Join host Carry Kim as she welcomes Neil Douglas-Klotz, a distinguished writer, researcher, and musician, to explore the untamed landscape of spirituality and its ancient roots. In this episode, Neil shares insights into how Western society has evolved through the cultural and spiritual extraction from the East, particularly focusing on the indigenous spirituality of the Middle East. Discover the profound impact of mistranslations in religious texts and the importance of reclaiming our spiritual heritage. Neil delves into the rich traditions of Southwest Asia, offering a fresh perspective on the teachings of Jesus, the importance of reconnecting with nature, and the wisdom of ancient nomadic cultures. This episode promises to challenge conventional beliefs and inspire a deeper understanding of spirituality in our modern world.

For the past two thousand years, the West has extracted, refined and harnessed the spiritual resources of the Middle East to create and fuel modern culture. “Organized religion” is a relatively new innovation in human affairs, perhaps only two or three thousand years old. For at least ten or twenty times as long, humans participated in a more open-ended, nomadic spirituality — one that embraced healing, ritual, art, poetry, drama, dance and chant to make sense of their existence. Unwilling to look at its own Western religious roots in terms of an indigenous spirituality, Western culture has denied both body and the Earth. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we are all influenced by Western culture’s distorted version of Middle Eastern cosmology, psychology and spirituality.

In this episode, Neil Douglas Klotz joins us to reclaim the wild landscape of spirituality, and the original interdependent existence of our inheritance where all life is sacred. He invites us to embrace unity through diversity as a way forward for humanity.

For an extended interview and other benefits, become an EcoJustice Radio patron at https://www.patreon.com/ecojusticeradio

LINKS

Neil Douglas-Klotz, Ph.D. [https://abwoon.org] is a renowned writer, researcher, teacher, and musician in the fields of Middle Eastern spirituality and the translation and interpretation of the ancient Semitic languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Living in Scotland, he was for many years the co-chair of the Mysticism Group of the American Academy of Religion. A frequent speaker and workshop leader, he is the author of several books on the Aramaic spirituality of Jesus including Prayers of the Cosmos and Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus, as well as books on Native Middle Eastern spirituality and Sufism.

Carry Kim, Co-Host of EcoJustice Radio. An advocate for ecosystem restoration, Indigenous lifeways, and a new humanity born of connection and compassion, she is a long-time volunteer for SoCal350, member of Ecosystem Restoration Camps, and a co-founder of the Soil Sponge Collective, a grassroots community organization dedicated to big and small scale regeneration of Mother Earth.

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Executive Producer and Intro: Jack Eidt

Hosted by Carry Kim

Engineer and Original Music: Blake Quake Beats

Episode 240