This week on the podcast I’m speaking again with Daniel Ingram. Daniel is a physician and meditator and is the author of the influential book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. He is the co-founder of the Dharma Overground and of The Emergent Phenomenology Research Consortium. Today we discuss awakening and the role of interpretations in the mind, as well as the dark night of the soul and other related topics. If you're interested in any of these topics, you can go to innerspaceinstitute.org to explore my guided practices there.

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Viivi Jokela is an awakening facilitator. She had a spontaneous awakening in 2022 which she subsequently integrated to reach abiding no-self realization. I find her descriptions of what she calls “the natural state”, and the process by which it can be realized, to be incredibly accurate, and so it’s a real pleasure to bring you my conversation with her today. We speak mainly about what it’s like to go through no-self realization, as well as other aspects of awakening. https://www.sensingradiance.com/

Judith Herman is a psychiatrist, researcher, teacher, author and a leading expert on the healing of traumatic stress. She is Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is the author of many books on PSTD, most recently Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice. A lifelong activist, she brings deep insight and understanding to the societal context in which trauma occurs, from the personal to the political, and these are the themes we discuss today.

Henry Shukman is a poet and Zen master. Henry is the Guiding Teacher of Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is part of the Sanbo Zen lineage. He is the author of One Blade of Grass: Finding the Old Road of the Heart, a Zen Memoir, and, most recently, Original Love: The Four Inns on the Path of Awakening. Today we discuss Zen and our own paths of awakening.

Karl Friston is a theoretical neurobiologist and Professor of Neuroscience at University College London. He is also an honorary consultant at UCL’s Queen Square Institute of Neurology and is a fellow of both the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society. He also happens to be the most cited neuroscientist in the world. Karl kindly read and gave a blurb for the book: “A remarkably current and forward-looking treatment. This book uses all my favourite words—in the right order—and some I have never encountered before. It offers a delightful narrative, grounded in state-of-the-art thinking about what it is to be an observer or, in the author's words, BEING IS BELIEVING.”

Find the original conversation here: The Dawn of Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive

Erik Ireland is a mindfulness teacher who runs a youtube channel and podcast called listen to sleep, where he provides guided meditations and bedtime stories for mindfulness and awakening. He also works with people to help them find direction through the framework of the hero's journey at awakenyourmyth.com. Two years ago, he experienced an awakening and recorded a video called mountain awakening describing it. With his permission I’m going to include a section here before our conversation. erikireland.com awakenyourmyth.com https://www.youtube.com/ListenToSleep listentosleep.com

Find the original conversation here: https://www.thetripreport.com/p/37-dr-james-cooke-the-dawn-of-mind

Ask questions for the next AMA via patreon or the channel membership community (click the "join" button above): Aubrey Plaza stroke clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13N4b2M06tE&ab_channel=TheHowardSternShow