This week’s episode is a conversation with an ex-police officer who recently underwent psilocybin therapy in the Netherlands.  We discuss how insights from his experiences led him to gain a new perspective on his history in the police force.

Shamash Alidina is an internationally renowned mindfulness teacher and is the author of many books including Mindfulness For Dummies and The Mindful Way Through Stress. In today’s conversation we talk about many different aspects of mindfulness, its benefits, advice for starting a practice, the nature of the mind, free will, self compassion, and much more. You can find his work at https://www.shamashalidina.com/

In this episode of the podcast I talk about the concepts of interdependence and separation and how they relate to life, the mind, the physical world, the natural world and the human community.

Bernardo Kastrup is a philosopher of mind with a background in computer science.  He has PhDs in both disciplines and has written 9 books including rationalist spirituality, why materialism is baloney, the idea of the world and recent studies of the works of Schopenhauer and Carl Jung.  Our chat was focused on his “consciousness-only” view of reality.

In this AMA I cover Christof Koch and Donald Hoffman’s views on consciousness, what happens to consciousness during sleep or anaesthesia, the possible evolution of consciousness, intelligence, self-awareness, shared DMT experiences and more.

Christoph Koch is the neuroscientist who, along with Francis Crick, initiated modern scientific research into the neuroscience of consciousness in the 1990s. Much of this work was done while he was a professor at the California Institute of Technology and he is now president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute for Consciousness. His books include Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist and most recently The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness is Widespread but Can't be Computed. Christof also writes the Consciousness Redux column for Scientific American Mind.

In this AMA episode I answer questions on the self, suffering, non-dual awareness, dissociation, tulpas & transpersonal love.

Donald Hoffman is a Professor of Cognitive Science at UC Irvine and author of The Case Against Reality.  We talk about his interface theory of perception and his worldview of conscious realism and its impressive implications.

In this Ask Me Anything episode I answer questions on nested consciousnesses, proto-consciousness, ketamine induced brain death in sheep and more.

John Horgan is a renowned science journalist and author of several books including Rational Mysticism, The Undiscovered Mind, The End of Science, The End of War, and most recently Mind-Body problems which is available for free online at mindbodyproblems.com. He also has a podcast by the same name on meaningoflife.tv.  He is the recipient of the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers and two Science Journalism Awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  John is currently the Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. He also writes the “Cross-check” blog for Scientific American.  In today’s conversation we talk about whether science can discover objective truths when it comes to issues of human nature like consciousness and free will, the compatibility of science and mysticism as well as the role psychedelics have played in John’s thinking and his thoughts on meditation.