Dangerous Wisdom

Love is a trainable skill, and luck is an inevitable ingredient in our lives. Our current science challenges the notion of the sovereign individual, the importance of love, and the need for a paradigm shift. The Harvard Study of Adult Development goes together with other data to invite us to question the nature and the role of love, luck, and the true wealth of nations. The Harvard Study also supp...

In this episode we rewrite the headlines: Massive Harvard Study Reveals the True Wealth of Nations. What is the true wealth of nations? Isn’t it gross domestic product? And if nations are comprised of people, what is our true wealth? We’re thinking through the true wealth of nations in relation to our last contemplation. At that time, we considered the famous Grant Study, more formally known as th...

It’s an impressive study, the longest scientific study of adult development, conducted across decades (it started in 1938). Referred to as the Grant Study or the Harvard Study of Adult Development, this famous research program has gotten several rounds of press. But the press coverage seems to miss something incredibly vital and far-reaching in this study. Even the books have failed to make it cle...

A contemplation of healing, wholeness, the challenges of suffering, and the paradoxes of success. We consider some of the essential questions: In what sense is life a self-healing truth? What is the nature of health and healing? What is the nature of sickness—our cultural sickness and our own mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical sickness? What is the role of nondoing in our healing and in ou...

In our culture, we have placed a set of habitual notions about time on top of the soul’s instincts and intuitions about rhythm and temporality. The physicist David Bohm said that, “. . . every thought assumes time. Whether we discuss thought or anything else, we always take time for granted. And we take for granted the notion that everything exists in time. We don’t take for granted that time is a...

Leslie Ellis, Ph. D.,RCC Author, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy https://drleslieellis.com A delicious discussion of the importance of dreams and some of the basics of how to approach them. Dr. Ellis wrote a book called, A Clinician's Guide to Dream Therapy that provides a highly accessible, yet insightful education on the nature of dreams and how to work with them. By offering a unified mode...

A little singing and swearing, to help us arrive at our awesome presence. Humus, humility, homo sapiens, and Om share a common root, and considering their interwovenness can help us to touch our basic dignity. In this contemplation, the first to have both swearing and singing, we look at some elements of the dominant culture’s way of living that indicate how Nature has gotten pushed into the shado...

Jung made at least two incredible discoveries. He wrote about one of them, and we discussed it in our first episode in this series. The other discovery appears nowhere in his writings, but it may have been his greatest by far. In this contemplation of the shadow we ask some questions, take a kind of inventory, that can help us detect the presence of the shadow so that we could begin to bring light...

Part 2 in a short series. The dominant culture tends to trivialize many of the spiritual teachings and practices that present a threat to it, or a threat to the egos within it. We get McMindfulness because a genuine practice of meditation, as part of a holistic and skillful philosophy of life, results in citizens who want nothing to do with many of the core practices of the dominant culture. Shado...

If you don’t look for Sophia in the shadows, She might come leaping out of them. The consequences can become severe. “Shadow work” has gotten increasing attention in the dominant culture. This tends to carry the risk of trivialization and increasing spiritual materialism. Here we take a philosophical look at the unconscious and the nature of shadow work. Generally speaking, the dominant culture an...

A philosophical story, based in fact and imagination, and rooted in the nature of mind and the mind of Nature.

Adam Smith's ignorance remains a major danger--at this point, a danger to life as we know it. We will also consider one more gem of Adam Smith's dangerous wisdom: class war. Long before Karl Marx, Smith recognized class war, and tried to warn us. We look at how that relates to the shift from moral statistics to market statistics, and how infection with the capitalistic style of consciousness and t...

One of Smith's biggest philosophical blunders. We continue with the key elements of Adam Smith's dangerous ignorance, focusing on a major case of that ignorance--one that still haunts us today--and how it relates to his idea of "the invisible hand".

This episode relates to a whole series on transforming our sense of right lifestyle and right livelihood. Check out others in the series: The Magnificent Swindle (56); The Others and the Interwovenness of Earth and Soul (55); The Feedback Loop of Earth and Soul (54); The Deepest, Darkest, Dirtiest Secret of Our Stress, Strain, Trauma, Anxiety, Depression, Imposter Syndrome, Burn Out, and Lonelines...

Adam Smith's not exactly the most brilliant philosopher, even though he’s rather perceptive and clever in some ways. He’s not even really a philosopher so much as a professor of philosophy, and that kind of writing rarely interests me. But what shocked me about his writing was both the nature of his ignorance and the nature of some of his insights. His writing seems perfectly symptomatic of the do...

Another installment in one of our ongoing pathways of contemplation: How to bring a little more wisdom, love, and beauty into our work with the medicines of this world. In this episode, Sunny Strasburg, LMFT joins us to discuss ketamine, magic, and more. Sunny Strasburg, LMFT is a psychedelic trainer, consultant, therapist, and presenter. Mrs Strasburg is an EMDR-certified trauma specialist, exper...

Dean Radin joins us to discuss some of his paradigm-busting research, and he shares a wild story about the magical power of love and the benefits of a trained mind. A dialogue you don't want to miss. Peer-reviewed papers we discuss or that might be of interest: Consciousness and the Double-Slit Interference Pattern Compassionate Intention As a Therapeutic Intervention by Partners of Cancer Patient...

More Dangerous Wisdom at https://dangerouswisdom.org/ In this episode of The Dangerous Wisdom Podcast, artist Nica Quinn and I reflect on art, symbolism, synchronicity, magic, and the natural world. Before the dialogue begins, we consider the nature of symbols, their potential role in our spiritual/philosophical development, and some of the special symbolic and magical potency of the horse in part...

Note: For most listeners, it will be helpful and even essential to start with episode 1 :-) What is the difference between the way human beings think and the way Nature functions? What is the patterning that connects all things? What is the meaning of the phrase, “We are a patterning of primordial awareness?” Patterning. Isn’t an object. In fact, we suffer because we turn our patterning into objec...

If we live in a magical way, if we know the world in a magical way, then we can know things that must remain unknowable to someone not living that way. We might think it has to do with mere belief, as if believing in magic becomes a self-fulling prophecy. Not so. A properly philosophical practice of magic seeks experience, not belief. The fundamental wholeness of the Cosmos makes magic possible. P...

Whether we love horses or not, whether we have contact with horses or not, they can teach us a lot about wisdom, love, and beauty. How do we get close to an honest openness to the potential magic of horses? And what does it even mean? The horse as a mirror for the soul and a vehicle for the soul could show us our true nature, and carry us into sacred spaces, initiating us into transformational hea...

Yeats tells us, "the borders of our memories are as shifting as the borders of our mind, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself." In this contemplation, we consider how that relates to horses, trauma, and the mysteries of remembering something that hasn't happened yet.

The practice of magic is taboo precisely because it draws from the experience of mind as a process that transcends the skin, and the experience of self and world as profoundly relational —which means ecological —rather than solid, or, we could say, economic .

The poet William Butler Yeats had a passion for magic, and he offers us three principles of magic that we will explore through philosophical and scientific perspectives. Can we arrive at a scientific understanding of magic, beyond woo-woo? Following these principles will bring us into an exciting and mind-expanding journey.

In this episode, we go into the wisdom, love, and beauty archives to re-release our series on magic. If you haven’t heard this series, I think you’re in for a treat. It’s like a box of wisdom donuts—paleo superfood wisdom snacks for the soul. We begin with events from my own life, in which the experience of magic transformed a situation of tension and aggression into spaciousness and wonder. If yo...