passage, when God shows [00:48:00] Abraham the land that he will inherit, it says already there, "there were people at that time living in the land," right?Inconvenient people, as it turns out. Palestinians. So, there's a profound contradiction here, I think. And the only way I think you can escape it is to understand the Gospel the way Ivan understood it, which is as something super added to existing local cultures, right? A leaven, right?Hmm. Not everything about a local culture or a local tradition is necessarily good. Mm hmm. And so it can be changed, right? And I would say that Illich insists that Christians are and must be missionaries. They've received something that they it's inherent in what they've [00:49:00] received that they pass it on.So the world will change, right? But Ivan says, this is in Rivers North of the Future, that it's his conviction that the Gospel could have been preached without destroying local proportions, the sense of proportion, and he put a great weight on the idea of proportionality as not just, a pleasing building or a pleasing face, but the very essence of, of how a culture holds together, right, that things are proportioned within it to one another that the gospel could have been preached without the destruction of proportions, but evidently it wasn't, because the Christians felt they had the truth and they were going to share it. They were going to indeed impose it for the good of the other.So, I think a sense of exile and a sense of home are as [00:50:00] necessary to one another as in Ivan's vision of a new church, innovation, and tradition, or almost any other constitutive couplet you can think of, right? You can't expunge exile from the tradition. But you also can't allow it to overcome the possibility of home.I mean, Ivan spoke of his own fate as a peculiar fate, right? He really anticipated the destruction of the Western culture or civilization. I mean, in the sense that now this is a lament on the political right, mainly, right? The destruction of Western civilization is something one constantly hears about.But, he, in a way, in the chaos and catastrophe of the 30s, already felt the death of old Europe. And even as a boy, I think, semi consciously at least, took the roots inside himself, took them with him [00:51:00] and for many people like me, he opened that tradition. He opened it to me. He allowed me to re inhabit it in a certain way, right?So to find intimations of home because he wasn't the only one who lost his home. Even as a man of 78, the world in which I grew up here is gone, forgotten, and to some extent scorned by younger people who are just not interested in it. And so it's through Ivan that I, in a way, recovered the tradition, right?And if the tradition is related to the sense of home, of belonging to something for good or ill, then that has to be carried into the future as best we can, right? I think Ivan was searching for a new church. He didn't think. He had found it. He didn't think he knew what it was.I don't think he [00:52:00] described certain attributes of it. Right. But above all, he wanted to show that the church had taken many forms in the past. Right. And it's worldly existence did not have to be conceived on the model of a monarchy or a parish, right, another form that he described in some early essays, right.We have to find the new form, right? It may be radically non theological if I can put it like that. It may not necessarily involve the buildings that we call churches but he believed deeply in the celebrating community. As the center, the root the essence of social existence, right? The creation of home in the absence of home, or the constant recreation of home, right? Since I mean, we will likely never again live in pure [00:53:00] communities, right? Yeah. I don't know if pure is a dangerous word, but you know what I mean?Consistent, right? Closed. We're all of one kind, right? Right. I mean, this is now a reactionary position, right? Hmm. You're a German and you think, well, Germany should be for the Germans. I mean, it can't be for the Germans, seemingly. We can't put the world back together again, right?We can't go back and that's a huge misreading of Illich, right? That he's a man who wants to go back, right? No. He was radically a man who wanted to rediscover the future. And rescue it. Also a man who once said to hell with the future because he wanted to denounce the future that's a computer model, right? All futures that are projections from the present, he wanted to denounce in order to rediscover the future. But it has to be ahead of us. It's not. And it has to recover the deposit that is behind us. So [00:54:00] both, the whole relation between past and future and indeed the whole understanding of time is out of whack.I think modern consciousness is so entirely spatialized that the dimension of time is nearly absent from it, right? The dimension of time as duration as the integument by which past, present and future are connected. I don't mean that people can't look at their watch and say, you know, "I gotta go now, I've got a twelve o'clock." you know.So, I don't know if that's an answer to James.Chris: I don't know, but it's food for thought and certainly a feast, if I may say so. David, I have two final questions for you, if that's all right, if you have time. Okay, wonderful. So, speaking of this notion of home and and exile and the complementarity of the two and you know you wrote and [00:55:00] spoke to this notion of Illich wanting to rediscover the future and he says that "we've opened a horizon on which new paradigms for thought can appear," which I think speaks to what you were saying and At some point Illich compares the opening of horizons to leaving home on a pilgrimage, as you write in your book."And not the pilgrimage of the West, which leads over a traveled road to a famed sanctuary, but rather the pilgrimage of the Christian East, which does not know where the road might lead and the journey end." And so my question is, What do you make of that distinction between these types of pilgrimages and what kind of pilgrimage do you imagine might be needed in our time?David: Well, I, I mean, I think Ivan honored the old style of pilgrimage whether it was to [00:56:00] Canterbury or Santiago or wherever it was to. But I think ivan's way of expressing the messianic was in the word surprise, right? One of the things that I think he did and which was imposed on him by his situation and by his times was to learn to speak to people in a way that did not draw on any theological resource, so he spoke of his love of surprises, right? Well, a surprise by definition is what you don't suspect, what you don't expect. Or it couldn't be a surprise.So, the The cathedral in Santiago de Compostela is very beautiful, I think. I've only ever seen pictures of it, but you must expect to see it at the end of your road. You must hope to see it at the end of your road. Well the surprise is going to be something else. Something that isn't known.[00:57:00] And it was one of his Great gifts to me that within the structure of habit and local existence, since I'm pretty rooted where I am. And my great grandfather was born within walking distance of where I am right now. He helped me to look for surprises and to accept them also, right?That you're going to show up or someone else is going to show up, right? But there's going to be someone coming and you want to look out for the one who's coming and not, but not be at all sure that you know who or what it is or which direction it's coming from. So, that was a way of life in a certain way that I think he helped others within their limitations, within their abilities, within their local situations, to see the world that way, right. That was part of what he did. Chris: Yeah, it's really beautiful and I can [00:58:00] see how in our time, in a time of increasing division and despondency and neglect, fear even, resentment of the other, that how that kind of surprise and the lack of expectation, the undermining, the subversion of expectation can find a place into perhaps the mission of our times.And so my final question comes back to friendship. and interculturality. And I have one final quote here from An Intellectual Journey, which I highly recommend everyone pick up, because it's just fascinating and blows open so many doors. David: We need to sell a few more books, because I want that book in paperback. Because I want it to be able to live on in a cheaper edition. So, yes. Chris: Of course. Thank you. Yeah. Please, please pick it up. It's worth every penny. So in An Intellectual Journey, it is written[00:59:00] by Illich that "when I submit my heart, my mind, my body, I come to be below the other. When I listen unconditionally, respectfully, courageously, with the readiness to take in the other as a radical surprise, I do something else. I bow, bend over toward the total otherness of someone. But I renounce searching for bridges between the other and me, recognizing that a gulf separates us.Leaning into this chasm makes me aware of the depth of my loneliness, and able to bear it in the light of the substantial likeness between the Other and myself. All that reaches me is the Other in His Word, which I accept on faith."And so, David at another point in the biography you quote Illich describing faith as foolish. Now assuming that faith elicits a degree of danger or [01:00:00] betrayal or that it could elicit that through a kind of total trust, is that nonetheless necessary to accept the stranger or other as they are? Or at least meet the stranger or other as they are? David: I would think so, yeah. I mean the passage you've quoted, I think to understand it, it's one of the most profound of his sayings to me and one I constantly revert to, but to accept the other in his word, or on his word, or her word, is, I think you need to know that he takes the image of the word as the name of the Lord, very, very seriously, and its primary way of referring to the Christ, is "as the Word."Sometimes explicitly, sometimes not explicitly, you have to interpret. So, when he says that he renounces looking for bridges, I think he's mainly referring [01:01:00] to ideological intermediations, right, ways in which I, in understanding you exceed my capacity. I try to change my name for you, or my category for you, changes you, right?It doesn't allow your word. And, I mean, he wasn't a man who suffered fools gladly. He had a high regard for himself and used his time in a fairly disciplined way, right? He wasn't waiting around for others in their world. So by word, what does he mean?What is the other's word? Right? It's something more fundamental than the chatter of a person. So, I think what that means is that we can be linked to one another by Christ. So that's [01:02:00] the third, right? That yes, we're alone. Right? We haven't the capacity to reach each other, except via Christ.And that's made explicit for him in the opening of Aylred of Riveau's Treatise on Friendship, which was peculiarly important to him. Aylred was an abbot at a Cistercian monastery in present day Yorkshire, which is a ruin now. But he wrote a treatise on friendship in the 12th century and he begins by addressing his brother monk, Ivo, and says, you know, " here we are, you and I, and I hope a third Christ."So, Christ is always the third, right? So, in that image of the gulf, the distance, experiencing myself and my loneliness and yet renouncing any bridge, there is still a word, the word, [01:03:00] capital W, in which a word, your word, my word, participates, or might participate. So, we are building, according to him, the body of Christ but we have to renounce our designs on one another, let's say, in order to do that. So I mean, that's a very radical saying, the, the other in his word and in another place in The Rivers North of the Future, he says how hard that is after a century of Marxism or Freudianism, he mentions. But, either way he's speaking about my pretension to know you better than you know yourself, which almost any agency in our world that identifies needs, implicitly does. I know what's best for you. So Yeah, his waiting, his ability to wait for the other one is, is absolutely [01:04:00] foundational and it's how a new world comes into existence. And it comes into existence at every moment, not at some unimaginable future when we all wait at the same time, right? My friend used to say that peace would come when everybody got a good night's sleep on the same night. It's not very likely, is it? Right, right, right. So, anyway, there we are. Chris: Wow. Well, I'm definitely looking forward to listening to this interview again, because I feel like just like An Intellectual Journey, just like your most recent book my mind has been, perhaps exploded, another nuclear bomb dropped.David: Chris, nice to meet you. Chris: Yeah, I'll make sure that that book and, of course, links to yours are available on the end of the website. David: Alright, thank you. Chris: Yeah, deep bow, David. Thank you for your time today. David: All the best. And thank you for those questions. Yeah. That was that was very interesting. You know, I spent my life as an interviewer. A good part of my [01:05:00] life. And interviewing is very hard work. It's much harder than talking. Listening is harder than talking. And rarer. So, it's quite a pleasure for me, late in life, to be able to just let her rip, and let somebody else worry about is this going in the right direction? So, thank you. Get full access to ⌘ Chris Christou ⌘ at chrischristou.substack.com/subscribe
To honour the milestone 50th episode, I'm joined by Richard Tarnas, a renowned historian and archetypal cosmologist. August 8th is the peak of the astrological event known as the Lion's Gate Portal. The Sun (in Leo) aligns with Sirius, Orion's Belt, and Earth. Simultaneously, Orion's Belt aligns with the Pyramids of Giza. Ancient Egyptians revered Sirius, the “spiritual star,” and associated it with gods Osiris and Sopdet. Each year the rising of Sirius marked the flooding of the Nile. As author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, Richard is the ideal guest to mark the occasion. He is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He teaches courses in the history of ideas, archetypal studies, depth psychology, and religious evolution. For ten years he lived and worked at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, studying with the likes of Stanislav Grof, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman, later serving as Esalen's director of programs and education. In re-enchanting the Western worldview, Richard traces the historical and cultural roots of the modern mind. Although much was gained, much was lost, including the ensoulment of the cosmos, and a sense of participation with higher forms of intelligence. Is civilisation experiencing a mythological fall from grace due to human hubris? Is global chaos a symbolic manifestation of humanity's descent into the underworld? How can a new worldview support spiritual transformation, sense-making, and flourishing on a global scale? Before we begin, one more special announcement: Richard is one of a number of contributing authors, including myself, for the new volume by the Academy for the Advancement of Postmaterialist Sciences: The Playful Universe: Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness. The book is released late August, with an online symposium scheduled for the 26th or 27th September. Resources Richard's Website. Article: Introduction to The Playful Universe: Synchronicity and the Nature of Consciousness. Article: Is The Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage? Epilogue of Passion of the Western Mind.
KWR0042 – The Dismantling of the Western Mind Kingdom War Room For decades, the elite has tirelessly and tacitly labored to dismantle the Western mind in their occult push toward a one-world government and thirst to control humanity. This episode will discuss four tools from their ever-growing arsenal against mankind: (1) weaponization of language, (2) psychopolitics, (3) Hegelian Dialectic, and (4). MK Ulta and Chemical Warfare of the Mind. Hosts: Dr. Michael K. Lake: Scholar-in-residence, Strategic Remnant Learning Center – BLA, Host of Biblical Life TV, Co-Host of the Kingdom Intelligence Briefing, and best-selling author. http://www.kingdomintelligencebriefing.com Dr. Mike Spaulding: The teaching pastor of Calvary Chapel of Lima, OH, the author of Upsidedown in America, more than ten other books, and the host of Soaring Eagle Radio and Dr. Mike Live. https://www.drmikespaulding.com/
Got injured in an accident? You could be click away from a claim worth millions. You can start your claim now with Morgan & Morgan without leaving your couch. Remember, it's free unless you win. Link to my second podcast on world history and interviews: https://www.youtube.com/@History102-qg5oj Link to my cancellation insurance: https://becomepluribus.com/creators/20 Link to my Twitter- https://x.com/whatifalthist Link to my Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/rudyardwlynch/?hl=en Bibliography: The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth The Sacred History by Mark Booth The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin The Eye of Shiva by Amaury de Riencourt The Soul of India by Amaury de Riencourt The Coming Caesars by Amaury de Riencourt The History of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell Hermeticism by Evola Forgotten Truth by Houston Smith Religions of the World by Houston Smith Fire in the Minds of Men by Billington The Secular Age by Charles Taylor The Secret Teachings of the Ages by Manly Hall Journeys out of the Body by Robert Monroe Ultimate Journey by Robert Monroe Far Journeys by Robert Monroe Nihilism by Seraphim Rose Trump and a Post Truth World by Ken Wilbur Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung The Passion of the Western Mind by Tarnas Mere Christianity by CS Lewis The Great Divorce by CS Lewis The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis Primitive Mythology by Joseph Camble Oriental Mythology by Joseph Camble A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong The Iliad by Homer The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku How God Becomes Real by Luhrman The History of the Devil by Carus Stalking the Wild Pendulum by Itzhak Bentov The Master and His Emissary by Ian McGhilchrist The Inner World of Trauma by Kalsched Trauma and the World by Kalsched The Ascent of Humanity by Eisenstein The Web of Meaning by Jeremy Lent The Alchemist by Paul Coelho Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson The Tao te Ching by Lao Tau The Primer of Jungian Psychology by Hall The Oxford History of China by Ebrey The Age of Faith by Will Durant Caesar and Christ by Will Durant
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.louiseperry.co.ukMy guest today is Tom Holland, co-host of the Rest is History podcast, and author of many books, including 'Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.' We spoke about the new book that Tom is working on, focused on the ideological revolution of the 1960s, which he compares to a second Reformation. He argues that the current culture wars are in fact theol…
Today on Sense of Soul we have Anodea Judith, Ph.D. she has been called “a prophet for our time.” A groundbreaking thought leader who is the founder and director of Sacred Centers, and a writer, therapist, and spiritual teacher. Her passion for the realization of human potential matches her concern for humanity's impending crises—her fervent wish is that we “wake up in time.” She holds Masters and Doctoral degrees in Psychology and Human Health, is a 500 hour registered yoga teacher (E-RYT), with lifelong studies of psychology, mythology, sociology, history, systems theory, and mystic spirituality. She is considered one of the country's foremost experts on the combination of chakras and therapeutic issues and on the interpretation of the Chakra System for the Western lifestyle. Her best-selling titles include Wheels of Life, and Eastern Body, Western Mind. The SHE RISES archetypes cards are her most recent creation, in which she sees the potential of a global movement carried by awakened women everywhere for the transformation of our world. Her most recent book is called Goddess: Blessed Reunions with the Feminine Face of the Divine (Common Sentience). In this episode Anodea shares her 1979 experience of the total eclipse and what that means to her. Check out Anodea Judith's websites: http://www.anodeajudith.com http://www.sherisesmovement.com
Then the Spirit clothed Amasa, chief of the thirty, and he said, “We are yours, O David, and with you, O son of Jesse! Peace, peace to you, and peace to your helpers! For your God helps you.” Then David received them and made them officers of his troops. - 1 Chronicles 12:18 This Episode's Links and Timestamps: 00:24 – 1 Chronicles 12 06:04 – Thoughts on the Reading 25:18 - Rome just reconstructed this 42-foot Colossus of Constantine and it is spectacular – Harris Rigby, NTB 36:28 - Hawaii rules "Spirit of Aloha" supersedes 2nd Amendment: "We read those words differently than the current United States Supreme Court" – AnnieOakley, NTB 48:23 – Colorado Gun Control Bills Filed This Session 1:09:54 - Republican Governor Declares State Of Emergency Over Police Officer Shortage – Leif Le Mahieu, DW 1:19:13 – Steven Reams – Wikipedia 1:24:51 – ‘Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind' by Michael Massing - Goodreads --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/garrett-ashley-mullet/message
This week: Magdalen College Professor Anthony Esolen is not only an eminent man of literature, he is also a walking encyclopedia of cinema. That definitely included movies set against or directly about, Christmas. In this free-wheeling conversation featuring brushes with fame and interconnectivity of actors who worked with the same directors, we hit many favorites and also some lesser-known Christmas movie nuggets. In this episode, you will learn Reasonable criteria for what makes a Christmas movie a Christmas movie How everybody seems to miss the non-stop blasphemous swearing in Die Hard (1988) The culture degradation as manifest in the way Christmas was treated by Hollywood in years gone by Why many Christmas moves seem to include notes of sorrow and grief Reasons why the Golden Age (1934-1966) produced the great movies about or set against, Christmas Resources mentioned in this episode Movies It Happened on Fifth Avenue The Man Who Came to Dinner Penny Serenade The Shop Around the Corner Remember the Night Christmas in Connecticut An Affair to Remember The Miracle of Morgan's Creek The Bishop's Wife Meet John Doe White Christmas Holiday Inn Miracle on 34th Street Die Hard Love, Actually Joyeux Noel The Apartment And course: It's a Wonderful Life! Books Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints and Sinners by Peter Dans Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind by Anthony Esolen Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esolen
What is generational trauma? How does it affect us?Join us in this enlightening episode where we discuss healing from past traumas and overcoming identity crisis.Kamala Ingrid, our guest episode, is a transformational coach, breathwork facilitator, energy healer, and holistic yogi. With over 26 years of experience in this field, she was able to help people rediscover their authenticity. She's been fortunate enough to share her teachings with a diverse audience.Her passion is for helping people live their best lives. She believes that everyone has the potential to be extraordinary and is committed to helping people reach their full potential.Website: https://www.kamalaingrid.yoga/coaching Instagram: @kamala_ingridFacebook: Kamala Ingrid Yoga Sacred CircleBook mentioned: Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea Judith***Co-host Graciela Laurent, is a published, award-winning and professionally certified portrait photographer specializing in Boudoir and Personal Branding. She creates portraits of who you are and not just what you look like so that you can become who you've always been.Website: http://www.gracielalaurent.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gracielalaurentphotography/Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/graciela-valdes/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gracielalaurentphotographyCo-host Julietta Wenzel, the Magical PT is the owner and founder of Body and Soul PT, as well as Soul Candy: intuitive, hand-made and one-of-a-kind jewelry and artwork. She supports people in finding the magic within themselves, creating balance in their body and soul.Websites: https://bodyandsoul-pt.com & https://soulcandy.love/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheMagicalPT & https://www.facebook.com/soulcandybyjuliettaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/themagicalpt/ & https://www.instagram.com/soul_candy_***Voices of The Goddess with Julietta & Graciela is a podcast where we Empower, Inspire, and Uplift women to be the goddesses they truly are.Join us each week as we sit down for a heart to heart chat, sharing stories and insights with listeners across the globe. Laughter and tears alike abound as we access ancient wisdom in modern times through unique and exciting storytelling - supporting you on your life's journey. If you want to feel more Empowered, Inspired & Uplifted you can find us here:https://www.votgpodcast.com/ https://www.instagram.com/voicesofthegoddess/ https://www.facebook.com/votgpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/thecircleofgoddesses https://www.youtube.com/VoicesoftheGoddess Shine bright and have a magical day!Julietta & Graciela
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” says the Declaration of Independence. But is it really self-evident? What is the basis of equality? How have we come to think the way we do about the world?In this episode of the Post-Christianity? podcast, Glen Scrivener and Andrew Wilson discuss the making of the Western Mind and how we became WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) as they trace the history of the West up to 1776.They make the case that far from being neutral, or self-evident, the values which many hold dear in the West today can be traced back through figures like Luther, Augustine, Paul, and ultimately to Jesus. They show that in spite of its secular pretensions the West remains a place thoroughly shaped and marked by a Christian worldview.So are we really post-Christian? Or is Christianity the only framework that can really make sense of the things we value most?Credits:Post-Christianity? is a podcast from The Gospel Coalition and The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. Learn more about The Keller Center here.The Good Book Company is the publisher of The Air We Breathe by Glen Scrivener. For 25% off books on Christianity and culture, go to thegoodbook.com/postpodcast.
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/world-affairs
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/russian-studies
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
"War was always central to Putin's project," writes Alex J. Bellamy in Warmonger: Vladimir Putin's Imperial Wars (Agenda, 2023). Not just the second Chechen war that made him but the NATO-probing wars in Georgia and eastern Ukraine that emboldened him, and the Western-style war from air in Syria designed to mark Russia's return to Great Power status. But, the project has not gone well. According to Professor Bellamy, the military and strategic disaster of Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine had long been foretold. In Syria, unable to control his client, Putin has been outwitted and outgunned by his Turkish imperial rival, which has also shifted the balance of power against Moscow in the long-running Azerbaijan/Armenia conflict. Even apparent success in Chechnya was bought by outsourcing to the Kadyrov clan, who run the republic independently at enormous cost to the Kremlin. "War has finally caught up with the warmonger," writes Bellamy. "Should Russia's imperial dreaming survive its battering in Ukraine, and it is by no means certain that it will, it will be a Potemkin empire existing only in the minds of those who parrot its tropes". Alex J. Bellamy is Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland. Since Kosovo and International Society in 2002, he has written 15 books as sole author including World Peace (And How We Can Achieve It) in 2019 and Syria Betrayed: Atrocities, War, and the Failure of International Diplomacy in 2022. *The author's own book recommendations are The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union by Serhii Plokhy (Oneworld Publications, 2014) and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland (Little Brown, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political-risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes the twenty4two newsletter on Substack and hosts the In The Room podcast series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Microdose & find your flow in a supportive group setting! Early Bird Pricing for FLOW FORMULA now open until Sept 26. Save $300 by registering now: https://flowformula.crd.co/What does it actually take to change your life with plant medicine? Iboga providers Elizabeth Bast and Chor Boogie know a thing or two about this. It took a lot of work for Chor to get clean from substance addictions, and Elizabeth to heal her childhood trauma.Theirs is a powerful story of strength, courage, and resilience; they truly transformed their pain to heal themselves and now others. The pair are life partners and iboga providers whose words are powerful transmissions that pierce deeply. They are devoting their life to Iboga, Bwiti and the Earth... and learning a lot along the way.Anyone who feels called to cultivate a meaningful and deep relationship with plant teachers, lineages, nature and themselves will benefit from hearing the words in this podcast. I can't wait for you to take this conversation in… enjoy!Topics covered:Chors story of overcoming addition with Iboga to becoming an ordained as a Bwiti NgangaElizabeth's journey with plant medicine that eventually led to IbogaThe different levels of Bwiti initiationsWorking with teachers who are in integrity to the traditionThe Missoko Assenguidia branch of BwitiBwiti as the original ancient study of the human mindHow to be in relationship with nature and our ancestorsWhat it means to be a participant in your own healingConnection to spirit through Truth rather than beliefsHow to use intuition to confirm Truth the correct wayThe skills of decrement and adapting on the medicine pathThe colonized mind and mind hoardingWhat it means to be a bridge between Bwiti and the Western mindShow Links:Flow Formula: 8 Week Microdosing Program - Early Bird Until Sept 26!Kanna Extract Co - LANA to save 10%Soul Centro Retreats in Costa RicaElizabeths website and bookChor's Iboga inspired artworkIboga Panel w/ Bwiti EldersShow NotesThis episode was filmed & produced in collaboration with FWI Media. Check out their beautiful work!If this episode sparked something within, please let me know and leave a review! 1:1 Coaching with LanaInstagram | Facebook | WebsiteModern Psychedelics Integration JournalDISCLAIMER: Modern Psychedelics does not endorse or support the illegal consumption of any substances. This show is meant for entertainment purposes only. The thoughts, views and opinions on this show should not be taken as life advice, medicinal advice, or therapeutic guidance. This episode was produced in collaboration with FWI Media. Check out their beautiful work! If this episode sparked something within, please let me know and leave a review! FREEBIES to support your journey 1:1 Coaching with LanaInstagram | YouTube | Web | Facebook DISCLAIMER: Modern Psychedelics does not endorse or support the illegal consumption of any substances. This show is meant for entertainment purposes only. The thoughts, views and opinions on this show should not be taken as life advice, medicinal advice, or therapeutic guidance.
As Sam is still away, we've dug out one our favourite podcasts from the archives. Back in 2019 Sam spoke to the historian Tom Holland, about his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity and an account of the myriad ways – many of them invisible to us – that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means? And are our modern-day culture wars between alt-righters and woke progressives a post-Christian phenomenon or, as Tom argues, essentially a civil war between two Christian sects?
As Sam is still away, we've dug out one our favourite podcasts from the archives. Back in 2019 Sam spoke to the historian Tom Holland, about his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity and an account of the myriad ways – many of them invisible to us – that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means? And are our modern-day culture wars between alt-righters and woke progressives a post-Christian phenomenon or, as Tom argues, essentially a civil war between two Christian sects?
In today's episode, we meet Trish Murray who shares how we can better understand ourselves by exploring our human design, which is like our personal blueprint. That blueprint can then be used to amplify our life “360 degrees” and create well-being and balance. We touch on numerology, birth data, soul styles, and living in the Age of Aquarius - all information we can use to better understand who we are. About our guest Trish MurrayAfter 25 years in Business & Marketing, Trish found herself on a 10-year long healing journey exploring and integrating a myriad of resources and practices to recalibrate burnout — body, mind and soul — and reshape a life of work into a life 360º!Today, Trish's focus is fast-tracking CEOs and business owners toward individual, inspired insights encoded into their birth data that shape their unique Soul Style™ and equips them with more soul-aligned solutions inside their business and beyond! Trish integrates her study in Psychology, Marketing & Business with principles and practices from Yoga Therapy, Astrology and Human Design for more meaning, purpose and alignment between Soul & Business. Recommended Books:Heal Your Body, by Louise HayThe Emotion Code, by Bradley NelsonEastern Body, Western Mind, by Anodea Judith Connect with Trish MurrayWebsite: https://www.soulstyle.me/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soulstyletrish Access Your Soul Style guide:https://pages.soulstyle.me/2023-guide About your host:I'm your host, Anita Adams, an award-winning leader and the founder of Joyful Inspired Living, an organization dedicated to teaching people how to access their highest most authentic self so they can find clarity and create a life of purpose, passion and joy. In addition to hosting the Joyful Journey Podcast, I offer retreats, both live and online, and private coaching programs to further guide my clients on their journey to their highest self. Email - anita@joyfulinspiredliving.comWebsite - https://joyfulinspiredliving.com/Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/628676761727732Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/anitaadams604/?hl=enLinkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/anitaadamsyvr/ Thanks for listening!It means so much to us that you listened to our podcast! If you would like to continue the conversation with us, head over to https://joyfulinspiredliving.com/ While there, check out the “Members Only” section where you can gain access to our “Tool Box” of free downloadable resources that will further guide you along your own personal joyful journey. Our Tool Box will be updated regularly with new content, much of which will be...
Greg Bennick is BACK!!! For another great episode. Greg Bennick is the author of the upcoming official biography of Ernest Becker. Greg has been speaking on stages worldwide for over thirty years. Greg is a performer thought provoker, punk rock singer, and world traveller who infuses ideas and action everywhere he goes. He is the Executive Director and founder of One Hundred for Haiti, a non-profit supporting development programs in rural Haiti, and he is a co-founder of the Portland Mutual Aid Network, which collectively supports the houseless and unsheltered community in Portland, Oregon. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Greg's previous episode with us is https://learningtodie.com.au/podcasts/3-dolphins-to-wwii-with-greg-bennick-on-the-work-of-ernest-becker/ Contact our guest Greg: https://gregbennick.com/ Check out our research study on dreams, death anxiety and religion. Open to all >18 years https://dreamteam.study/ Links from our discussion Podcasts Dr Rachel Menzies on her book about denial of death “Mortals” https://learningtodie.com.au/podcasts/27-dr-rachel-menzies-mortals-how-the-fear-of-death-shaped-human-society/ Freeman Dyson and Stephen Blackwood: On the Freedom of Thought and Nature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSbY8I-3338 Books Ernest Becker books https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/ernest-becker/205137/ Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland https://www.amazon.com.au/Dominion-Making-Western-Tom-Holland/dp/1408706954 Dr Iain McGilchrist “The Matter with Things” https://channelmcgilchrist.com/matter-with-things/ Rene Girard, Scapegoats https://www.amazon.com.au/Scapegoat-Ren%C3%A9-Girard/dp/0801839173 Yukio Mishima Sun and Steel People Ernest Becker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker Freeman Dyson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_Dyson Alan Watts https://alanwatts.org/life-of-alan-watts/ Yukio Mishima Sun and Steel Information: Religious affiliation in Australia https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia Academic paper: Riordan, D.V. The Scapegoat Mechanism in Human Evolution: An Analysis of René Girard's Hypothesis on the Process of Hominization. Biol Theory 16, 242–256 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00381-y Follow us Ciaran on Substack https://substack.com/profile/23799980-quarrelsome-life The YouTube version of this episode has a video and some slides. Contact us at ian@learningtodie.com.au or ciaran@learningtodie.com.au.
What has been the impact of Christianity on western civilisation? How did the shock of the cross change the relationship between the weak and the strong? Where might we see Christian theological dialogue in unexpected places? And why might it be important to reconnect Christian values with Christian stories?In today's show we will be talking to Tom Holland. Tom is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster, and he co-hosts the popular podcast The Rest is History. His latest work is called Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.
Ep 105: Trauma is shown to cause a 60% increase in risk of developing an autoimmune disease. On this quick solo episode I chat about my experience lately with discovering past trauma and how to go about finding peace. Topics: my experience with past trauma and trying to heal types of trauma methods for healing meditation Eastern Body, Western Mind book
In this episode, I have podcast guest Eileen Lee, founder of Aura Aura, an aura photographer who has an artistic and commercial practice. Eileen explains what the aura colors mean, how to learn more about your aura, and even some technical aspects behind aura photography - like what camera to use! Eileen shares her findings as an energetic researcher and having taken hundreds over portraits over the many years of her aura photography practice and some key patterns she finds when photographing people's auras. _____________________________________________
In our tenth episode, we immerse ourselves in the symbol of the Moon, one of our most ancient, and most important, symbols of fertility, the feminine, and the powers of creation and destruction. Whether we're contemplating the Great Mother goddess, meditating on the Moon card in the tarot, or approaching our own lunar placement in our natal charts, the Moon's expressions are wildly varied—nurturing, protective, feral and untamed, quiet and introverted, oceanic in depth. We hope you love the episode, and thank you for being here for ten Soror Mystica shows !!!!!Texts ReferencedCosmos and Psyche, and The Passion of the Western Mind, both by Richard TarnasEsther Harding, Women's Mysteries, Ancient and ModernSally Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey Links to connect with us, share your sacred symbols, or explore materials referenced in this episode:Find Us On InstagramSoror Mystica PodcastMariana LouisCristina FarellaSupport the Show on Patreon Share Your SymbolsDo you have a symbol that pops up in dreams, in your tarot card pulls, or in your personal experience that puzzles you? If you'd like to hear us talk about your personal symbol on our show, feel free to share your story with us here.Advertise with UsWould you like your product or shop to be featured as an ad partner on Soror Mystica? Explore advertising options here!Ad PartnerHannah Carey Coaching@rewildtheempresswww.hannahcareycoaching.com
Jess On The Mountain: Yoga, Chakras & Becoming Your Own Guru
Today we enter the heart chakra where we encounter love and relationships. Anahata means unstruck. The you within you that was, is, and always will be, perfect, whole and complete. An excessive heart chakra can lead to codependency, poor boundaries, clinginess, jealousy, being overly self sacrificing. A deficient heart chakra can make you withdrawn, cold, critical, judgemental, intolerant, narcissistic. When you know your tendencies in imbalance, you can make changes that will improve your experience in love and relationships. Source text: Eastern Body, Western Mind, by Anodea Judith Get on the waitlist for the next Chakra Savvy cohort: www.jessgoulding.com/chakrasavvy Get started or continue on your chakra journey: 3 questions to get you started: Chakra Savvy Quickie Quiz https://www.jessgouldingl.com/quiz Start with settling into some journaling questions and a video guide with the Chakra Check-In Self Assessment https://www.jessgoulding.com/chakras Listen about each chakra and keep it all straight with the Chakra Savvy Cheat Sheet at https://www.jessgoulding.com/chakras-podcast Ask questions and make suggestions at https://www.jessgoulding.com/podcast Connect on Facebook Instagram YouTube TAGS awareness, mindfulness, self study, svadyaya, self awareness, chakras, yoga, yoga therapy, love, codependency, narcissism, relationships
No BS Spiritual Book Club Meets... The 10 Best Spiritual Books
No BS Spiritual Book Club Meets… Healer, Educator, and Bestselling Author Anodea Judith, PhD A thought leader on the topics of chakras, psychology, yoga and social change, Anodea Judith is director of the teaching organization, Sacred Centers, and holds a doctorate in Human Health, and a Master's in Clinical Psychology, and advanced yoga teacher certifications. A globally recognized teacher whose courses have reached 163 countries, with books in 28 languages, she has been called a “prophet for our time,” and is the author of many best-selling books on the Chakras. Dr. Judith's titles include the classics Wheels of Life, Eastern Body, Western Mind, and the double-award-winning social change book, The Global Heart Awakens, as well as Charge and The Energy Body, and She Rises: Awakening Our Female Archetypes of Leadership. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/sandie-sedgbeer/support
Something that gets buried today is how the pagan or secular world treated people, and it's buried for a reason. We like to pretend the “Dark Ages” were full of witch-burning psycho priests but that pre-Christian societies were joy-filled lands where all joined hands and sang songs like the Whos in Dr. Seuss's Whoville. But nothing could be further from the truth. A good read on how much people have forgotten our Christian roots is a book by Tom Holland, titled: Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. We have forgotten how much Christianity has improved the lives of everyone in comparison to the “good old days” of paganism. We are so accustomed to hospitals, universities, libraries, and non-profit charities that we forgot where they all came from. They didn't come from Caesar or anyone in his time. People like to think there was some utopia before the “evils” of Christianity stamped out the fun. We will get to find this out soon, however, since we are lurching backward toward that “fun.” We forget things easily, not just over long expanses of time, but in single generations. The book of Judges illustrates this well, where each fall into sin has a savior, but within forty years, the people resume their errors and forget why they needed order. Our era is similar to that which preceded World War I when nations celebrated the beginning of the war, holding parades, cheering, wishing the boys well in their lovely uniforms and flags, only to find out a few years later that the war was a meat grinder of unprecedented levels, thanks to progress in technology and science. As we whisk God out of the public arena and out of our personal lives, we forget what the world was like before Jesus walked this earth, died on a cross, and rose from the dead to take away our sins, transform our suffering, and defeat the devil. One of the primary lies told today about the pre-Christian world is that women's lives were better without the Church imposing restrictions on them. But this is not true. It has never been true. It never will be true, no matter how many professors and bloggers keep writing about it. Disrespect of women was not a Christian doctrine or idea, but it was indeed a core doctrine of the secular powers of Rome, actually quite similar to the lyrics of Snoop Dogg. You could sum up the treatment of women by the wealthy of the ancient world in Snoop's hit song, “It ain't no fun, if the homies can't have none.” Women were objects, pure and simple. The interesting thing about reading the Old Testament treatment of women is that today we think it sounds barbaric, when in reality it was the most progressive treatment of women in the ancient world. We read with Western eyes, blinded by time, through which we are blocked from understanding, nuance, and history. With the Church, women achieved a radical leap forward, one that the pagan world mocked for centuries. Many of the women who fought against the old ways were martyred for it. Strange that they would be willing to die for such “oppression.” We are taught and bonked over the head repeatedly with this “Dark Age” myth in every university course. By design, we are not taught the reasons why Christian life appealed to so many women, because it undermines the sand foundation of modern life, which will ultimately undermine itself because it is spiritually dead.Here is a summary from Mike Aquilina of how women were treated before God revealed himself to us through Jesus. I should note that none of this was covered in my university history classes, nor was it ever mentioned in the Women's Studies class I had to take:Pagan and Christian sources agree that the Church grew at an astonishing rate in the first three centuries of its existence. The modern sociologist Rodney Stark estimates a steady growth rate of forty percent per decade during centuries of intermittently intense persecution when the practice of the Faith was a capital crime. Pagan and Christian sources agree that women made up the majority of converts.The most effective opponent of Christianity from this period, the Greek philosopher Celsus, mocked the Church for this. Around A.D. 178, he accused Christians of not daring to evangelize women when their sensible husbands and fathers were present but rather getting hold of them privately and filling their heads with “wonderful statements, telling them to pay no attention to their father and to their teachers.”What kind of statements were those? They no doubt involved the principle of equality of the sexes before God. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,” said St. Paul, “there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).The apostle wasn't denying sexual differences, nor was he claiming there should be no difference in the roles that men and women played. Rather, he was claiming for women—and slaves and foreigners—a dignity that no one in his world, not even a philosopher as brilliant as Celsus, could recognize.A woman in that world was seen as having little intrinsic value. She derived her identity from the males in her life—first her father, and then her husband, and then her sons. The law recognized little for her in the way of natural rights or protections. Women were not permitted to testify in a court of law because their testimony was considered unreliable. The law treated them like children.The value of their sex was nowhere more evident than on the day of their birth. Infanticide was common in the Greco-Roman world. It was practiced mostly for economic reasons, to limit family size and to maximize the future return on the father's investment in childrearing.Thus, children who were “defective” in any way—i.e., disabled—were usually drowned in a bucket of water at birth or left exposed at the town garbage dump. There they might be claimed as carrion by vultures and dogs or taken up by pimps to be raised as prostitutes. All the documentary and archaeological evidence indicates that the most common “defect” for which children were abandoned was femaleness.Nowhere is the matter expressed more shockingly than in a “love letter” found in the excavations at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. The husband, Hilarion, closes his missive to his wife, Alis, by saying: “If you happen to be pregnant again, if it is a boy, leave it; if it is a girl, throw it out.”In the economy of antiquity, a girl was an expense, an economic liability in ways that a boy was not. A boy would one day be an earner. A boy might provide for his parents in their old age. He might even improve their status by his accomplishments.A girl, on the other hand, would need to be fed and clothed for more than a decade before she was married off—and upon marriage her father would have to pay a sizable dowry. For these reasons the Roman playwrights referred to girls and young women as “odious daughters.” It's likely that the dialogue in their works is an accurate reflection of common turns of phrase.The ideal daughter, for pagan Romans, was physically beautiful, for the beautiful would be married off the soonest. The typical age for her arranged marriage was twelve, theoretically at puberty, but many girls were given in marriage at eleven to a man much older. And the marriage, it seems, was consummated whether the girl was physically ready or not.It appears there was little expectation of a loving relationship. Adultery was common, as was divorce. Abortion was common, as was infanticide. Marriage was a transaction established for the continuation of the customs of family and society for another generation.A woman's role was to produce a son to be heir. If she suffered the misfortune of widowhood before bearing a son, she might live the rest of her life in poverty.The laws and traditions of the Greco-Roman world had been refined over centuries to communicate the value that society placed on women. It was very low.If not held back by faith and morals set on the rock of objective truth, people will treat women like objects and objects like women. (This is sin in a nutshell, by the way: choosing the wrong goods.) And there is no one more in danger of being treated like an object than the crown of creation, who is called woman. If you were rich and powerful in pre-Christian times, you could have as many objects called women as you could afford or capture, including the wives of those less powerful than yourself (see: every King that ever had a harem. Also see: David and Bathsheba, as well as Solomon's sex life with hundreds of wives. These are two Biblical falls from grace for this behavior, where sin is being narrated and not praised…notice that wherever there is polygamy, you have a mess, and that includes Abraham and Jacob. At least Isaac kept it together with Rebecca, and they are the true model of marriage in the Old Testament). We are moving back to that era now, as calls for the bad idea of polygamy have resurfaced. Utah is no longer the only place we associate with this term. This is just one form of sin that is being presented as a good today, as slippery salespeople twist truth into the shape of bad ideas that women finally escaped through faith in Christ and living the Christian life with Christian men. The arguments today are no different from the Romans and Greeks. Is your baby possible defective or just bad timing? Kill it. Abort. Marriage has a minor difficulty? Divorce. Want immediate pleasure instead of commitment, responsibility, and love that requires work and action? Porn. Got a mother-in-law you don't want to deal with? Park her in a home. The reality is that the only reason we have nice things at all is because of Christianity. And that is the spiritual struggle that we are in, where advertisers and intellectuals preach from the screens, telling us that progress means going backward to pre-Christian insanity, which always ends in “might makes right.” If you are not pursuing objective truth as your ultimate goal, as the end of all things, then the desire for power is the substitute. I don't care how you try to sugar coat it; when God is no longer the foundation of truth, you end up with “my truth” and that devolves into groups dictating “truth” by coercion, eventually at gunpoint. Whenever the church has gone astray, they fall into this same trap, of power politics mixing with the faith. The eye can never stray from Christ, who is the truth and foundation of all things. Nor can his words be twisted, as he says of the Commandments they are not malleable to fit the decade we live in:Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Mt 5:17-20)To understand the difference between the pre-Christian era and the “Dark Ages” of Christianity, let's compare two buildings, arguably the two greatest buildings in the world, which happen to be in the same city, just a few miles apart.When people travel to Rome, they mainly visit two places. One is the Colosseum, where hordes of bloodthirsty fans got drunk, gambled, and watched men fight one another to the death. The other is St. Peter's Basilica, a Church, where a fisherman was crucified for telling people about a carpenter who was God incarnate. It's stunningly beautiful, but the real purpose is that St. Peter's is a place where the Sacraments take place: Baptism, Confession, Holy Matrimony, and the Eucharist. Holy Mass happens hourly, even while the tourists mill about. The purpose of St. Peter's, and any other church, is humility and surrender of your life to God. Do you see the difference? Both are architectural marvels, visually stunning, spectacles to the senses, but their purpose is in direct opposition to each other. Notice that America no longer builds beautiful churches. This should tell you something, as we build billion dollar stadiums for gladiator games. St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City was built in 1858 and dedicated in 1910. The rise of the modern stadium started in the early 1900s, and exploded after World War II. We are moving away from St. Peter's and back to the Colosseum, and so are our human relations. What I am getting at is: without humility before God, we see competition and strife as the great entertainment, the great game. Suffering is something to avoid and shun at all costs. Winning is all that matters, because winning removes suffering. We completely lose the point of redemptive suffering. This is because most of us don't really believe in the afterlife or eternal life any longer. We have no meaning in our lives, so we look for it in athletics, sex, money, and power. Our simple functions as fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters no longer excite us because we have traded eternal life for the plastic trophies of this world. One thing that always amazes me is that within three months after the Super Bowl or NCAA Tournament, I can't even remember who won, because it really doesn't matter. But I never forget Christmas or Easter or Pentecost or the Ascension days, because those matter immensely.Nothing angers unbelievers so much as the idea that you were made for a higher purpose, made by a living God who resides outside of time and space but speaks to us here. The purpose is to serve him and serve others, and the primary way we do that, if not married to Christ or his Church, is marriage between one man and one woman. Having a marriage and family is the great purpose of our earthly lives. Why is that message so bothersome? Because it doesn't allow us to follow our base instincts, which is to pleasure ourselves constantly. It requires abandonment to a higher power and a higher purpose, neither of which is the self. Sometimes we confuse this, thinking that our “sacrifice” for work or school is the offering we make to God. But those things are ultimately for the self, not God. Offerings to God expect nothing in return, because there is no transaction to be made when dealing with God, and if your offering is contingent on receiving something from God, you are actually talking to the devil. Yes, some people are not fertile, some will live a single life, some will adopt, some will never have children. Abandonment of the self means conforming your life to God's will, not despairing over what struggles he has given us, because we are all given struggles in order to draw us closer to him. Until you realize this, suffering will seem arbitrary and unfair. As for sex, the great call to chastity is pursuing a life of virtue whether you are married or single. They are both chastity, just different types. How can anyone understand the parable of the grain of wheat without looking at the formless void of creation and seeing that in order to fill it, it must be done in the right way, which is to fill this void in the form with families? God didn't say, “Subdue the earth and form a government, and have the government raise the children.” No, that's what Karl Marx said, and all of his flunkies that followed him, who now occupy your employer's human resources department and local school board. The form we are given by God is called marriage, between a man and a woman, and the void is filled with new life, called children. That sentence there is enough to get me fired, but the truth must be spoken and the truth will remain whether I say it or not. Because not only does marriage and family fulfill the physical form of this world, but it fulfills the heart. Dying to self means maturing into a greater purpose to serve God and others. Only then can we be spiritually reborn here. Then in physical death, if we choose God's will and not our own, we will we be brought back to union with God in eternal life. That's what we want, both here and hereafter. We don't want what HBO is telling us to want. We don't really want what Apple is selling. It's not just sex that we want. Not just career. Not a threesome. Not four wives. Not soullessness. We want God, as it is in heaven and on earth. Psalm 128 is the model for fulfillment. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house;your children will be like olive shoots around your table.Thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord. FYI: “Fear” of the Lord means wonder and awe, a healthy fear, not the kind of fear where you simply pay your taxes to avoid jail. This is a kind of fear that grows out of love, wonder, awe, reverence, and it all starts with knowing that you are a sinner in need of forgiveness, in need of a savior. Recognizing your status as a sinner will free you, because it sheds all the fig leaves we wear. Then once we have bore our souls before God, and become honest, open, and willing, then we can return to the faith of a child and let the ego wither away as it must. Recall that Jesus died naked on the cross. All was stripped away, and his death showed us the result of our sins, for what we did to Jesus we do to one another every day. This doesn't mean it's easy, but if you fear the Lord and are grateful for your daily bread and want nothing beyond the grace of God, only then will the blessings of a wife and children satisfy you, because you will share all of it with the Creator. And if some tragedy occurs, like in the book of Job, and all is taken away, even then you will still have the grace of God, as that is the rock of your life that can be clung to when everything else fades away. When your life becomes an offering to God, and God's endless offering of creation is accepted by you, then what more could you possibly want? Conforming your will to God's is how you level-up in this world, and you do this by praying. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.whydidpetersink.com
This week In the Elliott Hulse Podcast, special guest Dr. Michael Robillard, is an independent scholar, philosopher, and Iraq War veteran. His book "Don't Go to College" challenges the traditional notion of college as the only path to success and advocates for alternative approaches to gaining knowledge and experience. Dr. Robilard's insights on the impact of neo-Marxist ideologies on modern culture have garnered attention, making him a thought-provoking guest on the episode. He encourages listeners to consider alternative paths to success beyond traditional higher education and to think outside the box. In this episode:Campus Physical Assault and Neo-Marxism, Cultural Impact of Marxism in the WestThe Long March Through the Institutions and the Removal of God from the Western Mind.Exploring the Corrosive Ideology of Rejecting God and Objective TruthHuman Purpose and FlourishingUniversity Education on Human Development and Family FormationGender-Specific Prescriptions and the Impact of PromiscuityConnect with Dr. Michael Robillard: https://www.michaelrobillard.com/Gain control over your drinking, quit drugs, over-eating, over-working or viewing filth on your phone FOREVER... So you can take back your life and be the man you're meant to be: https://www.waronvice.com/Meet Elliott Hulse http://www.elliotthulse.comThere Is A WAR On Masculinity: https://www.makemenstrongagain.com/Join The King's Militia: http://www.kingsmilitia.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/elliotthulse/
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Charles Freeman about the history of intellectualism in the West. They discuss the preservation of texts after the fall of the Roman Empire, Charlemagne and his interactions with the Papacy, the importance of Augustine on Western thought, and the Great Schism of 1054. They also talk about rationality in the Middle Ages, impact of Islam, importance of Thomas Aquinas incorporating Greek philosophy into Christian theology, and the rise of Humanism. They also discuss impact of colonialism and conversion, the Reformation and the figures of Calvin and Luther, the reopening of the Western mind, and many more topics. Charles Freeman is an independent historian and author. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and has written over half a dozen books. He has wide spanning interests in the history of European culture and thought. He is the author of the last book, The Reopening of The Western Mind. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit convergingdialogues.substack.com
We live in a society in which so many people walk around in a chronic state of stress without even realizing it. Living with constant stress has become such a norm, that we are not even aware of how dysregulated our nervous systems have become. Our nervous system is made up of two parts: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. You may have heard of the sympathetic nervous system referred to as our “fight or flight” response. This is meant to keep us safe from danger, but we are not meant to be in this state at all times. The other part is our “rest and digest” nervous system, and this is where we are meant to operate on a regular basis.Staying in a fight or flight mode diverts energy from rest and digest, and so many of us have forgotten how to rest and need to learn how to regulate our nervous system so we can operate from a place of peace. We have all had some sort of trauma in our lives, even collective trauma such as the pandemic, and it is important to understand how it affects us, how it lives within our bodies, and how to release it so it doesn't hold us hostage. Phoebe Leona is here to teach us how to do that.Phoebe Leona is an embodiment guide leader, author, and TEDx speaker. Through inspirational speaking, dancing, writing, somatic/movement practice, and transformational coaching, she is here to guide people to become the embodied leaders of our world. In this episode, she shares her story of watching her father suffer from PTSD, and how she found peace in dance and movement. Phoebe explains that our bodies, posture, injuries, illnesses, and relationships mirror the experiences of our lives. Bringing awareness to how they are connected is the first step to finding peace. Tune in for more!Key highlights:Phoebe's background and childhoodHow people's habits play out in their posture and bodiesWe are living in a chronically stressed world and Phoebe helps people move into the parasympathetic nervous systemGetting out of survival modePhoebe's realization that she was addicted to chaosPhoebe explains the different chakras in our bodyIn the Western world, we love to put things in categories, but everything is connectedPhoebe walks us through a figure 8 exerciseEpisode resources:Book: Eastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea JudithConnect with Phoebe:Website: phoebeleona.comInstagram: @phoebeleona.loveGet Phoebe's book: Dear Radiant OneConnect with Alison:Instagram: @alisonanswers | @lagercounselingWebsite: LagerCounseling.comYouTube: Alison AnswersFacebook: Alison Lager Lcsw CasacPurchase Alison's book: “The Wake Up Call”Alison Answers Facebook Group: Join HEREWomen of Excellence FB group: Join HERE
Jess On The Mountain: Yoga, Chakras & Becoming Your Own Guru
Today's episode is all about embodiment. We ask, are you actually living IN your body, WHERE your body is? Or are you more in your head, with your body as a bit of an afterthought? This is the realm of muladhara, the work of the root chakra. Physically, we place muladhara at the base of the spine. Metaphorically, we place this at the base of the mountain. Losing the sense of connection to our base, to our body, is often a culprit for increased worry/anxiety, weight gain, food issues, financial difficulty, and material obsession. It can be harder to focus, have proper boundaries, and generally practice good self care. If you've ever had major illness, surgery, physical abuse, or inherited trauma–you might have some work to do at chakra one. From my experience, though, we could all use a little love at muladhara. Embodiment challenge! Choose one to do this week: Take a slow walk in nature, noticing your surroundings. Mindfully massage your feet with oil. Sit down for all meals for three days in a row. As a certified yoga therapist, I work 1:1 with clients for goals they have to feel better, body, mind and spirit. Quite often, we must begin at the base–at muladhara–at the element of earth–before we can even address low back pain, anxiety, or weight loss. It's something I come back to again and again in my own life as well. To practice embodiment is to take your physical wellness and connection into your own hands, feel, be in, and accept your life just as it is, and learn to trust that life is conspiring in your favor, all your needs will be met, and life is abundant. Much love ............... How is your root chakra? Take the Chakra Check-In Self Assessment: www.jessgoulding.com/chakras Would you benefit from Yoga Therapy? Schedule a FREE Discovery Call: www.jessgoulding.com/yoga-therapy Connect with Jess Facebook Instagram YouTube www.jessgoulding.com Other helpful links: Resource mentioned in this episode: Eastern Body, Western Mind, by Anodea Judith Read Jess's blog post: What's a Chakra? https://www.jessgoulding.com/blog/whats-a-chakra Not sure where to start? Take the 3 question Chakra Savvy Quickie Quiz: www.jessgoulding.com/quiz Listen to Jess teach the chakras and get a downloadable PDF, the Chakra Savvy Cheat Sheet, at www.jessgoulding.com/chakras-podcast
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com/2023/01/12/the-western-mind-and-the-relationship-to-the-guru/
Happy 2023! This week, Diana welcomes back Alena Kwong, LMSW, to discuss different forms of holistic healing and wellness. As a holistic healer herself, Alena shares how her former career as a pastry chef led her down a path toward wellness including reiki, nutritional counseling, and yoga. Together, Alena and Diana discuss the messiness of cultivating a wellness practice and being gentle with yourself through the process. Additionally, Alena gives a peak into her own wellness routines, and offers resources for those interested in deepening their own practices.Alena Kwong, LMSW, (she/her) is a psychotherapist/licensed social worker with a background in holistic nutrition and wellness. She is also a certified yoga practitioner and Reiki Master. Her approach includes mindfulness and somatic based wellness tools for stress reduction and emotional regulation. Connect with Alena on Instagram @inspiredliving.by.alena or via email at therapywithalena@gmail.comMentioned in this episode:Dr. Mark Hyman - The Doctor's Farmacy PodcastMayo Clinic Guide to Integrative MedicineOwn Your Self by Kelly Brogan, MDEastern Body, Western Mind by Anodea JudithResources for professionals: Southwest Institute of Healing ArtsIntegrative Institute of NutritionMindbodyGreen Functional Nutrition TrainingE-Cornell Wellness Counseling Certificate ProgramPESI Integrative Mental Health Provider Course Bridges Mental Health is a stigma-free hub for Asians, Pacific Islanders, and South Asian Americans (APISA) to discuss, navigate, and seek mental health care.Want to support our work? Buy us a coffee!Write to us with comments & questions, we'd love to hear from you.@bridgesmentalhealthbridgesmentalhealthnyc@gmail.comCover photo by Janice ChungTheme music by Will Marshall
This is a repost of my second conversation with Bernardo Kastrup on the More Christ channel and podcast. We discuss the question of different levels and kinds of consciousness, agency, meta-consciousness, spontaneous (“unconscious”) intelligence, intuition, the boundaries of identity, team dynamics and how all of this tie in with the Genesis narrative. This podcast was derived from: https://youtu.be/BUaVNrktCk4 Original interview: Episode 88: Jonathan Pageau/Bernardo Kastrup 2: Consciousness, Meta-Consciousness, God, and Morality: https://youtu.be/_-aadYA6S6A My previous discussion with Bernardo Kastrup: Episode 75: Jonathan Pageau/Bernardo Kastrup: Orthodoxy, Resurrecting the Western Mind, Body & Soul: https://youtu.be/usFMBUTkaLk ================== - The Symbolic World website and blog: www.thesymbolicworld.com - Merch: www.thesymbolicworld.store - Language of Creation, by Matthieu Pageau: www.amazon.com/Language-Creation…ook/dp/B07D738HD8 Support this podcast: - Website: https://thesymbolicworld.com/support/ - Patreon: www.patreon.com/pageauvideos - Subscribestar: www.subscribestar.com/jonathan-pageau - Paypal: www.paypal.me/JonathanPageau Join the conversation: - Unofficial Facebook discussion group: www.facebook.com/groups/1989208418065298/ - The Symbolic World Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/TheSymbolicWorld/ Social media links: - Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheSymbolicWorld - Twitter: www.twitter.com/pageaujonathan - Instagram: www.instagram.com/jonathan.pageau My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson. My website designers, Anomalist Design: www.anomalistdesign.com/
Today is all about YOU! We jump into the conversations that have been going online and give lots of shout-outs to listeners. THEN you get a sneak-peak into what we're reading right now. Books mentioned in this episode: Teaching From Rest by Sarah Mackenzie (hidden bird story) Keeper of the Lost Cities Series by Shannon Messenger Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson Dead Wake by Erik Larsen The Water Keeper by Charles Martin The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams The Divine Comedy by Dante Maritime Supremacy and the Opening of the Western Mind by Peter Padfield The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien If the Shoe Fits by Julie Murphy When Books Went to War by Molly Guptil Manning
This is a repost from my conversation with Bernardo Kastrup on the More Christ podcast and YouTube channel. We discuss dissociation and the problem of unity and multiplicity, how the Western mind approaches the world and what we have lost in modernity, banality, heavenly hierarchy and transcendence, crisis in the West and recovering the sacramental life without sentimentality. Bio (from his website): 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 Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories (where the 'Casimir Effect' of Quantum Field Theory was discovered). Formulated in detail in many academic papers and books, his ideas have been featured on 'Scientific American,' the 'Institute of Art and Ideas,' the 'Blog of the American Philosophical Association' and 'Big Think,' among others. Bernardo's website: https://www.bernardokastrup.com/ Original video: More Christ: Jonathan Pageau & Bernardo Kastrup: Orthodoxy and the Resurrection of the Western Mind, Body, & Soul: https://youtu.be/usFMBUTkaLk YouTube: https://youtu.be/LglZNsmol58 Mentioned: - The Book of Enoch: Fallen Angels and the Modern Crisis: https://youtu.be/QtmLCK1keFI - The Mythical Constantinople | with Dr. Mario Baghos: https://youtu.be/3vGTGBW8CS4 - The Symbolic World website and blog: http://www.thesymbolicworld.com - Merch: http://www.thesymbolicworld.store - Language of Creation, by Matthieu Pageau: https://www.amazon.com/Language-Creation-Cosmic-Symbolism-Genesis-ebook/dp/B07D738HD8 Support this podcast: - Website: https://thesymbolicworld.com/support/ - Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/pageauvideos - Subscribestar: https://www.subscribestar.com/jonathan-pageau - Paypal: http://www.paypal.me/JonathanPageau Join the conversation: - Unofficial Facebook discussion group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1989208418065298/ - The Symbolic World Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSymbolicWorld/ Social media links: - Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TheSymbolicWorld - Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/pageaujonathan - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonathan.pageau My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson. My website designers, Anomalist Design: https://www.anomalistdesign.com/
Aliza Kelly connects with Dr. Richard Tarnas (Pisces Sun, Aries Moon, Gemini Rising), professor of psychology and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies and author of the renowned text Cosmos and Psyche. In this episode, Dr. Tarnas and Aliza dive into the mechanics and magick of astrological practice. Dr. Tarnas explains how he stumbled upon astrology and how it shaped his professional trajectory. Dr. Tarnas and Aliza discuss the power of planetary transits, the significance of the United States' Pluto Return, and the profound, unifying forces of the universe.Tune in to Stars Like Us each week for expert interviews on pop culture and mysticism. Find out what guests believe in, how magic shows up in their lives, and what the universe has to offer them. Love Stars Like Us? Please rate, review, and subscribe!Explore Dr. Tarnas' website: https://cosmosandpsyche.com/Read “Cosmos and Psyche”: https://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Psyche-Intimations-World-View/dp/0452288592Read “The Passion of the Western Mind”: https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Western-Mind-Understanding-Shaped/dp/0345368096Keep an eye out for “Changing of the Gods: An Astrology Documentary Series”Follow Aliza on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alizakelly/ Order This Is Your Destiny: http://bit.ly/ThisIsYourDestinyBook Join the Constellation Club: https://constellation-club.comReach out: http://alizakelly.com/contact Brand Partnerships: adam@twowestentertainment.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
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