The Mystical Positivist

Podcast: This week on the show we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Richard Whittaker in which he brings his considerable interviewing skills to bear on interviewing The Mystical Positivist hosts, Stuart Goodnick and Robert Schmidt, Spiritual Director of Tayu Meditation Center. Richard Whittaker is the co-founder, with Rue Harrison, of the non-profit "Society for theReCognition of Art" and founding editor in 1998 of the magazine works & conversations. Earlier he founded The Secret Alameda [published from 1990-96]. He is also the West Coast editor of Parabola Magazine. Although Whittaker has a background in philosophy [BA] and clinical psychology [MA] and has done graduate work at the GTU in Berkeley, his connections with art go back over forty years including photography, ceramics, painting and sculpture. More information about Richard Whittaker's work can be found at: works & conversations online: www.conversations.org, Interview with Richard Whittaker on ServiceSpace: www.servicespace.org.

Podcast: This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Zoketsu Norman Fischer and Ken McLeod framed by two key questions. The first is whether mystics or mystically inclined practitioners have responsibilities to society and the World, and if so, what might those responsibilities be. Out of this question comes an extended exploration of what it means to be a mystic, the nature of the world in which we practice, the distinction between direction and goal in spiritual practice, and spiritual practice as learning how to die. The second question is of the great spiritual questions, for which ones have we found the answers and for which ones do the questions remain? Out of this comes reflections on the role of questions themselves, the nature of divinity, the mystery of the passage of Time, the impending meeting we all have with Death, and how to prepare for Death as the cessation of all conceptualization. Zoketsu Norman Fischer is an American poet, writer, and Soto Zen priest, teaching and practicing in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. He is a Dharma heir of Sojun Mel Weitsman, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1988. Fischer served as co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center from 1995–2000, after which he founded the Everyday Zen Foundation in 2000, a network of Buddhist practice group and related projects in Canada, the United States and Mexico. Fischer has published more than twenty-five books of poetry and non-fiction, as well as numerous poems, essays and articles in Buddhist magazines and poetry journals. His most recent book is The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path. After learning Tibetan, Ken McLeod translated for his principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, and helped to develop Rinpoche’s centers in North America and Europe. In 1985, Kalu Rinpoche authorized Ken to teach and placed him in charge of his Los Angeles center. Faced with the challenges of teaching in a major metropolis, he began exploring different methods and formats for working with students. He moved away from both the teacher-center model and the minister-church model and developed a consultant-client model. Ken is the founder and director of UnfetteredMind.org. He is the author of Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention, The Great Path of Awakening, An Arrow to the Heart, Reflections on Silver River, and his most recent book, A Trackless Path. More information about Norman Fischer and Ken McLeod's work can be found at: Norman Fischer's website: www.normanfischer.org, Ken McLeod's website: unfetteredmind.org.

Podcast: This week on the show, we present a telephone conversation with Barbara Du Bois. Barbara Du Bois, Ph.D., longtime teacher of Buddhadharma, is known for the clarity, freshness, humor, and fearless love with which she shines a frank Western light on the path. Her principal gurus are Padmasambhava, Milarepa, Machig, H. H. Dudjom Rinpoche, and H.E. Garchen Rinpoche. Barbara’s lifetime of service includes work with disarmament, African refugees from colonial regimes and genocide, United Nations social development, feminist scholarship and teaching, and initiating an indigenous women’s peace movement during active civil war in Africa. She holds the doctorate from Harvard University and has taught at undergraduate and graduate levels as social scientist, psychologist, and psychotherapist. Barbara is also a visual artist and author of Light Years: A Spiritual Memoir (Laughing Vajra, 2011) and the newly published Brave, Generous, & Undefended: Heart Teachings on the 37 Bodhisattva Practices. She currently resides in Arizona. More information about Barbara Du Bois' work can be found at: Barabara Du Bois at White Cloud Press: www.whitecloudpress.com, Brave, Generous & Undefended at the Garchen Store: www.garchen.store, Light Years on Amazon: www.amazon.com.

Podcast: This week on the show, we present a pre-recorded conversation with Hersch Wilson, author of Firefighter Zen: A Field Guide to Thriving in Tough Times. Hersch is a thirty-year veteran volunteer Firefighter-EMT with the Hondo Fire Department in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. He is also a story-teller, committed to explaining how First Responding can change how we see and experience our own lives. In his “real job” he is a writer, speaker, and consultant. In the past twenty-five years, Hersch has worked extensively with leadership teams from a variety of organizations including Kodak, IBM Japan, Altria, The United States Postal Service, the CIA, Kraft Foods and Baxter Healthcare to name a few. He has co-written three national business best sellers with Larry Wilson, including the awarding winning, Playing to Win!: Choosing Growth Over Fear in Work and in Life. His latest project, based on thirty years as a volunteer firefighter, is helping individuals and organizations see the world as firefighters do and learn how to thrive through traumatic and stressful times. Hersch attended Colorado College and graduated with a BA in English from the University of Minnesota. Prior to becoming a writer and consultant, Hersch was a dancer and actor. He performed in Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. He has also worked as a flight instructor and commercial pilot. More information about Hersch Wilson's work can be found at: Hersch Wilson's Website: www.herschwilson.com, Hersch Wilson on Medium: medium.com, Hersch Wilson on YouTube: www.youtube.com.

Podcast: This week on the show, we present a pre-recorded conversation with Robin Bloor, author of To Fathom The Gist Volume III: The Arousing of Thought. In this book, Robin demonstrates a method of reading and comprehending the contents of G. I. Gurdjieff’s master work, All and Everything: Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson. Our conversation ranges from some practical insights from The Tales, to the nature of Objective Art, to an introduction to the subject of Objective Science. Robin was born in 1951 in Liverpool, UK. He obtained a BSc in Mathematics at Nottingham University and took up a career in the computer industry, initially writing software. From 1989 onwards, he became a technology analyst and consultant. He has thus been a writer of a kind ever since. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary Ph.D. in Computer Science by Wolverhampton University in the UK. He currently resides in and works from Austin, Texas in the USA. In 1988, after drifting through several work groups, Bloor met and became a pupil of Rina Hands. Rina was a one-time associate of J. G. Bennett, a student of Peter Ouspensky's, and later, a pupil of George Gurdjieff. Following Gurdjieff's death, she remained part of J. G. Bennett's group for a while. Subsequently, she formed groups both in London, where she lived, and in Bradford in the North of England-initially in conjunction with Madame Nott. She was an accomplished movements teacher and an inspirational group leader. She died in 1994 and is buried next to Jane Heap in a cemetery in North London. Robin leads a group, The Austin Gurdjieff Society, in Austin, Texas. Aside from the usual movements and Work activities, the group specializes in the study of Gurdjieff's writings and the study of Objective Science, as articulated by Ouspensky in In Search of The Miraculous, and by Gurdjieff in The Tales. More information about Robin Bloor's work can be found at: Austin Gurdjieff Society Website: austingurdjieffsociety.weebly.com, To Fathom the Gist Website: www.tofathomthegist.com, The Seekers' Cafe Website: seekerscafe.org, Robin Bloor's email address: robin.bloor @ gmail.com.

Podcast: This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Anne Sweet, Sydney-based artist and spiritual exemplar of living in the world from a point of view of transcendence. Of her spiritual life she writes: I had a ‘change of identity’ about 15 years ago. This was very liberating for me, but I wasn’t exactly sure what it was or what had happened. By then I had left my teacher and was pretty much done with spiritual life. After 30 years I’d had enough, and been through enough. I had learnt to take care of my interior world and over time had stabilized my ‘condition’ and had no desire to get involved with another teacher in the hope of having my remaining questions answered. In a sense I forgot all about spirituality. About 5 years ago I began to become very curious about my ‘state’. I was reading the Masters again in a casual way, and their words seemed to match my experience. I believed there was an excellent chance I was fooling myself however, and it became important to find out. I contacted a well-known Vedanta teacher who I trusted with my ‘story’, and he very kindly confirmed my understanding and helped clear my remaining questions. I was satisfied. After that spiritual life slipped even further into the background. Recently, after a series of formal interviews with her friend, Amir Freimann, Anne has started speaking openly about her state and her ongoing experience of transcendence of a contracted identification with her personal story. In this conversation, we discuss Anne’s background of deep spiritual practice, the crisis that led her to make a decision to shift her sense of identity from her personal narrative to that within which remains unchanging, and how Anne has come to integrate this mode of being into her life in the world. More information about Anne Sweet's work can be found at: Anne Sweet's website: www.annepenmansweet.com, Sweet + Shore Collaboration website: www.sweetandshore.com, Rebecca Hossack Gallery London website: www.rebeccahossack.com.

Podcast: This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Michael Nagler, founder of The Metta Center for Nonviolence in 1982, and author of The Third Harmony: Nonviolence and the New Story of Human Nature. The Metta Center provides educational resources on the safe and effective use of nonviolence, with the recognition that it’s not about putting the right person in power but awakening the right kind of power in people. The Metta Center advances a higher image of humankind while empowering people to explore the questions: How does nonviolence work, and how can I actively contribute to a happier, more peaceful society? As Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature at UC, Berkeley, Michael co-founded the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. His previous books include The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World; and The Nonviolence Handbook: A Guide for Practical Action. He is a student of Eknath Easwaran, who founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, and he has lived at the center’s ashram in Marin County, California since 1970. More information about Michael Nagler's work can be found at: Michael Nagler's personal website: michaelnagler.org, The Metta Center website: mettacenter.org, The Third Harmony film website: thirdharmony.org, Nonviolence + Science = New Story: mettacenter.org/nonviolence/newstory/, Blue Mountain Center of Meditation website: www.bmcm.org.

Podcast: This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Amir Freimann, author of Spiritual Transmission: Paradoxes and Dilemmas on the Spiritual Path and a doctoral researcher on Living Transcendence: A Phenomenological Study of Spiritual Masters. Amir returns to continue our conversation from May about Living Transcendence and the nature of Spiritual Surrender. Born in 1958 in a kibbutz, Amir grew up in a small village in Israel. At the age of 17 he became deeply interested in spiritual-existential questions about the nature of consciousness, freedom, self and the Whole. He served in the Israeli army and became a pacifist after participating in the 1982 Lebanon War. He then studied medicine but at the end of the 5th year of his studies decided to devote his life to spiritual awakening. He spent 2 years meditating in a Zen monastery in Japan and over 20 years doing intense spiritual practice and engaged in philosophical-spiritual exploration in the community of EnlightenNext in the USA. In 2009 he left the community and moved back to Israel. Shortly thereafter he began interviewing prominent spiritual teachers and their students, which led to the publication of Spiritual Transmission, which is his first book in English. Note: the video of this conversation can be found at www.youtube.com. More information about Amir Freimann's work can be found at: Amir Freimann's website: The Freedom to Question, Amir Freimann on Facebook: www.facebook.com, Spiritual Transmission at Monkfish Book Publishing Company: www.monkfishpublishing.com, Amir Freimann on The Mystical Positivist: mysticalpositivist.blogspot.com.

Podcast: This week on The Mystical Positivist, we present a pre-recorded conversation with Sufi practitioner and strategic consultant, Richard Webb. In this conversation we discuss challenge of rising above the cloud of malaise that can so seductively hold our attention, the utilization of breath and the energetic system of the body to support us in this challenge, and how the human biological machine is naturally designed to enable us to rise up to take this all on. Richard brings an earthy and immediate wisdom to our conversation that is both deadly serious yet leavened with humor and compassion. As a young man, Richard entered into an intensive apprenticeship with noted Sufi teacher Reshad Feild and ultimately worked with Feild and his community for almost twenty years. Having established himself in the world both professionally and with a family, he found himself at a crossroads in the early 2000s that led to his initiation into a shamanic tradition. His work was soon complemented with the initiation into the Tibetan Chöd tradition which weaved in a web of community support into the sometimes wild and elemental work of the shamanic tradition. Throughout these epochal shifts in his spiritual work, Richard maintains a clarity of about the nature of practice and the essence of spiritual transformation. Professionally, Richard has been driving the development of cutting-edge solutions in global Fortune 500 environments in the high-tech industry for over 20 years. He brings big-picture vision to both operational and digital transformation by applying lean concepts to optimize systems, streamline processes, and reduce costs while managing multi-million-dollar budgets and corporate change. Additionally, he cultivates collaboration to bridge development, operations, and implementation while building highly productive teams that increase enterprise resiliency and security. More information about Richard Webb's work can be found at: Richard Webb on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com.

Podcast: This week we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Hokai Diego Sobol and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ken McLeod. In this penetrating discussion, we explore the nature of Vajrayana Buddhist practice and its antecedents in the Tantric tradition, the primacy of the teacher-student relationship and the intimacy of spiritual transmission, as well as the body as the foundation for the awakening experience. Hokai Diego Sobol started practice and study of Buddhism in 1985. After 10 years of exploring Buddhist thought and practicing martial arts, while broadly learning from sources Eastern and Western, mainstream and fringe, Hokai became a practitioner and eventually instructor in the Shingon esoteric tradition of Japanese Vajrayana, under the private tutelage of Ajari Jomyo Tanaka. Hokai founded the Mandala Society of Croatia in 1999. Continuing to explore and cultivate his own Buddhist practice, Hokai maintains an ongoing conversation with a number of teachers and senior practitioners. Starting from 2012, he focuses on mentoring individuals to deepen their practice in the context of their lives – those who pray, learn to meditate; and those who meditate, learn to pray. Hokai’s areas of special interest include mystical principles and esoteric practices in daily life, sacred apprenticeship, and deep semiotics. He is based in Rijeka, Croatia. After learning Tibetan, Ken McLeod translated for his principal teacher, Kalu Rinpoche, and helped to develop Rinpoche’s centers in North America and Europe. In 1985, Kalu Rinpoche authorized Ken to teach and placed him in charge of his Los Angeles center. Faced with the challenges of teaching in a major metropolis, he began exploring different methods and formats for working with students. He moved away from both the teacher-center model and the minister-church model and developed a consultant-client model. Ken is the founder and director of UnfetteredMind.org. He is the author of Wake Up to Your Life: Discovering the Buddhist Path of Attention, The Great Path of Awakening, An Arrow to the Heart, Reflections on Silver River, and his most recent book, A Trackless Path. More information about Hokai Diego Sobol and Ken McLeod's work can be found at: Hokai Sobol's website: hokai.eu, Hokai Diego Sobol on Twitter: @hokaisobol, Ken McLeod's website: unfetteredmind.org., Ken McLeod on Twitter: @kenmcleod.