In his classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, about four-dimensional alien beings and a protagonist that has come unstuck in time, Kurt Vonnegut describes death as 'violet light and a hum.' The state of absorptive consciousness has been associated with the color violet, and with the sound of the hum, in many cultures around the world for many thousands of years. In this episode, we look at the relationship of the trance state to this place of the violet hum, exploring Zen koans, Greek myths, and Tantric visions of consciousness to get there. Features interview clips with mythologist Joseph Sansonese, author of The Body of Myth.

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This week on The Emerald, a conversation with author Robert Tindall on Homer, Tolkien, Paleolithic cave art, Zen koans, Shakespeare, sacred song, and the visionary, animistic consciousness that connects all of them — a 'once universal mode of consciousness' in which 'reality is understood to be pervaded and structured by powerful numinous forces and presences that are rendered to the human imagination as the divinized figures and narratives of myth'.  You don't have to be a Tolkien or Homer fan to appreciate this episode. Our conversation goes deep into the worldview that was the normative vision for human beings for most of our history and looks at how we lost this worldview and what can be done to help reclaim it in challenging times, when an imaginative vision is increasingly necessary.

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Sacred stones are ubiquitous across India. You find them in villages, in rural shrines, and in major urban temples that see tens of thousands of pilgrims a day. Shiva, the third most popular deity on the planet, is worshipped in the form of a smooth black stone. Many of the Indian goddesses too are worshipped as stones. Why? Why should such a simple object receive so much attention?  To really understand this, we have to edit out a whole lot of cultural clutter and take ourselves to a more direct experience of nature. 

Today on the podcast, I’m going to make the case for worshipping rocks. In fact, I’m going to put forward the outlandish notion that in the worship of sacred stones, we find some of the most ‘advanced’ visions of the cosmos and consciousness that human beings have ever developed.

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Animals have not only ‘shared the planet’ with human beings as we often hear on nature shows, which of course is a noble description intended to cultivate empathy for animals and urgency around their preservation. But animals are much more than this — more than just co-inhabitants of the world. In this episode, I explore the idea that the human mind, thought, imagination, language, and ingenuity are utterly dependent upon — and grow directly out of — our experience of animals. In fact, it is difficult to imagine that the human mind could have developed into what it is at all without animals. And what a future human mind would be like without direct experience of animals is a bleak thought indeed. Today on the Emerald. The Fauna Mandala: Animals, Imagination, and Consciousness. 

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"I mean seriously, what's more out of touch with objective reality? The Lakota sense of Wakan-tanka, mother and father nature, mirrored in cultures and traditions around the globe. Or, say... Wal-Mart?"

Who gets to claim objective reality? Scientists, leftists, rightists, capitalists, religious types, the spiritual-but-not-religious, atheists, modernists and ancients alike have all tried. Ultimately it may be that the only thing that can lay claim to objective reality is mystery itself. In this episode of the Emerald, I take a recent New York Times Magazine interview between David Marchese and Stephen Colbert to talk about objective reality, cultural notions of the real, and fictions that we all participate in. Caution: This episode dives (respectfully) right into the heart of the science-spirit divide. If you're up for it, come along for the ride.

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Ancient visions of cosmic dismemberment and ego destruction meet modern yoga practice with its focus on self-care and self-worth in this episode of The Emerald.

In creation myths around the world, from Scandinavia to India to Mexico, dismemberment is a central theme — a vision in which a primal oneness is torn into pieces to create this universe of diversity. This cosmic dismemberment is also reflected in the experience of the individual practitioner, who, in their journey towards finding wholeness, must themselves go through some type of disassembly or tearing apart of the constructs of small self in order to find connection to that which is eternal and universal. Shamanic acolytes around the globe experience — while in trance — their own dismemberment. Tantric practitioners of the chöd ritual in Tibet conduct an elaborate meditative self-dismemberment. It is nearly universal — practice involves some type of letting go of identity constructs. How then, does this vision meld with the modern vision of yoga practice, in which practice serves as more of an accessory to identity and a bolstering of ego than a tearing apart of identity? How do teachings on ego-destruction meet an identity-driven world?

Dismembered Frost Giants and the Core-Power Paradox — Self-Care Meets Self-Obliteration in an Identity-Driven World.

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In this mytho-poetic look at one of the defining modern political issues, Josh explores ideas of freedom, empathy, and responsibility and how they are viewed in various cultures, cosmologies, and mythologies around the globe. In the west, freedom tends to be seen solely in terms of the material freedom to follow our wants and impulses free of external interference. In yogic traditions, freedom is seen as moving beyond these same impulses towards a deeper vision of peace. 

Ultimately, questions around weaponry and armament in Indian mythologies and in the Arthurian legends revolve around worthiness and responsibility, a responsibility that extends not only to the larger community but ultimately to nature itself. Nowhere is this more evident that in the story of the holy grail itself, which explores this balance of freedom and restraint as a path that ultimately leads us towards empathy for our fellow humans and alignment to the natural world. 

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What can we learn from those who can read the ocean like we can read words on a page? How can we transform how we view culture when modern western culture likes to position itself as the top of the cultural pyramid? What does a vision of sacred geography have to offer us? What are its implications for planet and person? A discussion with anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis.

If you don’t know the work of Wade Davis, you should. Davis is a Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America and particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.

He’s also an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society (probably the coolest job title on the planet) and his work has taken him all across the world. Today on The Emerald, Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World: A Conversation with Wade Davis.

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Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what it feels like to have whiskers? Those bristling antennae, so bright and alive... Or have you put your hand on one of those globes at a science museum and felt the energy surge through the very ends of your hair? Today on the podcast, we’re going to talk about hair. Tumbling, cascading, curling, radiating — hair holds a very special and very energized place in the imaginative mind. Across the world, visions of the divine involve wild-haired goddesses, bristling white beards, and even silver-haired baboons. Turns out that hair and energy and even consciousness are very closely linked in the human mind and in some traditions, even the cosmos itself is a little bit hairy. These aren't just Rapunzel stories, this is something wilder and more unkempt — hair that sprouts out of the back of trance practitioners, hair in the shamanic experience of animal transformation, and hair as a qabbalistic mystery. 

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Today on the Emerald, we dive a little further into the topic of wonder. Not wonder as just a fleeting feeling, but rather wonder as a state of consciousness deliberately architected through creative ritual. Wonder that is pursued systematically, stoked, as our interviewee says, in order to break open our day to day experience and get us to something deeper. In this way, wonder becomes a form of resistance to the current state of the world.

Join us as Josh interviews professor and author Tulasi Srinivas about her book The Cow in The Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder. Tulasi Srinavas is Professor of Anthropology, Religion and Transnational Studies at Emerson College. She is currently a Luce ACLS fellow in Religion and international Affairs, and a World Economic Forum expert in the study of religion. 

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