Dangerous Wisdom

The Burning Man phenomenon involves a lot of good intentions and a lot of wonderful experiences—aesthetic, gastronomic, social, and even spiritual. It emerges from, and thus expresses, the incongruencies and general confusion of the pattern of insanity, even as it stands in defiance of that pattern of insanity. In some sense, it gives us an image of conquest consciousness wrestling with itself. Li...

From the Wisdom, Love, and Beauty archives. A breath of fresh air, even if you listened to this one last year. Sometimes we get lucky enough to experience a shocking moment when the great mystery confronts us so directly that we have to say, "This changes everything!" In this contemplation, we consider the nature of "this changes everything," how the dominant culture tries to keep those experience...

Composer and musician Carole Nelson helps us contemplate the dangerous wisdom of jazz and her new album, Night Vision . In honor of our dialogue, Carole and I collaborated on a meditative video project. You can check out the two takes we released here: https://youtu.be/aWN6UDYp86E https://youtu.be/OrnoYWUkVBw In our dialogue, we make reference to Thich Nhat Hanh’s book, Zen and the Art of Saving t...

A dialogue with the poet Grace Wells, in relation to her latest book of poetry, The Church of the Love of the World ( https://www.dedaluspress.com/ ). Grace is an award-winning eco-poet and nature writer living on the West Coast of Ireland. Nature, spirit-of-place and environmental concern are the large themes of her writing. She is an organic gardener and orchard-planter who hosts The Little Sanc...

Horses are both a mirror for the soul and a vehicle for the soul. Even if we don't think of ourselves as being really "into" horses, they are still a spiritual keystone species, and they can teach us a lot about ourselves, and lead us into the great mystery. In this episode, we consider how horses threaten certain aspects of our identity, our sense of love, and in some ways our whole way of life i...

It may seem strange to ask it, but one way to put the most important question for humanity right now is this: Can we learn to inhabit reality? By implication, this question suggests we currently inhabit delusion . That’s what the wisdom traditions of the world—including many indigenous traditions—try to make rather clear to all of us living in, or infected by, the dominant culture. This divergence...

How can we inhabit interwovenness? This is like asking: Can truth be inhabited? Can truth be embodied ? We consider these deep questions (in relation to DIY architecture) with Dr. Sarah Breen Lovett. Sarah is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Manager of the Future Building Initative at Monash Art, Design & Architecture MADA. Breen Lovett has instigated and been included in many exhibitions, s...

In this dialogue with Lia Helena Rubinoff, a philosopher and certified nutrition consultant, we consider how craving itself can lead to liberation and healing. Enlightened craving means our craving itself is enlightened—it’s just encumbered. When we look directly at it, we can bring the medicine of awareness to our craving and liberate it into bone fide wisdom. In particular, craving has to do wit...

Socrates was initiated by a priestess into the mysteries of wisdom, love, and beauty. A modern-day priestess joins a modern-day philosopher for dialogue and dangerous wisdom.

Picking up the thread of compassion training, as part of A Philosopher's Guide to Working with the Medicines of Our World, we contrast compassion with empathy distress. We also introduce the notion of the tonglen attitude, a special mindset that can empower and liberate our practice with any of the medicines of our World. Finally, we look at one way to understand one aspect of how compassion and t...

Part of A Philosopher's Guide to Working with the Medicines of Our World, this is the single most important recommendation I can make, for those facilitating work with the medicines of our world, and also for those seeking healing and insight from those medicines. This is a two-part discussion of compassion as a skill that requires training. Learn how compassion differs from empathy, and how it pr...

An exploration of the ethics of consciousness—what that means and how it relates to the medicines of our world, including psychedelics.

We can only overcome fragmentation if we can begin to admit how much it has infected us, and if we can admit that we don't fully understand holism. Psychedelics and other medicines demand a revitalized sense of healing and wholeness, learning and culture, mind and Nature, self and World. In this contemplation, we try to sense the ways we may not understand, let alone wonderstand, the notion of a h...

What can Plato and Socrates teach us about working with the medicines of our World? In this first chapter of a philosopher's guide to working with psychedelics and other medicines, we look at what Plato and Socrates, and their relationship with psychedelics, initiation, and walking a path of healing, a path of wisdom, love, and beauty.

How can Buddhist philosophy empower us to work more skillfully with the medicines of our world—including psychedelic medicines like DMT, LSD, MDMA, and others? Psychedelic medicines have a burgeoning presence in our culture. People have experienced healing and transformation with them. How can we work with them, and with our whole lives, in accord with wisdom, love, and beauty? With a more holisti...

How can Buddhist philosophy empower us to work more skillfully with the medicines of our world—including psychedelic medicines like DMT, LSD, MDMA, and others? This contemplation was inspired in part by the surge of interest in psychedelic medicines in the past decade or so, and also in part by the dialogue I had with Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule , and DMT and the Soul of Pro...

A dialogue on the wisdom, love, and beauty of DMT with Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule , DMT and the Soul of Prophecy , and The Psychedelic Handbook .

Leia Friedwoman is a psychedelic integration facilitator, a trainee in restorative and transformative approaches to conflict, and the host of a podcast called The Psychedologist: Consciousness Positive Radio. Leia holds her permaculture design certificate from Starhawk’s Earth Activist Training, a program that emphasizes social permaculture and spirituality in activism. In this dialogue, we touch...

The megafire narrative . . . Wherever you live, you likely depend on forest ecologies. Even though the western U.S. has gotten a lot of press for wildfires, fire affects us all, forest integrity affects us all, and ecological ignorance affects us all. In this dialogue with Chad Hanson, forest ecologist and director of the John Muir Project, we confront the megafire myths and the bad science done i...

Derrick Jensen brings his unique style of dangerous wisdom to a dialogue about the bright green lies of the mainstream environmental movement. We can think of that movement as an attempt to establish solar-powered samsara, solar-powered suffering, or even solar-powered insanity. We need to get beyond this style of consciousness, but to do that we first have to confront our situation with clarity....

UFOs, UAPs, Alien Abduction Experiences…What can they tell us about the nature of reality, the nature of mind, and the mind of Nature? How can we relate to these experiences as a call to journey into mystery and discover deeper truths about ourselves and the vast Cosmos? We can learn a lot just by dropping the dualistic notion that these experiences are either literal “space creatures,” or they ar...

What is the great field of new discoveries? Where will the truly paradigm-shifting breakthroughs come from? The great psychologist and philosopher William James invites us to see how our next big breakthrough will come from what we now see as noise in the data, as impossible, as absurd. In this suggestion, James joins a vast group of philosophers who understand the true spiritual meaning of the im...

With a little help from Aldous Huxley, we embrace the fact that love is the soul’s compass as we journey the landscape of mystery. We need that love to acknowledge our fear, and to rouse the great passion needed to understand (and wonderstand) reality. When we look around and see conflict, aggression, and injustice, to what degree can we attribute it not merely to fear, but to fear of reality? And...

Wisdom and love can bring us profound revelations about ourselves, our world, the nature of reality, and the meaning of life. But a special kind of fear—sometimes conscious, but mostly operating unconsciously—can keep those revelations at bay. Do we put up scarecrows to keep away reality, intimacy, and wonder—perhaps even magic? In this contemplation we inquire into this spiritual or existential f...