Ancient Futures

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What does it mean to have mental plasticity? ♳ Unless the mind is to some extent controlled, it controls our experience. This axiom of yoga philosophy has helpful applications in everyday life – from avoiding being triggered by politics to making wise choices. Jessica Frazier is a lecturer at Oxford Universit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What might the world look like if heroin was provided on prescription at local pharmacies? 💉 This is not a thought experiment. It used to be the basis of a policy that experts call the “British System” – in the early 1960s in London, the biggest dealer of drugs was Boots the Chemists. JS Rafaeli is the autho...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com To what extent is knowledge an obstacle? Is ignorance bliss? 🤔 Although it can be helpful to admit to not knowing, it rarely feels comfortable. I’ve been reflecting on that recently while working on some writing about yoga and politics, and it’s also a theme on my year-long course , The Path of Knowledge. Th...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com Were the all-embracing visions of William Blake shaped by Indian philosophy? 🪷 A new book by Mark Vernon explores what inspired Blake alongside his influence. Although he died 200 years ago, he was a prophet for our times, perceiving the spirit of some of the issues we're still grappling with – from rapid te...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What does it mean to inhabit a world that’s alive with deities, which might be less like gods than enlightened aspects of the mind? How could that influence how we relate to ourselves, to each other and to our surroundings? Yeshe Palmo has practised tantric Buddhism for roughly four decades, inspired by an em...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What inspired the creation of Indian sacred images? They played no part in early Vedic rituals, in which priests made offerings into a fire, asking gods for reciprocal blessings. Others did something similar with embodiments of nature, whose spirits – called yakṣas and yakṣīs – were sculpted in earthenware an...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com Do yogic practices and psychoactive substances lead somewhere similar? Stuart Sarbacker is a scholar and practitioner of yoga based in Oregon, where adult use of psilocybin – the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms – was recently legalised (though some places opt out ). As well as studying and teaching...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com Life can be both physically and mentally fragile – as Michael Holden explores with candid humour. His most recent book , The Reluctant Carer , describes moving in with his ailing parents, and trying to look after them while navigating multiple personal setbacks. One of these – not featured in the book – invol...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What makes it holy to get really stoned? This is an unavoidable question in India, where smoking cannabis is banned but done by dreadlocked devotees. Meanwhile, weed smoothies are frequently drunk at religious festivals. The writer Karan Madhok investigates this paradox – along with many others – in his new b...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What if the most important yogic posture was curiosity? That’s how Paul Bramadat , a scholar and practitioner, approaches research on a personal passion. He describes his new book Yogalands as “a skeptical but devoted insider’s perspective” on postural yoga and its place in the world. As we discuss, this invo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com Are there limits to what can be said in factual prose? Might poets sometimes do a better job of conveying deeper meaning and emotional truth? Lindsey Hilsum has reported on conflicts for more than 30 years. Her latest book , I Brought the War with Me , juxtaposes poetry with frontline experiences. Our convers...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com How closely connected are yoga and politics? Many people today try to keep them apart, but an ancient tradition sees yoga as politics. Although its theories might be distinct from yogic philosophies and mind-body disciplines, they’re nonetheless part of a broader understanding of what yoga means. A new book c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com How do people cope with uncertainty? What differentiates ways of predicting the future from scientific study of patterns – be that in epidemiology or forecasting weather? Might techniques of divination reveal as much about the past and the present as what happens next? Michelle Pfeffer (formerly Aroney) is a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com How can we address global problems – such as catastrophic climate change – when individual actions make very little difference? What’s the right thing to do when there aren’t easy answers? Is it wrong to do nothing? Is everything relative, or are there better ways to think about solutions? As Travis Rieder wr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What does it mean to be human, and how can one access one’s innermost self? Robert Rowland Smith writes popular books about practical philosophy, including a memoir that discusses what he’s learned from his relationships – as well as a career as an Oxford don, a strategic adviser and a personal coach, among o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com "What are we doing wrong that requires us all to be so resilient so often?” That’s the basic question that frames a new book by Elliot Cohen. The Psychology of Slow Living investigates ways to avoid being frazzled by a culture of urgency fuelled by quests for instant gratification via digital technology and o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com N.B. for more on this topic, see this article . What if the text known as the Yoga Sūtra never existed – at least not to start with? Philipp Maas is a scholar of Patañjali’s yoga, whose work suggests its teachings were originally transmitted as part of a larger philosophical text with explanations. We discuss...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What do Heinrich Himmler and Mohandas Gandhi have in common? Both were inspired by the Bhagavad Gītā . As Dorothy Figueira explains, what they found in it were mental projections. So Gandhi saw promotion of non-violence, while Himmler thought it justified killing for an avatar of God called Adolf Hitler. Thes...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com A shift in focus for the podcast this week to discuss a new book by Richard Seymour . Subtitled “The Downfall of Liberal Civilization”, Disaster Nationalism investigates “a struggle for our collective soul”, along with the psychology of far-right movements. As Richard warns, these can take many forms – includ...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com Is prāṇāyāma the same thing as breath-work? Both labels are commonly used to teach similar techniques. They’re also increasingly hard to distinguish, because of ongoing changes in methods and objectives. This conversation with Isabel Tew examines the overlaps as well as distinctions between modern systems. Is...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com This is a different sort of podcast, featuring interviews I did half my life ago. I originally planned to make a radio documentary, but the audio wound up on MiniDiscs gathering dust. In 2001, I was a foreign correspondent searching for answers. I hoped I might find some in India at the world’s biggest gather...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com What might it look like to live in a world that combines ancient wisdom with newer ideas about sustainable development? In his recent book Politics of Being , the social scientist Thomas Legrand explores the potential for shifts in perspective that could help us to face converging challenges. At the heart of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com Why is “light” used as a metaphor for “good”, while “dark” means “bad”? How does that blind us and what might we do about it? As Mariana Alessandri writes in Night Vision , difficult feelings such as anger, sorrow, grief, depression and anxiety can be sources of knowledge, so we need to embrace them as part o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com How did Westerners first get involved with Eastern teachers, and is the age of the guru now over? In his latest book, The Nirvana Express , Mick Brown presents a colourful cast of seekers, writers, mystics, tricksters and chancers – he reveals people’s flaws without obscuring the sincerity of spiritual quests...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit ancientfutures.substack.com How does someone heal an addictive mind? Matthew Hahn is a co-founder of Recovery Dharma , which uses Buddhist methods to overcome addictions. He also contributes to the Boundless Freedom Project, teaching mindfulness, ethics and compassion to people in prison and on their return to the outside world. Our con...