Wonder Cabinet

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up in London with a Russian Sufi mystic living downstairs, seekers showing up at all hours and meditation happening constantly.  Then his family moved to a  coastal redwood forest in Northern California, where he learned to surf and fell in love with wilderness.  

Today, Emmanuel is the founder, executive editor and podcast host of Emergence Magazine – for nearly a decade, one of the most important venues for spiritually-infused ecological writing.  His new book, Remembering Earth, is both a meditation on the sacred nature of the living world and a practical guide to re-entering it.  

In this conversation,  we explore Sufism's radical vision of the divine as intimate and immanent, rather than distant and transcendent. We also talk about jazz — Emmanuel dropped out of school at age 16 to play acoustic bass — and the liminal space of creative improvisation.  Other stops along the way:  the epigenetic memory of birdsong, how breath and walking can become a form of prayer; what dreams are and where they come from; and the boundlessness of Earth’s love. 

Note:  Wonder Cabinet is taking a summer break.  We’ll be back in August with new episodes.

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00:00:00 The Magic We've Forgotten
00:02:15 Growing Up With a Guru
00:06:55 One River, Many Names
00:15:55 Spiritual Ecology and Practice
00:29:05 Nightingales, Jazz, and Dreams

What happens when a physicist experiences a moment of transcendence that science cannot explain?

Alan Lightman has spent much of his life exploring the mysteries of the universe—from black holes and the nature of time to the fundamental laws that govern reality. A physicist, novelist and longtime professor at MIT, he's fascinated by the transformative power of awe and wonder.

In this live conversation recorded at New York's Morgan Library, Lightman reflects on extraordinary encounters in nature—from a startling moment with two ospreys to a solitary night beneath the stars—that shook him to the core and left him feeling as though he had somehow "fallen into infinity." Calling himself a "spiritual materialist," he seeks to bridge the divide between science and religion, between mathematics and art.

Can a scientific worldview make room for awe, transcendence, and mystical experience? Lightman says these fleeting moments reveal something essential about being human: our longing to connect with something larger than ourselves.

This event at the Morgan Library was co-sponsored by the Nour Foundation as part of our series “Spirituality in the Age of Science: Conversations on God, Transcendence and Mortality.”

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0:00 Introduction
2:40 The Osprey Encounter
9:40 Science And Religion
13:30 Scientist And Novelist
28:50 The Religious Impulse
36:50 Evolution And Consciousness

We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of "The Friends of Attention," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the German Romantics, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Henry James — to argue that we've lost touch with older, richer forms of attention. And he makes the case that reclaiming it will require more than screentime apps or digital detox – it’ll take collective resistance. Plus: why your Pilates class, your evening needlework, or your walk with the dog might already be forms of radical attention — and how reframing everyday activities can make ordinary life feel richer, more mysterious and more full of wonder.

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0:00 Introduction
3:00 Human Fracking
27:30 Attention as Generosity
30:55 Wonder and Disenchantment

What happens when one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has a mystical experience that upends his understanding of reality?

In the 1990s, Christof Koch helped launch the modern science of consciousness, searching for the neural basis of subjective experience. A committed materialist, Koch believed brain science would explain how conscious experience is generated.  

Then several profound psychedelic experiences changed his metaphysical beliefs. “It was like an earthquake,” he says.

In this conversation, Koch reflects on how those mind-bending experiences transformed his deepest assumptions about mind and matter, and whether the cosmos itself might have purpose. He talks about the power and the limits of science, and why he’s come to see consciousness not as a byproduct of matter, but as something far more fundamental, perhaps the fabric of reality itself.

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Personal website 

Allen Institute

TTBOOK: "Your Brain on Shrooms" 

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0:00 Introduction
4:05 Pursuing Ultimate Truth
9:40 Into the Psychedelic Void
16:00 The Loss of Self
20:55 What Science Cannot Explain

Sharon Blackie is one of our foremost fairy tale interpreters.  In her new book, “Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now,” she reclaims the subversive fairy tale heroines of the past.  Not passive, well-behaved princesses — think Tatterhood instead of Cinderella, the Fox Wife instead of Sleeping Beauty — figures from centuries-old European folk tales that were whispered over hearths and spinning wheels, and handed down from one generation of women to the next, not as children’s entertainment but a blueprint for survival, maps for soul retrieval and cultural regeneration. 

The brave, smart heroines and wise old women in these tales offer us an alternative, “post-heroic” model of psychological development, Blackie says. A code of ethics based on kinship with the more-than-human world of animals and plants, and a celebration of old-fashioned virtues like compassion, kindness and reciprocity. Fairy tale heroines, Blackie says, don’t slay dragons — they make them part of the team. 

Fairy tales are part of our collective unconscious, a storehouse of archetypes and images that predate the modern world.  There's a bridge back to the enchanted landscapes and animist sensibilities of our ancestors — a gateway to wonder.  In this conversation, Blackie shows us how to unlock their power and find our way back the imaginal world. 

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0:00 Introduction
2:25 Why Fairy Tales Are Survival Stories
12:25 Beyond the Hero's Journey
27:05 Jung, Hillman, and the Imaginal World
41:45 Active Imagination and Closing Thanks

Can capitalism save the world it's destroying?

Rebecca Henderson thinks so. An economist at Harvard Business School and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, she has advised some of the world's biggest corporations and argues that capitalism itself — and what drives corporations — urgently needs to change.

She's clear-eyed about capitalism's failures — the inequality, the exploitation, the environmental destruction — which is precisely what drives her passion for reforming it from within. And as a climate activist, she's haunted by the consequences if we fail to act.

But this conversation goes deeper than economics. Henderson opens up about hitting a personal wall in her climate work — and the unexpected turn that brought wonder back into her life.

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0:00 Introduction
3:00 Capitalism Reimagined
8:30 The Norway Turnaround
16:50 Hitting the Wall
28:40 Reweaving Ourselves
43:00 Finding the Way Through

T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone.

Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing mysterious fossils and giant bones they didn't even have names for yet. Almost overnight, something remarkable happened: the New World became old. The United States went from infant start-up nation to the blueprint for all of creation.

Stanford historian Caroline Winterer traces this deep time revolution in her book How the New World Became Old — and she shows us how profoundly it shaped American identity. We still think of dinosaurs as fun, as children's toys and museum spectacles. Few of us realize how deeply they underwrote a national mythology — one that fueled American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, Christian nationalism and genocide.

This is a story about wonder and awe. And it teaches us that those emotions are neither simple nor neutral.

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:20 Dinosaurs and the Deep Time Revolution
00:10:10 Darwin and Fundamentalism
00:16:10 The Shadow Side of Wonder
00:29:00 Deep Time Today

What if nature isn’t just alive—but divine? Pantheism, once branded heresy, is finding new adherents among those who don’t consider themselves religious but still sense something sacred and wondrous in the living world.

Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of philosophy and religion, traces the long, contested history of wonder—from medieval mystics to modern seekers. She reflects on the Overview Effect, that disorienting moment when astronauts gaze back at Earth and feel both its fragility and its radiance. And she talks about the obsession that tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have for space exploration, which may be the new frontier of awe—even a new religion.

But awe is never simple. It can be as unsettling as it is beautiful, as terrifying as it is astonishing. It breaks us open even as it draws us in—leaving us to reckon with a world that is stranger than we thought.

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0:00 Introduction
3:50 Pantheism: History and Ethics
11:15 Personal Spirituality
19:55 Awe, Wonder, and the Overview Effect
28:35 Space as Religion
35:50 The Wonder Cabinet

Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth.

For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing was often female, and where land itself—especially the sacred Himalayan landscape of Sikkim—was alive with presence, meaning, and obligation.

Today, she is a global conservationist and founding director of the Loka Initiative, building unlikely partnerships between climate scientists and religious leaders across traditions—from Buddhist monastics to Catholic clergy, Indigenous elders to Muslim clerics and Evangelical pastors. Her work suggests that the climate crisis is not only scientific or political—but spiritual.  

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0:00 Introduction
4:05 Sacred Mountains of Sikkim
10:20 The Sacred Feminine
16:30 Rituals and the Land
21:25 Scientist by Day, Buddhist by Night
28:25 Bridging Faith and Science

Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience? 

Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds. 

How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions.

Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?

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0:00 The Macumba Exorcism in Brazil
4:35 Meeting the Sikerei of Siberut
8:30 Inside a Shamanic Healing Ceremony
17:05 Psychedelics and Altered States
22:10 Shamanism as the First Religion
29:25 Was Jesus a Shaman?