He’s stirred the imagination of poets and writers and artists for 30 centuries. Rilke wrung his pale heart out to him. He finds his way into Shakespeare and Nietzsche, into the librettos of Stravinsky and Lizst. He’s the subject of ballets and sonnets and even avant-garde films.

I’m speaking, of course, of Orpheus. In this episode of The Emerald, I speak with author Ann Wroe about her remarkable book Orpheus: The Song of Life.  In the book, Wroe explores Orpheus from his Thracian shamanic roots into the modern era, finally coming to the conclusion — as many poets have — that Orpheus is not simply an abstract figure from the myths of old, but is the animate force itself, the force of song and poetry so timeless and so necessary in our modern world.

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It’s easy to dismiss the practice of sacrifice as brutal, but the fact is that sacrifice, enacted in varying degrees in both external and internal ritual, has dominated human traditions for thousands of years in cultures around the world. Today on the podcast, a look at humanity’s relationship with sacrifice — its prevalence, its permutations,  and how modern culture, without ritualized forms of sacrifice, compensates for what has been a driving force for humanity for thousands of years. Perhaps, we discover, the act of ritual sacrifice is so inherent to the human experience that our modern culture inevitably finds ways to enact this cycle over and over again, whether consciously or not.

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In the modern western understanding of consciousness, certain states are afforded the status of more important, or real, than others. The visionary state of meditative trance, which has been critically important for many cultures, takes a back seat to 'Normal Waking Consciousness.' Yet is the visionary state really less important than what we call Normal Waking Consciousness? And how have we historically treated those states of consciousness that veer from what has been termed ‘normalcy?’ With a modern lifestyle that is drastically different from how our ancestors lived, does what we call Normal Waking Consciousness even bear resemblance to how humans experienced the world for most of our history? Today on the Podcast, Sei and Her Soul Are Separated: The Colonization of Consciousness and Reclaiming the Visionary State

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Modern yoga has put forward a vision of the whole human being that revolves around comfort, ease, freedom from pain, and the healing of trauma. Yet in many cultures, what we call discomfort is actively sought out as a portal to the state of spiritual revelation. In fact, almost all traditional rituals that lead to the revelatory state of trance involve deliberate discomfort or some form of ritually induced trauma.

In this episode, we journey to what can be a very uncomfortable place — the cremation ground — to discuss notions of comfort and discomfort, death, and surrender in practice. And along the way we find that true comfort may not always be found where we normally think it is.

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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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