Dangerous Wisdom

The biggest bite of knowledge fruit humanity has taken in the past millennium or two has to do with complex systems—the very stuff of life. Neil Theise has written an excellent, accessible introduction to complex systems, and we discuss the basic elements. Neil Theise is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Through his scientific research, he has been a pioneer of adult...

Bob Thurman, known in the academic circles as Professor Robert A.F. Thurman, is a talented popularizer of the Buddha’s teachings and the first Westerner Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. A charismatic speaker and author of many books on Tibet, Buddhism, art, politics and culture, Bob was named by The New York Times the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism, and w...

How can we practice with Earth? How can we think with Earth? Can we allow our thinking and our practice of life to become undomesticated, wild, and indigenous again? In this dialogue, Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, philosopher in the academy and Zen priest, joins us to discuss Dogen, Gary Snyder, and the possibilities for a practice of the wild that can heal self and world in mutuality.

If Nature is super, if superness belongs to the very character of the Cosmos, then our attempts to exclude the super and the "impossible" may contribute in fundamental ways to the mess we find ourselves in (politically, economically, spiritually, and of course ecologically). We may claim that we want to exclude the impossible because we insist on excluding "superstition" and "woo," but in fact we...

On the Winter Solstice of 2023, U.S. President Biden will sign a law that could move our entire planet a step closer to global transformation--or not. It's up to us. But the law will require the disclosure of UFO/UAP and alien encounter information held as some of the deepest secrets of the U.S. government. What does this mean for us? It may surprise you to learn that even the Vatican has formally...

Where do we find Sophia's wild garden of awakening and love? We're it. And we can see that garden in every direction, if we look with awakening eyes, eyes of love, eyes of wisdom, eyes of beauty. And we need to cultivate that garden, with "Acts of Restorative Kindness". We find references to Sophia as a presence in the Earth, a presence in soil and soul. She calls to us to attend to Her, and to al...

Our need for wholeness has revealed itself clearly in many ways, and one of them relates to trauma. And, that puts us in dangerous wisdom territory, because talking about trauma can provoke anxiety and confusion. How can we relate most skillfully to the experiences we consider traumatic, and to our lives and our world as we metabolize those experiences?

We live in a fragmented culture. That means our attempts at holism, including any supposed holism of body and mind, could involve significant fragmentation and ignorance. We need holism and vision in order to make sure our practices of embodiment heal self and world at the same time.

Instead of becoming more “embodied,” we, in some crucial sense, need to become more . . . ecologied, encosmosed, and liberated into the mysteries of interwovenness, liberated into sacredness and wonder. If “embodied” signifies getting “into” our “body,” it misses our true need in a variety of ways. For a free pdf of practices to help facilitate ecosensual awareness and a more ecological embodiment...

Embodiment and somatics are big business. But do our practices of embodiment and somatics subtly maintain the duality between mind and body, Nature and culture, human and the larger community of life? And do we lose track of the fact that what we refer to as "my body" is usually an abstraction? In the worst case scenario, “embodiment” becomes another form of spiritual materialism, in which we bypa...

Embodiment and somatics are big business. We need to recover our balance and our sanity, and heal our wounding in relation to embodiment. How can we do it in a way that minimizes spiritual materialism and prevents all these practices from becoming part of the self-help catastrophe and the continued elaboration of the pattern of insanity? Reflecting on some common errors of embodiment and how we ca...

Jay Tompt joins us for some economic reflections in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher. As part of our dialogue, Jay shares an inspiring idea you can put top use in your own community, to germinate sprouts of wisdom, love, and beauty: The One-Day Incubator. Jay is a co-founder of the Totnes REconomy Centre, a lecturer for Regenerative Economics at Schumacher College, an associate lecturer in economics...

What happens when two philosophers and a neuroscientist walk into a podcast? They talk about things they wish more people knew. If people only knew how magical the world is, they might take better care of it, and relate to it with a greater sense of reverence and wonder. It's not that our reverence and wonder should depend on the existence of woo-woo phenomena, but that nature's superness is palpa...

Dangerous Wisdom with a friend from the Emerald Isle. Take a journey to Ireland without leaving home, and take a leap into the sacred wells of wisdom, wonder, and magic. Join us as we contemplate the power of place and the places of our empowerment. The delightful and insightful Manchán Magan and I read and reflect on passages from his book and other sources of wisdom, inviting you into your own p...

Kate Rudd joins us to talk about a short and highly accessible chapter from the classic book seeking to integrate economics and wisdom: Small Is Beautiful , by E.F. Schumacher. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Small Is Beautiful, Dangerous Wisdom will host a series of dialogues with faculty and alumni of Schumacher College. Schumacher's book is exceptionally relevant today, a...

Mona Sobhani joins us to discuss her book, Proof of Spiritual Phenomena: A Neuroscientist’s Discovery of the Ineffable Mysteries of the Universe . Mona is a cognitive neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur. A former research scientist at the University of Southern California, she holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of Southern California and completed a post-doctoral fellow...

The nature and scale of ecological degradation can provoke empathy distress that devolves into depression, despair, anxiety, antipathy, avoidance, and outright denial. But ecological awareness and ecological education can help us to see how much power we have when we become attuned to spiritual and ecological realities. We can actually help to heal the world —each and every one of us, wherever we...

Derrick Jensen's new book is called, Marijuana: A Love Story . It details his wild romance with this oft misunderstood plant teacher and medicine, and how the dream the Marijuana once offered people (a version of "the American Dream") became ruined by the corporatized capitalistic system. From the book description: "In state after state, the wealth-building capacity of this extraordinary plant is...

A magnificent swindle attempts to keep us from realizing true peace and happiness. How can we overcome it? We must begin by seeing through it, with the help of Lewis Mumford, Walter Kaufmann, C.G. Jung, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. We consider addiction, domestication, distraction, and the material bribe we all must keep ratifying in order for the pattern of insanity to perpetuate itself. We can sto...

Picking up our contemplation on the feedback loop of Mind and Nature, we enter into insights and suggestions from Nietzsche and the poet-philosopher-farmer Wendell Berry. These thinkers help us to face some troubling questions: What are we not likely, or not able, to become conscious of, simply by living in the dominant culture? What does the culture make likely as our experience? What does it mak...

We arise embedded in mind, with mind in every direction. Human beings in the dominant culture seem to miss the mindedness all around them. The “modern” human walks around with “ideas” “in” their head. This localization of mind remains untenable on scientific grounds, and does not fit with most of the spiritual/philosophical traditions we have inherited.  Nature is already Minded. Because of t...

It's something the self-help-industrial complex covers over, turning our sincere search for healing and success into the self-help catastrophe. What does our soul really want? How can we get on a path of sanity and sacredness, a path of true healing and happiness? Wisdom can help us find our way---but first we have to see things as they are, which means seeing our deepest, darkest, dirtiest secret...

In honor of Interdependence Day, celebrating the total interwovenness of all things, we speak with Sharon Hewitt Rawlette, a philosopher specializing in the anomalous. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette is a philosopher and interdisciplinary researcher specializing in anomalous phenomena and their implications for our understanding of consciousness. She earned her PhD from New York University in 2008, studyin...

If you struggle with getting enough sleep, you aren't alone. Keep in mind: six hours or less per night on an ongoing basis seems about as bad as getting zero for two days straight. As much as 41% of adults in the U.S. report short sleep, and as much as 84% of high school students report short sleep. Worse yet, 50-70 million U.S. citizens (perhaps more) qualify for a formal diagnosis of sleep disor...

We begin with a story, and thread all the way through the meaning of enlightenment, and the need to receive initiation into the mysteries of life, follow a path of joy, cultivate reverence for wisdom and wildness, and truly realize the inconceivable interwovenness of all things.