Zeitgeist with Zack Geist

In this episode Dr. Doug Brackmann and I go into what it means to be Driven. There are genetic differences among this population, which leaves them often, confused, successful, addicted or controlled by shame. 

We go into the reasons that nature might have caused this expression in certain individuals in a tribe and how these tendencies can wreak havoc on personal relationships and on the body itself. 

We go into why the Driven Person may be looked at as a sociopath or psychopath and why they are drawn to behaviors that are considered to be very antisocial or self serving to others and what to do about it. 

We also go into what to do in a world that doesn't have much need for someone with this level of compulsive drive for survival, and what to do if you are driven to stay healthy and to cultivate deep relationships with those who don't share that same drive, and much more.

Dr. Doug has two PhDs in Psychology and has worked with high entrepreneurs and special forces and has written the book "Driven" with a Navy Seal. You can find out more about Doug's work at Iamdriven.com

It's been a long time since I have published an episode. Frankly, the long delay has been due to the fact that my life circumstances have changed so completely that the topics that I am most actively working appear so different than previous episodes. Although this topic and ones to come may appear disparate and unconnected at first glance, I think that they are in fact another aspect of living in the world in a more beautiful and holistic way. 

In this episode I interview Hajjar Gibran and Steve Areen. Hajjar Gibran is the founder of Dome Gaia, an organization that helps people around the world build very inexpensive and beautiful homes that are sustainable, long lasting and can be duplicated in most any climate. These technologies harbor the opportunity to reduce or even eliminate homelessness and allow for people to build for much less than the absurd cost of lumber both economically and to the planet. 

We talk about what can be built with aircrete and other materials and how people can learn how to build, even if they haven't built a thing in their lives, like your's truly. I consider Hajjar and Steve to be great friends and Hajjar lives here and participates in our community activities on the Big Island of Hawaii.  

Links:

Hajjar Gibran's Ted Talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzCXNlqDW6M

Steve Areen's Viral Video of his dome built for under $11,000 including labor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VcdwDRNPzA&t=249s

Dr. Clare Johnson received her PhD in Lucid Dreaming and the Creative Process. She has been lucid dreaming for over 40 years since the age of 3. She is the past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, is a Yoga Teacher, Mother and an author of more books on lucid dreaming than any other author that I have been able to find.

Over the past 2 years I have been deeply committed to my lucid dream practice. Experiencing the Divine through real experiences, as real as waking life or even more real, has inspired me to dive deeper and deeper into accessing this numinous embodied presence. This eventually led me to discovering the work of Dr. Clare Johnson. Beginning to read her book almost a year ago, inspired lucid dreams 3 nights in a row, which at the time was a record for me. Since working with her through her books, in groups and personally, I have often told people that if I were to be trapped on a desert island, alone, with only one book, it would be her, "Llewellyn's Complete Book on Lucid Dreaming." I have discovered through her work an entirely different level of being that has transformed my life in both my waking state and in alternate states of consciousness. I'm not embellishing when I say that what she teaches is the closest thing to magic that I have witnessed.

In this episode we skip all the techniques and common questions regarding lucid dreaming and go deep. Within the first 6 minutes we are speaking about death and dying and through the rest of the dialogue we talk about the gift of nightmares, connecting with the Divine, healing ourselves and others and the great mystery that is this life and how through lucid dreaming we can be privy to insights that are completely closed to us in our waking physical reality. 

May this inspire you to have lucid dreams and a more lucid live, what a gift it is.

I discovered Jorge Conesa Sevilla from my reading and research around lucid dreaming. He was one of the first authors that I'm aware of to do extensive research into sleep paralysis and speaks about it in his book "Wrestling with Ghosts." Jorge has spent his lifetime in nature and exploring consciousness through spending considerable time in a primal state in the wild, living off the land as well as undergoing long fasts for spiritual insight and biological health. 

In this episode we speak about the effects that modern urban and city living is having on the human psyche and we speak about how we can return to nature and dream for healing. Jorge Conesa-Sevilla PhD, has a triple degree in Biology, Philosophy and Psychology which gives him an evidence based perspective on states of being that are ignored and even viewed as uncanny to most of western mainstream science. 

Topics of the Dialogue include: Shamanism, lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, vision quests, fasting as a spiritual practice, zazen meditation, and ecopsychology, working close to nature for healing. 

Jorge does not often agree to interviews, so this is a special treat! We are speaking about having an in person 5 day nature fast here at the Rainbow Bridge Sanctuary in Hawaii. 

On this episode I am joined by Luis Rodriguez whom I met at a men's retreat in Mendocino in 2019 with Michael Meade. Luis' bio is far too long and varied to cover fully here, but includes healing from addiction, working to help prisoners cry through their words, becoming the poet laureate of Los Angeles twice, working with gang members and at risk youth, running for green party governor of California and for vice president for the justice party. 

Hearing some of Luis' stories at the Michael Meade retreat told a tale that sounded more uncanny than fiction. His wounding was long and deep and the discovering of his gifts came with much suffering as soul gifts tend to do. I wasn't sure exactly where the conversation would go and I had imagined that we may go into more of his stories, however, speaking with Luis evoked a lot of my past to pour into our dialogue. I have been hesitant to post this episode as I don't speak about these things publicly or much at all and I feel a bit embarrassed that I spoke so much. Truth be told I have had a hard time integrating my youth into my story of self and I think that becomes apparent in this dialogue. When asked why I run a podcast, I have different answers that all point to truths, however the main reason is probably for my own healing. 

I feel that the world could benefit from hearing the cries from the neighbor's cage, as tears don't often take the same shape. We are all familiar with the cliche "Hurt people hurt people," though in fact, this couldn't be a truer statement. Many hurt people have literally lost their ability to shed tears, have become hard and numb, and I know, for a time I was among those ranks and to some degree, still am. I hope you find this talk healing and that it can open you to a world that you may not be familiar, maybe you can hear some of your story weaved in here somewhere. 

One of the most well known lucid dreamers and considered one of the pioneers of lucid dreaming in the western world, Robert Waggoner joins me to go "deep" into the world of lucid dreaming. This is not an episode speaking about techniques, but instead, speaking to the potential that becoming aware in dreaming holds for the future of humanity and our shared waking physical reality. 

Both Zack and Robert uncover that they were both brought to exploring of the dream world by early encounters with dreaming mixed with an anemic view of heaven. Robert shares about what has kept him exploring lucid dreaming all of these years and goes into deep "mystical or shamanic" experiences that have occurred in dreams and waking physical reality that defies our modern worldview.  He also speaks about feeling connected to past lives and to other worlds in the here and now, and a connection with intelligent beings that appear to live lives joined to ours, that can be touched by the intentional closing of our eyelids, and occasionally with our eyes wide open. 

"What is a caretaker of the cosmos?" One of the first questions posed to author Gary Lachman in this episode of Zeitgeist with Zack Geist. Among his 20+ books, Gary wrote ‘The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World.’ and joins Zack to explore the author's central tenet: that humans are entrusted with a daunting task of repairing creation itself. The theory positions us as mediators between dual realms, one of time & space versus our spiritual world that enfold one another. Each person's accountability is then two-fold, to care for our material world while simultaneously exploring the inner realm of pure spirit/imagination.

Join Zack and Gary in exploring the lofty question, "Why are we here?"

In this episode I speak with the author and teacher on Lucid Dreaming, Charlie Morley. Charlie is a practitioner of Tibetan Dream Yoga and works with his his dreams for spiritual insight and healing. We speak about many topics related to dreaming and lucid dreaming, healing from trauma and practices during waking life that can help a dreamer become lucid in their dreams. 

Charlie also gives us a sneak peak into his Lucid Dream Summit with guest teachers like Dr. Clare Johnson and Robert Waggoner, prolific lucid dreamers and shares lucid dream research that is at the cutting edge of this pioneering practice. Lucid dreaming is a vast open vista to states of consciousness that can help heal and transform humans and the living earth.  

Dr Ed Tick is a psychologist specializing in treating sufferers with PTSD and has worked with combat veterans since the 1970s. He discovered through his work that the most profound healing from the symptoms of PTSD were to be had through dream work and more specifically through the ancient Greek practice of Asklepion Dream Incubation. 

To my surprise, modern medicine in the west as it is known today is rooted in Asklepion sanctuaries where cures were sought in both the waking world by working with the laws of nature as well as the mythic world of dreams where the patient explored the numinous through radical ritual and dreams inviting the Asklepios to help them heal. This healing could occur through insight in how to work with the natural world to improve either physical or mental illness or could happen in the dream and carry over to waking life. 

You may be shocked as I was to discover that there were hundreds of these Asklepion temples and that the healing miracles which occurred there were etched into the walls. Even our modern "Hippocratic Oath" which our Medical Doctors take today, was an oath to the healing power between the physician and the God Asklepios.

It is my hope that you become more connected to the dream reality and the numinous beings and healing that await you there. 

In this episode, Zack Geist and Bayo Akomolafe engage in a dancing of words around the constantly changing issues of these queer times of Spring 2020. Akin to flies they find themselves tangled in the spider's web, a sensation both uncomfortable and familiar, they attempt to feel their way towards something just out of reach. Energized by the exhausted common narrative Zack and Bayo explore the realm that is inhabited by the invisibles as though they may have been listening all along. They invite you to join them on the edge of where fact and fiction breed and birth the myths that shape the lens of our times. 

Bayo Akomolafe is globally recognized for his poetic, unconventional, counterintuitive, and indigenous take on global crisis, civic action, activism and social change. He is an international speaker, poet and activist for a radical paradigm shift in consciousness and current ways of living. His readings of ‘knowledge’, ‘development’, ‘progress’ and ‘truth’ as Eurocentric metanarratives led him and his wife, Ej to develop the first International Workshop on Alternative Research Paradigms and Indigenous Knowledge Promotion (WARP, 2011). Bayo is a member of the advisory board of the Real Economy Lab (UK). In 2014, and was awarded for Global Excellence Award [Civil Society] by Future Shapers (California). He is the Chief Curator for The Emergence Network (A Post-Activist Project) [www.emergencenetwork.org], and host of the online writing course, ‘We will dance with Mountains: Writing as a Tool for Emergence’. He hopes to inspire a diffractive network of sharing – a slowing down, an ethics of entanglement, an activism of inquiry, a ‘politics of surprise’…one that does not treat the crisis of our times as exterior to ‘us’ or the ‘solutions’ that conventional activism offers as discrete or separate from the problems that we seek to nullify. Bayo has authored two books, We Will Tell Our Own Story! and These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home.