The third book of the Patañjali yoga sutras, the Vibhūti Pāda, is often skipped over in modern yoga teacher trainings. Why? Its descriptions of supernatural powers — of yogis who can shrink to the size of an atom, fly, and read minds — can cause cognitive dissonance or discomfort in the modern mind. Yet right in the heart of this discussion of the extraordinary powers is an animate, rapturous vision that is concurrent with the experience of human ritual culture dating back in an unbroken line to the Paleolithic. This is, in fact, the animist chapter of the yoga sutras, which is precisely why it's ignored. Today on the podcast, we look at the rapturous vision of the Vibhūti Pāda, which arrived at a time when the old ways of trance and animal powers were butting up against new doctrines of transcendence. With source references as diverse as Italian scholar Roberto Calasso and the Wu-Tang Clan, we can safely say this is like no other commentary on the yoga sutras that you've ever heard. And if it ruffles a few scholarly feathers, so be it. Enjoy. 

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The poet/bard/singer holds a special place of reverence in many cultures and traditions. Far from being seen as 'escapism,' sung music, incanted verse, and told story was essential technology for transporting people to a place of greater presence, awareness, focus, and timeless vision that ultimately could assist in navigating life well.  This is why story, poetry, and song are more vital now than ever. On this live storytelling episode of The Emerald, we conjure up the old bards and singers, from the formidable Indian singer Tansen — who called fires and storms with his voice — to the Celtic Taliesin, to Orpheus, the animate force of poetry and song itself. In this vision, poetic, sung verse is sometimes a fountain, sometimes a stream, sometimes a cauldron full of bubbling liquid... and the force of praise is the force of nature itself, which exists in a state of perpetual awe at its own creative power. 

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In this live storytelling episode, we look at mythological visions of the world axis or central column across a range of cultures. Starting with the simple upright alignment of the human spine, and journeying to the central mountain of the Indian mythologies and the world tree of the Norse and Siberian cultures, we explore stories and ritual practices that illuminate 'center' and our relationship to it. 

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There’s a great myth that is told and retold in cultures throughout the world. The story goes like this — something is harnessed, raised upwards, suspended there, until finally there is a great cracking open and then a cascade of sweetness downward. Mythologist Joseph Sansonese calls this — and not Campbell’s monomyth — the real Great Myth. Today on the podcast we explore myths of rupture — from the cracking of Krishna's butter pot to the collapse of Troy — that invoke the yogic process. These myths, according to Sansonese, detail the journey of the individual practitioner toward an experience of yogic union, the trance state, a journey so central to the human story that it is found literally everywhere.

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More and more pandemic experts are saying that humanity's disruptions of natural environments are responsible for outbreaks of new viruses. This sense of disease as intimately tied to imbalances that occur within nature is found in traditional Indian and Tibetan understandings, in which local nature goddesses are seen as both bringers and dispellers of disease. If there is something to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, perhaps it is that we need a deep re-evaluation of how we interact with the natural world and a re-alignment towards respecting the forces of nature. 

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Eyes have always held sway over the human imagination — mesmerized us, scared us, inspired us. The windows to the soul, they’ve been called. They’ve been the subject of song and poetry, folklore and myth. Consciousness, in the Indian texts is repeatedly described in relation to eyes. These glorious visions of eyes and consciousness reach their culmination in the 8th century Netra Tantra, the Tantra of the Eye, which opens with a playful question about the nature of eyes and spirals into something far greater — cosmos and consciousness as one great, macrocosmic eye.

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We often assume that Paleolithic people lived in a world that was fundamentally less than ours because they didn’t yet have what we have. We assume that their existence was incomplete, because it hadn’t yet culminated in us. Yet new findings on our ancestors' culture, physiology, and physiognomy paint a very different picture. This episode takes us deep into the Paleolithic era, in which 97% of our ancestors lived, and dispels notions about war, violence, primitivism, chaos, and the minds and hearts of Paleolithic people. 

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Bette Midler recently made headlines for tweeting a picture of three girls at a museum distracted by their phones instead of admiring the art. Yet the context in which we view art tends to be just as compartmentalized and distracting as a phone. Today on the podcast, we look at varying visions of art in cultural context — from the paleolithic caves to Indian temples to modern performance art — and move towards a conclusion that art, perhaps, isn’t just in the object. It’s in the state and quality of interaction between subject and object. Art, in its traditional context, reinforces the animate force of life, and is a gateway for an experience of this animate force. And if the observers aren’t delivered into a state of rapture by the art, perhaps it’s not a reflection on them, but on the entire context in which we view and compartmentalize art.

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A few weeks back, wizard-yogi-talkshow host Russell Brand interviewed scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast Under the Skin. It’s the November 1st, 2019 episode and it’s highly worth listening to. On the show, Neil puts forward some commonly held suppositions about western science — that the scientific method is the only valid method of arriving at the truth. That subjective reality has nothing to offer the discussion on truth. That science itself is ultimately objective. And that the proof of science’s fundamental ‘rightness’ can be measured by the “progress” of technological society or what some have called civilization. In this episode, we take a look at some of the stories Neil uses to illustrate progress, triumph over superstition, and scientific objectivity and offer a differing perspective based on the animate vision that has driven humanity for 99% of its history. 

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In this poetic ode to the animate vision of the cosmos that has been so central to humanity for so long, we explore the idea that the ritual heart of both culture and cosmos itself is poetry, and that poetry is the only way to accurately convey and invoke a cosmos that is ultimately artful. Poetry exists so humans can be propelled into states where we feel one with nature. Hence the gods “clothe themselves in poetic meter,” say the Vedas, and in doing so, give us a direct vehicle through which to access them, to revel in them, to ourselves shine. This episode uses the Greek myths as a jumping off point to celebrate the poetic vision of the cosmos and explores how we drifted far from our poetic source. Caution — Greek myths are explicit.

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