Infinite Conversations

Douglas Prater is an author, musician, media engineer, and designer of audio tracks that offer support for meditation, flow states, and personal development. In this episode, we discuss how audio brainwave entrainment technology can be used to cultivate consciousness, creativity, and mental health, especially when used in the context of a holistic or integral practice.

We specifically discuss Doug’s latest creation, Stealing Flow*, a suite of tracks designed to support the creative cycle by inducing phase-appropriate flow states. The conversation includes an overview of the major brainwave states and their correlates in inner experience, and how Stealing Flow works with these states.

Doug and Marco share notes on how they’ve personally used meditation and brainwave tech as part of their creative process, and Doug talks about his recent sci-fi and romance writing, as well as his upcoming book about Harry Potter and Buddhism!

“A Trauma-Sensitive Approach to Meditation,” by Mark Foreman

Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening

Greg Thomas and Ed Mahood talk about the life and literary legacy of Albert Murray, whose Collected Essays & Memoirs were published by the Library of America in 2016. We discuss Murray's ideas on Omni-American identity, culture and race, and his conception of "antagonistic cooperation," which gives us the Blues Hero, who faces adversity with improvisation, artfulness, and affirmation of life. We also explore how Murray's thought is especially relevant in our political moment, and how leaders in business and other areas can learn from the example of the "Jazz break," where the performers slay the dragon of entropy and chaos with superior style.

Music includes Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, playing "Bird's Blues," and a recording of "Cherokee" by Clifford Brown.

Ed Mahood also joins for the latter part of the discussion, and we listen to some music!

Niven Jazz Collection: Charlie Parker Tape 1 (1940-1945)

Clifford Brown and Max Roach, "Cherokee"

Marco V Morelli (host)

Read Greg's piece, "Reading Albert Murray in the Age of Trump" on Metapsychosis.

In Part 2 of their talk, Caroline and Marco continue exploring the relation between meditation and the body. Can meditation help transmute the karma that comes with the development of abstract thinking and the rise of civilization as such? Caroline argues that the expansion of the notion of the individual I, which may have once conferred advantage, is now massively maladaptive on a planetary scale. The two also discuss art and artists and how a sensitivity to raw experience is needed to hear the voices drowned out by our hyper-development. How might we enter into a more indigenous relationship with the Earth? Caroline proposes that sustainability is a crisis of how we organize concepts and project them onto the world, and that a more conceptually elegant and empathetic orientation, which can be cultivated through Buddhist practice, is essential to restoring health and clarity.

See Part 1 for more background on this episode: https://cosmos.coop/podcast/you-are-any-body-a-response-to-secularizing-buddhist-ethics-with-caroline-savery-part-1

In this episode, Marco and Caroline formulate their responses to the Buddhist Geeks podcast episode "Secularizing Buddhist Ethics" with Vincent Horn and Stephen Batchelor. Caroline explains how her understanding of the ways consciousness materially evolves in complex systems—via Douglas Hofstadter of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and Maturana/Varela's Santiago School Theory of Cognition—intersects profoundly with her understanding of Buddhism. Caroline has been practicing and studying Buddhism since having a discrete transcendental experience in 2010. In this lively "inter-view," Marco and Caroline explore the notion of treating any and every body as though they are you; the problematic aspects of the "you are not your body" teaching in Eastern mystic tradition; and the potential for realizing "heaven on Earth" through particular actionable frameworks of relating to one another.

Part 2: https://cosmos.coop/podcast/you-are-any-body-a-response-to-secularizing-buddhist-ethics-with-caroline-savery-part-2/

Here is the original Buddhist Geeks episode Caroline and Marco are responding to:

https://podtail.com/en/podcast/buddhist-geeks/secularizing-buddhist-ethics/

Caroline also references her film project, The Sust-Enable Meta-mentary (2014).

Episode music by Chris Zabriskie. (CC) BY 4.0. http://www.chriszabriskie.com.

John Davis and Marco V Morelli discuss who could benefit from Clean Language training, and John attempts to help Marco understand how Clean Language could help writers and artists develop richer metaphorical landscapes. John also relates his experiences as a counselor and activist during the AIDS crisis, and touches on how psychic and paranormal experiences have informed his creative writing.

During this talk, John also discusses the relationship between trauma and transcendence. In a later conversation on the forum at infiniteconversations.com, John added the following notes.

We have discussed this Clean Language philosophy, Marco, before and I am open to further developments as I believe it can be used in this process we are in the midst of to articulate desired outcomes and to purify the speech of our tribe. Fiction, story telling, and the language arts are crucial for the Generative Self to arise from the ashes. So I will elaborate further some notes that I'm making that reference some of our previous conversations. Please appreciate the impromptu nature of these comments and I hope they are of use for they reference those previous discussions on Clean Language and how I believe it can be employed to train the Imaginal Intelligence and turn trauma into transcendence; indeed there is an element of trauma that may be necessary to activate this intelligence. I'm working out this perhaps controversial idea in the following notes. Patience is required!

Some people have one trauma and can be served best with developing a metaphor for that traumatic episode.

Persons who have had multiple traumas, especially as children, have learned how to use hypnotic skills to dissociate (go somewhere else). This can be triggered at the mere hint of another traumatic episode about to happen.

Dissociation as a strategy for coping with multiple traumas is a great survival strategy; you can float up to the corner of the room and watch it from there. Often this talent can also be developed in non-traumatic experiences: in art, theater, fiction, we use the same processes to deconstruct and reconstruct identities creatively. We can go into other worlds.

Working with dissociation was one of David Groves' keen interests, and when he worked with me he used a lot of Clean Space. I have found the interplay of Clean Space and Clean Language has worked best for me.

I strongly resist the notion that experts know best. I worked with experts without Clean Language and they are often terrible with trauma. After working with an expert I developed a Tourette's-like syndrome that lasted for a decade.

I found that a good CL practitioner with a beginner's mind and an open curiosity can work wonders with traumatic events. Luckily, I have had the good luck to train someone in using CL and after he worked with me once a week for three months my symptoms disappeared. I have been free of symptoms for over a year. I much favor peer to peer relationships than the more traditional ways of working. Someone with an arts background and CL is much better than anyone who has immersed themselves in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.

So having reviewed these notes in public I see I have a lot of work to do as I move through the personal multiple traumas I have struggled with, cultivating good trances and finding reserves. And how does that learning become knowledge that can serve the groups I am a member of? Not sure. Thanks for this forum and may we continue to bring our Best Self to this Mandala of Generative Selves in the making....

[Source: https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/on-the-politics-and-ethics-of-empowerment/864/24]

Episode music by Chris Zabriskie. (CC) BY 4.0. http://www.chriszabriskie.com.

Jenn Zahrt and host Marco V Morelli discuss a series of Jenn's poems recently published in Metapsychosis journal under the titles “Dialogues with the Inscrutable” and “There is a Hydrogen Bomb on Your Raspberry Eyelid.”

Jenn reads the following poem during our talk....

polish in the squalor

J.F. Martel is a writer and filmmaker living in Ottawa, Canada. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, published by North Atlantic Books. This episode is a companion to J.F.’s essay, “Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination," published in Metapsychosis.

In this conversation Marco and J.F. discuss:

• the paintings of Vermeer and Van Gogh

• Martin Heidegger

*Editor's note: In the talk, Marco conflates Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism with his letter De Profundis.

• The Ever-Present Origin – by Jean Gebser

• Vincent van Gogh, Still Life: Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers, 1888

Modern Busker Productions

“What Does Anybody Know About Anything” and “It's Always Too Late to Start Over” – by Chris Zabriskie

Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license

How can organizations support our authentic and meaningful engagement in work we actually care about? How can we value openness, participation, reputation, legitimacy, connectivity, and abundance in the way we work together? How can we can organize in ways that liberate rather than stifle our creative spirit?

This is Part 2 of our talk with social philosopher Bonnitta Roy. Listen to Part 1 here.

How can organizations support our authentic and meaningful engagement in work we actually care about? How can we value openness, participation, reputation, legitimacy, connectivity, and abundance in the way we work together? How can we can organize in ways that liberate rather than stifle our creative spirit?

Social philosopher Bonnitta Roy thinks we need a new kind of organization to meet these challenges. She calls it the Open Participatory Organization. And her Manifesto is the point of departure for this conversation—an example of the kind of work Bonnitta does in real time with people and organizations around the world.

To learn more about Bonnitta and her work, visit appassociates.net.

APP Associates International

The Fifth Discipline, by Peter Senge

Open participation, Agile methodology, new economy, organizational development, organizational design, p2p (peer to peer), collective intelligence, distributed intelligence, distributed agency, abundance, Holacracy, CRiSP (Continually Recalibrating Its Starting Position), social technology, naming not claiming

Audio Production

Intro Music: “What Does Anybody Know About Anything” – by Chris Zabriskie

What happens when we bring some of the same principles of a meditation or mindfulness practice into our conversations with each other? That is to say, what becomes possible when we become fully present and engaged in the experience of listening, speaking, and relating to others as a dialogical practice?

What forms of communion—and even shared purpose—emerge when, yes, we recognize, honor, and work with our differences, yet also go beyond our personal identities to experience presence and meaning through the art of conversation? How could a practice such as “generative dialogue” help people of the different faiths or worldviews reach new levels of intimacy—and how could we experience this sort of intimacy in other cultural contexts, including our social activism as well as our everyday lives?

Marco and Trevor discuss Trevor’s recent paper "The Ethics of Presence: New Paths in Interfaith Dialogue."

Olen Gunnlaugson

EnlightenNext

On Dialogue – by David Bohm

Beams and Struts

generative dialogue, Bohmian Dialogue, pluralism, spiritual practice, Quaker Listening Practice, relationship to the other, spirituality of conversation, interfaith dialogue, communion, God, mindfulness, creativity, collective intelligence, shut the fuck up and write, field theory, morphic fields, beginner’s mind, emergence, the holy spirit, intersubjective meditation, agency and communion, jazz music, flaneur, developmental theory, Body of Christ, the multitude, irreducible singularities who come together in common, Integral Postmetaphysical Spirituality, planetary civilization, convergence

Audio Production

Intro Music: “What Does Anybody Know About Anything” – by Chris Zabriskie