Dangerous Wisdom

Mona Sobhani joins us to discuss her book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe. Mona is a cognitive neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur. A former research scientist at the University of Southern California, she holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Vanderbilt University with the MacArthur Foundation Law and Neuroscience Project. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, VOX, and other media outlets. She lives in Los Angeles.

The nature and scale of ecological degradation can provoke empathy distress that devolves into depression, despair, anxiety, antipathy, avoidance, and outright denial. But ecological awareness and ecological education can help us to see how much power we have when we become attuned to spiritual and ecological realities. We can actually help to heal the world—each and every one of us, wherever we live.

Imagine a national park bigger than Yosemite, bigger than Yellowstone, bigger than the Grand Canyon. Imagine a national park bigger than all three of those combined. Now imagine a national park bigger than those three combined with the addition of the Adirondacks, the Grand Tetons, the Great Smoky Mountains, Denali, Olympic, and Sequoia—bigger than all of those put together!

Imagine all the wild beings doing the work they do to further the conditions of life, all the work they do to make your life and my life possible. Imagine those beings thriving, and imagine humans thriving more in the process.

Finally, imagine that this park can become a reality—and that reality depends on you. It doesn’t depend on you in some burdensome, terrible way. You don’t have to give yourself a spiritual or physical hernia. Rather, it depends on things you can do at your own scale, something enjoyable and rewarding. And something done in the key of wonder, something that can open up the ecology of your own mind.

This describes Doug Tallamy’s project, detailed in his book, Nature’s Best Hope. This is a good news kind of book, and it can dispel our feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, replacing them with beauty, wonder, wildness, and mutual empowerment.

Doug is the T. A. Baker Professor of Agriculture in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, where he has authored 112 research publications and has taught insect related courses for over four decades. His principle research goal involves arriving at a better understanding of the many ways insects interact with plants, and how these interactions create diversity in animal communities.

Doug’s books include Bringing Nature Home, The Living Landscape (co-authored with Rick Darke), The Nature of Oaks (winner of the American Horticultural Society’s 2022 book award), and Nature’s Best Hope (a New York Times Best Seller). In 2021 he cofounded Homegrown National Park with Michelle Alfandari (HomegrownNationalPark.org).

https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/

Derrick Jensen's new book is called, Marijuana: A Love Story. It details his wild romance with this oft misunderstood plant teacher and medicine, and how the dream the Marijuana once offered people (a version of "the American Dream") became ruined by the corporatized capitalistic system.

From the book description: "In state after state, the wealth-building capacity of this extraordinary plant is now concentrating into the control of the already rich. From seed to smoke, legalization is eroding the lives and livelihoods of the people it was supposed to help: the patients, growers, trimmers, "mules," and activists who created the colorful and committed culture that is now under threat.We can end the war on weed without turning it into a war on small family growers-but it will depend on how much pressure we are willing to apply to force law makers to serve local communities rather than corporate interests. Marijuana: A Love Story is a report from the front, a reminder of how and why we fell in love with this plant, a cautionary tale of corporate power, and a call to once more "Free the Sacred Herb."'

Derrick Jensen is the author of more than twenty-five books, including Bright Green Lies, A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, and Endgame. He is also a teacher, activist, and small farmer, and was named the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement by Democracy Now! In 2008, he was chosen as one of Utne Reader's 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World and won the Eric Hoffer Award. He is a cofounder of the organization Deep Green Resistance. Jensen has written for the New York Times Magazine, Audubon Magazine, and The Sun, and was a columnist at Orion Magazine. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and a BS degree in mineral engineering physics from the Colorado School of Mines, and has taught creative writing at Eastern Washington University and Pelican Bay State Prison. He lives in Northern California on a property frequented by bears.

A magnificent swindle attempts to keep us from realizing true peace and happiness. How can we overcome it? We must begin by seeing through it, with the help of Lewis Mumford, Walter Kaufmann, C.G. Jung, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. We consider addiction, domestication, distraction, and the material bribe we all must keep ratifying in order for the pattern of insanity to perpetuate itself. We can stop ratifying it here and now.

Picking up our contemplation on the feedback loop of Mind and Nature, we enter into insights and suggestions from Nietzsche and the poet-philosopher-farmer Wendell Berry. These thinkers help us to face some troubling questions:

What are we not likely, or not able, to become conscious of, simply by living in the dominant culture?

What does the culture make likely as our experience?

What does it make likely as our world?

The general answer to the latter question seems to be something degraded, limited, limiting.

The philosophy of the dominant culture encourages the practice and realization of the very things that cut us off from our fuller potentials, and philosophers in the university do little to teach students how to transform. The cultivation of states of anger, greed, aggression, and deceit go altogether with conquest, and this leads to the total breakdown of more empowered and empowering forms of awareness.

We in the dominant culture live in a context that encourages the invisibility of these other forms of awareness, discourages their cultivation, and then encourages and even insists upon their dissolution if they were to somehow arise. How can we transform all of this, for the benefit of the whole community of life?

We arise embedded in mind, with mind in every direction. Human beings in the dominant culture seem to miss the mindedness all around them.

The “modern” human walks around with “ideas” “in” their head. This localization of mind remains untenable on scientific grounds, and does not fit with most of the spiritual/philosophical traditions we have inherited.

 Nature is already Minded. Because of this, we need to mind Nature—that is, attend to Nature, and also allow Nature’s mindedness to spontaneously presence itself in/through/as us and our World.

We likewise need to allow Nature to mind us. That will mean liberating ourselves into the nonduality of Nature and Culture—liberating ourselves into larger ecologies of mind. We can’t really let Nature care for us, guide us, teach us, and even liberate us if we maintain a false duality between Nature and culture.

Engage with your philosophical self by checking out part two on The Others and the Interwovenness of Earth and Soul. These two contemplations belong to a larger mandala revealing pathways to better ways of knowing and being, living and loving.

It's something the self-help-industrial complex covers over, turning our sincere search for healing and success into the self-help catastrophe. What does our soul really want? How can we get on a path of sanity and sacredness, a path of true healing and happiness? Wisdom can help us find our way---but first we have to see things as they are, which means seeing our deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret.

In honor of Interdependence Day, celebrating the total interwovenness of all things, we speak with Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, a philosopher specializing in the anomalous.

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher and interdisciplinary researcher specializing in anomalous phenomena and their implications for our understanding of consciousness. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2008, studying under Thomas Nagel, and taught at Brandeis University before leaving academia for an independent writing career.

She currently serves on the advisory board of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies and is a supporting researcher for the International Centre for Reincarnation Research. Her books include The Source and Significance of Coincidences, Beyond Death, and The Feeling of Value.

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, PhD

sharonrawlette.com 

Author of:

Psychology Today blog Mysteries of Consciousness

BICS award-winning essay Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness

The Source and Significance of Coincidences: A Hard Look at the Astonishing Evidence

The Feeling of Value: Moral Realism Grounded in Phenomenal Consciousness

The Supreme Victory of the Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Synchronicity

If you struggle with getting enough sleep, you aren't alone. Keep in mind: six hours or less per night on an ongoing basis seems about as bad as getting zero for two days straight.

As much as 41% of adults in the U.S. report short sleep, and as much as 84% of high school students report short sleep. Worse yet, 50-70 million U.S. citizens (perhaps more) qualify for a formal diagnosis of sleep disorder, ranging from insomnia to sleep apnea.

All of this should create a sense of urgent compassion for ourselves, each other, and the world. That has to do in part with the many mental and physical ailments connected with sleep disruption. Not getting enough quality sleep AND dream seems to go together with a concerning list of illnesses, including cognitive decline.

Moreover, a lack of quality sleep and dream can limit our skill and our potential in life, leaving us less capable to take skillful, creative, wise, compassionate, and beautiful action in our lives, on behalf of our own wellbeing and also on behalf of the whole community of life. Sleep and dream go fully together with our life and our world, and the problems we see in our own life and world thus go together with the crisis of sleep and dream we now face.

The present dialogue goes together with the dialogue with psychologist and dream tender Dr. Leslie Ellis, released as Episode 44. If you missed that one, I encourage you to check it out.

In the present episode, Dr. Rubin Naiman joins us to contemplate the dangerous wisdom of sleep and dreams, reflecting on some of the things we need to begin to open to and keep in mind if we want to allow the power of sleep and dreams help us to heal self and world at the same time.

But the episode begins with some reflections on Hermes from your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. Hermes is, after all, a guide of souls, a lord of dreams, and a magician with the capacity to carry lead us into the realm of sleep and dream. Then we move into a delightful dialogue that I think you will enjoy. You can find Rubin's bio and contact info below.

Rubin Naiman, PhD, FAASM, is a psychologist, author, Fellow in the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of Arizona’s Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine where he has taught seminars on sleep and dreams to physicians for twenty-five years. Rubin pioneered the development of integrative approaches to sleep and dreams, integrating scientific with depth psychological, transpersonal, and spiritual perspectives. He has taught and consulted about sleep and dream matters in a dozen countries around the globe.

Over the years, his work has included training doctoral psychology students, dreamwork with hospice patients and survivors, and establishing and directing sleep and dream health programs for Canyon Ranch and Miraval Resorts. Rubin has also served as a creativity consultant for the entertainment industry, which included travel with a world-renowned rock band for two years.

Rubin is the author of numerous consumer and professional works on sleep and dreams including Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming and Awakening, Hush: A Book of Bedtime Contemplations, Healthy Sleep, an audio program co-authored with Andrew Weil.

More recently, he published a seminal paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences entitled, Dreamless: The Silent Epidemic of REM Sleep Loss as well as Oxford University Press Medical text chapters entitled, Dream Medicine and The Future of Sleep Medicine.

In his spare time, Rubin is an avid hiker and amateur photographer. He has about seven grand kids and believes that children and dogs offer the greatest hope for the betterment of our planet.

Rubin Naiman, PhD, FAASM

Director, NewMoon Sleep, LLC

Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine

  Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine

   University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ

www.drnaiman.com

www.integrativemedicine.arizona.edu

We begin with a story, and thread all the way through the meaning of enlightenment, and the need to receive initiation into the mysteries of life, follow a path of joy, cultivate reverence for wisdom and wildness, and truly realize the inconceivable interwovenness of all things.