Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate (Or Objects)

More from The Emerald All episodes →

1. 

   S1 · E83 · 31 Dec 2023 · 1 hr 59 min

   For the Intuitives (Part 2)

   Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why? Perhaps it is because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emphasis on forward progress, its commitment to the removal of mystery from daily life, and its encouragement of numbness over feeling, is fundamentally at odds with the seer's sensitivities and alignment to larger forces beyond human control. So modernity ...

2. 

   S1 · E82 · 21 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 37 min

   For the Intuitives (Part 1)

   Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premonitions that come to pass, to have dream experiences that translate into day-to-day life, and to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, and with a larger world of animate forces. For most of human history, the people that received su...

3. 

   S1 · E81 · 21 Oct 2023 · 1 hr 43 min

   All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound ( w/ Trevor Hall)

   There is... a sound. Many, through the ages, have heard it. It echoes in the world all around us, it reverberates in songs of joy and lament, it vibrates in the names of the gods and goddesses themselves. Across the world, tradition after tradition describes a sound that is the source of all sound, a sound that can be heard if we practice attuning ourselves to it. So the Indian yogi follows the sound OM to its source, the Brazilian Umbanda practitioner rides a thread of vibration to the great...

4. 

   S1 · E80 · 28 Aug 2023 · 1 hr 13 min

   Reissue: On Trauma and Vegetation Gods

   Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word ‘trauma.’ Yet addressing trauma is nothing new — traditional cultures across the globe have historically had their own forms of trauma work, without ever labeling it trauma work. For many cultures for many years, cathartic ritual practice that bypasses the conditioned mind has served multiple purposes as it regrows and re-patterns brains and bodies and communities. These...

5. 

   S1 · E79 · 12 Jul 2023 · 1 hr 58 min

   So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode)

   The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the need for ethics and regulatory measures. Yet it may be that the only way to truly understand the implications of AI — the powers, the potential consequences, and the protocols for dealing with world-altering technologies — is to speak mythically. With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths....

6. 

   S1 · E77 · 9 May 2023 · 1 hr 3 min

   Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)

   For 98% of human history — over 10,000 generations — our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate — imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an "-ism." I...

7. 

   S1 · E76 · 7 Apr 2023 · 1 hr 17 min

   The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé)

   Báyò Akómoláfé is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with. In this episode of The Emerald, Báyò joins Josh for a deep-dive discussion into how the Western psychological vision shapes modernity, and the need to expand into alternative stories of what 'being' means. Says Báyò: "Psychology is complicit in the creation of Western modernity. It is ...

8. 

   S1 · E75 · 21 Feb 2023 · 1 hr 38 min

   The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized

   Once upon a time, psychologist James Hillman spoke of anima, the breath of life, the soul of the world, as something that had to be rescued by psychologists from theologians. Now, with pop-psychology vernacular inundating all aspects of life, it may be time for the breath of life to be rescued all over again. The New York Times recently released an article entitled 'The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything.' Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes of the need to 'decenter Western ps...

9. 

   S1 · E74 · 9 Jan 2023 · 1 hr 52 min

   Universe, Adorned: Ornament in Culture, Cosmos, and Consciousness

   Human beings adorn. Scientists now say that the earliest adornments date back over 160,000 years. Why is adornment so universal? It is easy to see adornment as simply an indication of status, wealth, and identity. But adornment is also more than this. The word 'adorn' and 'ornament' relate directly to the word 'order,' to the pattern of the cosmos. And so to adorn has also been associated with aligning to a greater pattern, a pattern evident in the harmonic structures of nature and expressed ...

10. 

    S1 · E73 · 24 Nov 2022 · 1 hr 44 min

    On Birds, and the Imperative of Mystic Flight

    Birds in myth are messengers, deliverers of prophecy, and instigators of journeys. But birds are much more than this. Human neurobiology is deeply linked to birds, who, through the arcing patterns of their flight, their hypnotic songs, and their high, piercing calls, awakened human sense faculties, taught us to look up in wonder, and therefore gave us the ability to soar into imaginal spaces. Somatically, we ideate, journey, and soar because of our coevolution with birds. So we find the influ...