The Sacred Speaks

Pastor Juanita Rasmus recounts a life of service to others and then the reality that no one is free from being drawn into a fight for their life. This fight felt more like a decent which landed in a depressive episode that she describes in great detail. Juanita recounts how she was able to both emerge from the depths and work to make sense of how her mind and body could have been so completely taken over by this decent. She could not laugh, get out of bed, or take care of herself, and while she had already been leading the life of someone who had committed her life to help those in need, this reality has provided her with a life-changing orientation. She was learning to take care of her soul. After laying out her personal experiences through this conversation, she begins to explain some of the contemplative practices that have clarified her thinking and have become reflections of her heart. Following Pastor Juanita's move through her depression, she became more connected with her environment and the act of contemplation as a means by which she can engage in a more profound and more mystical presence with her life and God. She discusses the mystical teaching of Jesus and also a few black mystics that have been omitted from the general history of Christianity. Bio: Juanita Rasmus is a pastor, Spiritual Director, and contemplative with a passion for outreach to our world’s most impoverished citizens. Pastor Juanita co-pastors the St. John’s United Methodist Church located in Downtown Houston with her husband Rudy. In 2009, Juanita was diagnosed with kidney cancer, but she wasn’t afraid. Instead, she waited to see what lesson the disease would bring. Years later Juanita and Rudy have continued their mission of bringing life to those who struggle on a daily basis and they created a nonprofit called The Bread of Life which has changed the landscape of Downtown Houston providing an array of services to families in peril and homeless individuals. The project also distributes over 9 tons of fresh produce weekly to hungry families. The project has been on the forefront of HIV/AIDS prevention, providing solutions to food insufficiency, housing the homeless, and disaster relief. Today, with a focus on social impact investing, the Bread of Life owns and operates Eco Life Employment LLC, a digital employment and staffing agency for men and women with troubled past lives and the Amazing KMAZ 102.5fm radio station Thanks to generous support from a collaboration of government agencies and a significant donation from Tina, Beyoncé, and Solange Knowles the St. John’s Downtown campus includes the Knowles-Temenos Apartments, a 43-unit Single Room Occupancy development designed to provide permanent living accommodations for formerly homeless women and men. Temenos CDC portfolio also includes an 80-unit apartment community to meet the growing need for permanent supportive housing for the previously homeless in Houston, Texas and a 15-unit apartment project for chronic inebriates and the most vulnerable homeless individuals in the Houston community. Eighteen years ago Kelly Rowland teamed up with Beyoncé and Tina Knowles to build the Knowles-Rowland Center for Youth where community empowerment activities for the young and old take place every week. The facility is currently serving as the base of operations for Hurricane Harvey relief efforts. https://www.stjohnsdowntown.org https://breadoflifeinc.org Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: Todd Pipes Music page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/todd-pipes/26246004 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

This podcast episode explores how one mystical experience can bring an individual to question the nature of reality enough so that they devote their life to answering questions that often time seem unanswerable: What is the nature of reality? What is a self? What is identity? Also, how do people approach their lives after they have an experience that challenges the way they see the world; yet because that same experience seems so outside of their cultural norms, they keep it to themselves? Although with that said, Dr. Linda Ceriello began to notice that at the turn of the millennium many more people seemed free to start a public discussion about these radical personal experiences that seem to shatter and destabilize one’s worldview. We discuss the millennials and the plural generations as challenging the boundaries of these cultural identities, and how these younger generations are dealing with the grand narratives, they have been provided — the birth of the “spiritual but not religious” movement. We explore the differences between modernism, postmodernism, and the development of what some call metamodern; popular culture and the various depictions of mystical narratives; and she examines how Russell Brand has become such a significant figure in popular culture, fulfilling roles ranging from social advocate to spiritual teacher, and comedian. Bio: Linda Ceriello is a scholar of religions, specializing in Asian religions in America, mystical experience, contemplative studies, and critical theory of popular culture. She recently received her Ph.D. in Religion from Rice University, and also has a Master's degree in Education from Antioch University Seattle. Some of her favorite lecture topics include awe and wonder, the history of yoga, metamodern monsters, and the gnostic attributes of transgressive comedy. Publications include “Encoded Ambiguities, Embodied Ontologies: The Transformative Speech of Transgressive Female Figures in Gnosticism and Tantra” in (European Journal of Esotericism) La Rosa di Paracelso, and the forthcoming chapters, “Toward a Metamodern Reading of Spiritual-but-Not-Religious Mysticisms” in Being Spiritual But Not Religious: Past, Present, Future(s), and “"The Big Bad and the Big “Aha!”: Metamodern Monsters as Transformational Figures of Instability" in Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques: Monstrosity and Religion in Europe and the U.S. She is co-founder and editor, with Greg Dember, of the website, What Is Metamodern? www.whatismetamodern.com. Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: Greg Dember Music page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/greg-dember/292921755 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

This podcast episode explores the stories that help us understand our reality, our place in that reality, and how humans both cling to and challenge these same stories. Jeffrey Kripal has been a keeper of many extraordinary stories, and as a professor of religion, he is positioned to question the stories that we believe serve us, but the reality is that we often serve the story. This conversation is anchored in Dr. Kripal’s newest book, The Flip, wherein he challenges many of the assumptions of materialist science and posits that the sciences are not wrong, but that they are incomplete and therefore we need a change in our worldview. His arguments are well articulated and well informed by many scientists, including neuroscientists and physicists, who have, as a result of their research into reality, moved away from the materialist worldview into an approach to reality that chips away at many of the assumptions in which many of us have been educated – for example, the fact that we don’t really know what matter and consciousness are in the first place. Really. From Jeff’s book: A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,””a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world. Bio: Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he chaired the Department of Religion for eight years and helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He is the Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he also serves as Chair of the Board. Jeff is the author of numerous books, seven of which are with The University of Chicago Press, including, most recently a memoir-manifesto entitled Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions(Chicago, 2017). He has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan Handbook Series on Religion (ten volumes, 2015-2016). He specializes in the study of extreme religious states and the re-visioning of a New Comparativism, particularly as both involve putting “the impossible” back on the academic table again. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of religions and the sciences for The University of Chicago Press, collectively entitled The Super Story. http://jeffreyjkripal.com Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: Chomsky Music page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/chomsky/5662475 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

The title of the John Horgan’s book, The Mind-Body Problems, with the addition of the “s”articulates the core of the mind-body problem – that it is plural. John Horgan is not content with one story that solves for the myriad problems we humans encounter when we explore reality and hunt to discover who we are and what matters most. John has been a scientific journalist for over 35 years and as someone who is paid to be curious he has commented on, written about, queried, and learned about some of the most ubiquitous and obscure scientific theories and discoveries science and human thought have brought to the foreground. Bio: John Horgan is a science journalist and Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey. A former senior writer at Scientific American (1986-1997), he has also written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, The Washington Post, Slate and other publications. He writes the "Cross-check" blog for Scientific American and produces "Mind-Body Problems" for the online talk show Bloggingheads.tv. He tweets as @horganism. Horgan's most recent book, Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity and Who We Really Are, takes a radical new approach to the deepest and oldest of all mysteries, the mind-body problem. Published in September 2018, it is available for free online at mindbodyproblems.com, for $5 as an Amazon e-book and for $15 as a paperback. Horgan's first book was The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Science in the Twilight of the Scientific Age, which was republished with a new preface in 2015 by Basic Books. Originally published in 1996, it became a U.S. bestseller and was translated into 13 languages. Horgan's other books include The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation, 1999, translated into eight languages; Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment, 2003, which The New York Times called "marvelous" (see outtakes from the book posted on this site); and The End of War, published in paperback in 2014, which novelist Nicholson Baker described as "thoughtful, unflappable, closely argued." Horgan's publications have received international coverage. He has been interviewed hundreds of times for print, radio, and television media, including The Lehrer News Hour, Charlie Rose, and National Public Radio's Science Friday. He has lectured at dozens of institutions in North America and Europe, including MIT, Caltech, Princeton, Dartmouth, McGill, the University of Amsterdam, and England's National Physical Laboratory. His awards include the 2005 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion; the American Psychiatric Association Certificate of Commendation for Outstanding Reporting on Psychiatric Issues (1997); the Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1992 and 1994); and the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award (1993). His articles have been selected for the anthologies The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Science Writing. Horgan was an associate editor at IEEE Spectrum, the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, from 1983 to 1986. He received a B.A. in English from Columbia University's School of General Studies in 1982 and an M.S. from Columbia's School of Journalism in 1983. http://www.johnhorgan.org https://meaningoflife.tv/programs/current/mind-body-problems https://mindbodyproblems.com Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: The Deathray Davies Music page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/the-deathray-davies/6557498 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

We begin this conversation with Dr. April DeConick’s first exposure to Gnostic literature when she was a young student, without any real idea of what it is she was going to do with her life. The question for her was, “Why are these Gnostic texts not included in the New Testament?” This question sent her on the path of discovery, as she devoured literature from near-eastern and biblical studies. Dr. DeConick's particular interests include those aspects of the religious traditions that fell through the cracks of social, religious, and spiritual norms, while despite this still maintain a considerable influence on the dominant traditions of our current religious worldview. This conversation explores subjects ranging from early Christianity to Gnostic, Mystic, and Shamanic thought, ritual, and literature. These early communities were in large part quite transgressive; therefore much of the conversation is oriented towards understanding the nature of culture, power, societies, and the various ways that people throughout time have made meaning of the mysterious nature of reality. Bio: April DeConick holds the Isla Carroll and Percy E. Turner Professorship in New Testament and Early Christianity at Rice University, and is Chair of the Department of Religion. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1994 in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Since then, she has studied, written and taught on a range of topics revolving around the silenced voices of religious people and the communities that were left behind or discarded when Christianity emerged in the first four centuries CE as a new religion. She is the co-founder and executive editor of a new academic journal called Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies published by a very prestigious publishing house in Europe. She founded and chaired for years the Mysticism, Esotericism and Gnosticism group in the Society of Biblical Literature and is now Chair of the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism group. She is most noted for her writing on the Gospel of Judas when she challenged sensationalism generated by the National Geographic Society that wrongly claimed that Judas is a gnostic hero in this text and that his heroics would rewrite our understanding of early Christianity. Instead, her work shows that Judas remains demonic in the Gospel of Judas, just as he is in the New Testament gospels. Her work on this text was so instrumental that she appeared in CNN’s documentary on the Gospel of Judas that premiered in 2015 on the TV series "Finding Jesus". Her most recent book, The Gnostic New Age, has won an award from the Figure Foundation for the best book to be published by an university press in philosophy and religion. It is tradition that the Figure Foundation composes a koan for each book to receive this award and publishes it on the front page. The koan for The Gnostic New Age reads: “that square be squared”. If you have any insight into the meaning of this koan, she would love to hear it. https://reli.rice.edu/people/faculty/april-deconick http://aprildeconick.com Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

Dr. Murray Stein discusses initiation, directed vs. nondirected thinking, and the tension of opposites. He highlights the emergence of images beyond conscious control and the disconnect from the immaterial due to the growth of rational thinking. The conversation explores the impact of blending rational and imaginative thinking, the symbolic aspect of religion in Protestantism, and the transformative power of symbolic experiences.

After struggling through depression during medical school, Dr. Joseph Tafur was introduced to peyote by a friend who was researching psychedelics as a medical intervention. He reports that he quickly realized the connection between modern medical interventions, such as anti-depressants and psychedelics. In 2007 Dr. Tafur traveled to the Amazon and began his exploration of Ayahuasca and later began his training in Shipibo shamanism. Dr. Tafur’s medical background and his training as a Shipibo shaman position him to articulately explain the Western understanding of this spiritually-based approach to healing. Dr. Tafur’s book is full of case studies, and his use of these examples provide a first-hand account of what many know to be true: that many individuals do not feel adequately understood by the traditional western medicine. We discuss epigenetics, specifically how researchers are beginning to understand how trauma can be passed down from one generation to the other. We frame depression and other psychological issues as a disorder of the imagination, wherein the individual is cut off from their sense of creativity, and which cuts the individual off from imagining other possibilities in their life, and therefore they suffer under the burden of the discomfort and belief that change is not possible. Although Dr. Tafur can use modern medical language, he prefers to speak about love and broke-heartedness as it relates to what is missing in modern medicine. Bio: Dr. Tafur has been an Integrative Medicine activist throughout his medical career, while in medical school at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine, and during his Family Medicine Residency at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has collaborated on research projects with the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine and the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine. After residency, Dr. Tafur subsequently completed a two-year Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the UCSD Department of Psychiatry under psychoneuroimmunology expert Dr. Paul Mills. While in San Diego, he also served on the board for the Alternative Healing Network and the Steering Committee for the UCSD Center for Integrative Medicine. Dr. Tafur is also dedicated to education. At Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual, Dr. Tafur supervised traditional training for allopathic medical students and medical student groups from the Southwestern College of Naturopathic Medicine and Bastyr College of Naturopathic Medicine. He has also worked as a professor for the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine’s online doctoral program. He is now developing new educational programs for Modern Spirit. Since 2007, Dr. Tafur, a has been traveling to Peru to work with Traditional Amazonian Plant Medicine and to study with Master Shipibo Healers. He has completed his shamanic initiation under Maestro Ricardo Amaringo and worked alongside him for years in ayahuasca healing ceremony at Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual. Here in the United States, he is working to promote the value of spiritual healing in modern healthcare and to demonstrate the intersection between traditional healing and allopathic medicine .https://drjoetafur.com https://modernspirit.org Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: Black Tie Dynasty Music page: https://www.facebook.com/blacktiedynasty/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/black-tie-dynasty/41368471 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/

Many people make mystical claims about their worldview, but few can articulate their view in a way similar to Rabbi Jeff Roth. In this episode, Rabbi Roth explains that he views the fundamental problem of human existence as a rift between the human being and the divine. He explains that this rift created the ground of what we call evil. Rabbi Roth locates the origin point of the split between the divine and the human as the formation of the conceptual, thinking mind and language. He draws from mystical Jewish and Buddhist practice. Rabbi Roth’s understanding of the various problems with different translations of the original stories from the Torah supports his approach of deconstructing the original language used in both The Torah and The Zohar. This process of understanding and deconstructing takes an act of awareness, contemplation, and a handle on the original language systems used to communicate foundational stories in, not only the Judeo-Christian myth, but also any story that human beings have identified that reflects the origins of creation. Bio Rabbi Jeff Roth is the founder and Director of The Awakened Heart Project for Contemplative Judaism. He was the co-founder of Elat Chayyim where he served as Executive Director and Spiritual Director for 13 years. He is the co-leader of the Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training program and has facilitated of over 190 Jewish meditation retreats. He is the author of, Jewish Meditation Practices for Everyday Life and Me, Myself and God, both from Jewish lights Publishing. https://www.awakenedheartproject.org Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Song of the week from Slaid Cleaves https://www.slaidcleaves.com Music page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/breakfast-in-hell/380426781?i=380426816 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks

The discussion today centers on Dr. John Beebe’s ideas about psychological types as inspired by Jung’s understanding and articulation of this theory of personality. Dr. John Beebe is the leading expert on the subject, so much so that in the forthcoming release of Jung’s collected works on Psychological Type will include an introduction by Dr. Beebe – an honor of the utmost order. Dr. Beebe and I explore how the psychological types show up in film and how viewing films through this lens may enable someone to understand the various types and the dynamics between them better. Dr. Beebe explains how our early history provides the framework for our attitudes to organize themselves in service to making sense of the world. Conflicts between each other and ourselves are usually, in part, a consequence of the different attitudes and functions of the personality misunderstanding each other given their differences between how each of these comes to experience and know what it experiences. John identifies Hamlet as a means by which we may see the personality types play out. Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: The Chemistry Set Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks

How does a young man growing up in an “under resourced” community make sense of the mystical experiences that began at the age of 14 years old spending time with friends? By making his exploration of African American religion and theology the center point of his spiritual and academic development – and helping others through the process. This episode explores Cleve’s development and the dissertation that has provided him the container to examine his thinking as it relates to those thoughts and thinkers who have influenced him. At Princeton Theological Seminary, Cleve, began to expand his understanding of the great thinkers within Black Theology and African American Cultural studies including people such as Hortense Spillers, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cornell West, James Cone, Martin Luther King Jr, and others. Cleve provides a deeper understanding of Black critical thought, and how this intellectual tradition has influenced religion and culture. Interwoven into this rich conversation, we also discuss personal symbols for Cleve such as how N.W.A provided a means by which Cleve, as a young guy, began to understand his cultural upbringing and the basic struggle as an adolescent boy – in particular what factors shaped his understanding of himself, of his religion, and of his community. Bio: Cleve V. Tinsley IV is an ordained Baptist minister, scholar of religion and African American culture, and community social justice strategist based in Houston, TX. He is currently the Co-Managing Partner of projectCURATE—a non-profit social impact enterprise and intersectional justice collaborative—and a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Rice University. Cleve’s research focuses on critical understandings of the wider social scientific and historical approaches to the study of religion in general and African-American religion in particular. His current research explores the relationship between religion, black freedom struggles, and African-American formations in America and argues for more expansive sociological approaches to studying the meaning and nature of black religious identity given the complexity of religion and spirituality in the lives of African Americans today. Cleve also works as a research fellow in the Religion and Public Life Program (RPLP) at Rice and, prior to his doctoral training, earned his Master of Divinity (MDiv) at Princeton Theological Seminary. Cleve has worked in the past as a pastor and consultant for several churches and educational non-profit organizations in the US South and on the East Coast. www.projectcurate.org Theme music provided by: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com Band of the week: Abstract Rude and Tribe Unique https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/p-a-i-n-t/306865459 Learn more about this project at: http://www.thesacredspeaks.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesacredspeaks