Living Mirrors with Dr. James Cooke

Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher and bestselling author. Her emphasis is on vipassanā, or insight meditation, and mettā, or loving-kindness meditation. In 1974, she co-founded the Insight Meditation Society with Jack Kornfield and Joseph Goldstein and she has been leading meditation retreats around the world for over three decades. Her books include Lovingkindness, A Heart as Wide as the Wo...

My guest this week is Rob from the YouTube channel called Adeptus Psychonautica. Rob's channel explores different aspects of contemporary psychedelic culture, from reviewing ayahuasca retreats to encouraging best practices and responsible use in the community. Today we talk about the effects of psychedelics with a particular focus on DMT & ayahuasca, and the risks and dangers of irresponsible psyc...

Suffering in society, domination & the US Capitol siege

Marcela Ot'alora G. is a psychedelic psychotherapist and artist. Marcela has worked as a therapist in the clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a treatment for PTSD, spearheaded by MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. She recently served as the principal investigator for MAPS' phase two and phase three trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. She also trains...

End of 2020 reflections

Lawrence Millman is an adventurer, writer and mycologist. He is the author of many books, including Northern Latitudes, Lost in the Arctic, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Fascinating Fungi of New England, Mushroom Apocalypse, Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer and most recently Fungipedia: A Brief Compendium of Mushroom Lore. His work has also appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic Adventure, the...

Jerry B Brown is an anthropologist, activist and author. He received his doctorate in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1972 and, until 2014, served as founding professor of anthropology at Florida International University in Miami. Here, in 1975, he started offering a pioneering course in "Hallucinogens and Culture". More recently he has performed field work exploring the possibility that p...

Joseph Goldstein is a meditation teacher and author and was one of the key figures in introducing mindfulness meditation to the west. He is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), with Jack Kornfield and Sharon Salzberg, where he is a currently a resident teacher. He has written many popular books on Buddhist meditation including The experience of insight, One Dharma and Mindfulness:...

Zac Kamenetz is a rabbi, community leader, and aspiring healer. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012. Zac is also the founder and CEO of Shefa, a non-profit dedicated to integrating safe and supported psychedelic use into the Jewish spiritual tradition. Our conversation today focuses on Jewi...

Charles Eisenstein is an author, activist and public speaker. His work relates to the intersection of spirituality, ecology, economics and the history of human civilisation. His books include The Ascent of Humanity, Sacred Economics, Climate—A New Story and The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. Our conversation ranges from understanding how human civilization developed to the point...

Rupert Spira is an internationally renowned teacher of a direct method of spiritual self enquiry called Advaita or non-duality which has its roots in ancient Hinduism. He holds regular meetings and retreats in Europe and the US and is the author of 6 books including The Ashes of Love, The Nature of Consciousness and Being Aware of Being Aware. He is also a notable artist who works in the medium of...

Michelle Baker Jones is an integrative psycho-therapeutic counsellor in private practice and is also a lead therapist at Imperial College's psychedelic research team where she as worked on studies exploring the therapeutic potential of psilocybin for depression. She also co-facilitates a monthly Psychedelic integration group based in London and offers individual integration sessions for people who...

Brian Muraresku is the author of the new book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Brian initially trained as a classicist gaining a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit from Brown University and since then, as a member of the New York Bar, he has been practicing law internationally for fifteen years. In 2016, he became the founding executive director of Doctors for...

B. Alan Wallace is a highly respected meditation teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and is a leading voice in discussions on the relationship between science and Buddhist philosophy. In 1971, he moved to India to study Tibetan Buddhism, medicine and language. In India he was ordained by the Dalai Lama and spent fourteen years as a monk where he studied with and translated for several highly...

Fritjof Capra is a world-renowned physicist, systems theorist, educator, activist, and best-selling author. He received his Ph. D. in theoretical physics from the University of Vienna in 1966 and spent 20 years doing research in theoretical high-energy physics in many respected universities including at the University of Paris, the University of California at Santa Cruz, the Stanford Linear Accele...

Following the publication of the Living Mirror theory of consciousness I discuss my thoughts on the place of consciousness in the natural world and the unique difficulties our species has faced in thinking about consciousness. You can read the paper at www. DrJamesCooke.com/Consciousness

Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist with a special interest in naturally occurring psychedelic substances. He was a cofounder of the psychedelic research non-profit the Heffter Research Institute where he is director of ethnopharmacology. With his brother Terrence he authored the classic books The Invisible Landscape and the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide and more recently he has written books...

Bill Richards is a psychedelic researcher with a special interest in the religious and spiritual experiences occasioned by psychedelics, which he details in his book Sacred Knowledge. Bill was a key figure in psychedelic research in the 60s and 70s and was instrumental in initiating the current renaissance in psychedelic research that began in the early 2000s. Today we talk about the research in t...

Gail Bradbrook is an environmental activist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental movement that focuses on the use of nonviolent civil disobedience to create change in how governments are responding to the current climate and ecological crises. She has a background in science with a PhD in molecular biophysics and integrates both scientific and spiritual perspectives into...

Ericka Dyck is a Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. She is a leading expert on the wave of psychedelic research that occurs in the mid-twentieth century and the books she has written and edited include Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from clinic to campus, Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond, and A Culture's Catalyst: Historical E...

Robert Wright is a journalist, bestselling author and is currently a Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Meaningoflife.tv and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bloggingheads.tv. His books include The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, for which he was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and Why Buddhism...

This week's episode is a conversation with an ex-police officer who recently underwent psilocybin therapy in the Netherlands. We discuss how insights from his experiences led him to gain a new perspective on his history in the police force.

Shamash Alidina is an internationally renowned mindfulness teacher and is the author of many books including Mindfulness For Dummies and The Mindful Way Through Stress. In today's conversation we talk about many different aspects of mindfulness, its benefits, advice for starting a practice, the nature of the mind, free will, self compassion, and much more. You can find his work at https://www.sham...

In this episode of the podcast I talk about the concepts of interdependence and separation and how they relate to life, the mind, the physical world, the natural world and the human community.

Bernardo Kastrup is a philosopher of mind with a background in computer science. He has PhDs in both disciplines and has written 9 books including rationalist spirituality, why materialism is baloney, the idea of the world and recent studies of the works of Schopenhauer and Carl Jung. Our chat was focused on his "consciousness-only" view of reality.