The Emerald

Latest Episodes:

All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound ( w/ Trevor Hall) Oct 21, 2023

Show notes

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 vibration, and the Gay'Wu group of Australian Aboriginal women speak of how sound transports the singer to their homeland, to the place where the 'time is now.' To access this sound isn't frivolous, it serves to replenish and renew our connection to the world around us, to reinvigorate relationships with land, with community, and with the harmonic laws of creation. So the role of the bard — the musical seer — has always been to listen for this sound, to dissolve into it, and to return laden with songs that reinvigorate natural relationships. Song, in this sense, reconnects us to and replenishes the law of the land, and in a time of fracture, listening for this sound and singing back to it in reverence is more important than ever. Anchored by an interview with musician Trevor Hall, and featuring original music from Leah Song and Chloe Smith and traditional Baul devotional singing from Sri Parvathy Baul, this episode is a love song to sound itself. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.

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Reissue: On Trauma and Vegetation Gods Aug 28, 2023

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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 ritual enactments, communal ecstasies, and group catharses — these weepings over the bodies of lost gods — are traditionally tied to something very specific… vegetation. There is a profound link between the myths and rituals of the old vegetation gods and what we might now term trauma work — because the cycle of vegetative birth, growth, decay, and death mirrors our own cycle. This episode explores the deep link between the repatterning of the nervous system — which itself is described in a language of trees — and vegetation, from the numerous studies that show the healing power of the presence of plants, to the plant medicines that are literally regrowing nerve tissues, to the old vegetation deities whose theatrical ritual enactments, repetitive singing and dancing, and relationship to altered states of consciousness are deeply tied to trauma repatterning. The stories and rituals of the vegetation gods reveal a language around trauma which does not vilify or sanctify trauma, or isolate it, or see it solely as something to be extracted or released, but rather addresses it as part of a larger network of patterning and repatterning, regrowth and assimilation, a greater cycle of nature. If we start looking through this ritual lens, we see ritualized trauma work everywhere in cultures around the world. And it doesn’t always look like we think it would. Sometimes it even looks fairly… traumatic.

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So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode) Jul 12, 2023

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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. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real. Are human beings prepared to handle such powers? While the AI conversation centers around regulatory laws, it may be that we also need to look deeper, to understand the chthonic drives at play. And when we do so, we see that the drive to create AI goes beyond narratives of ingenuity, progress, profit, or the creation of a more controllable, convenient world. Buried deep in this urge to tinker with animacy and sentience are core mythic drives — the longing for mystery, the want to live again in a world of great powers beyond our control, the longing for death, and ultimately, the unconscious longing for guidance and initiation. Traditionally, there was an initiatory process through which potentially world-altering knowledge was embodied slowly over time. And so… what needs to be done about ‘The AI question’ might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics — because the drives at play are deeper and the consequences greater and the magic more real than it’s ever been before. Buckle up for a wild ride through myths of magic and human overreach, and all the kung fu movie and sci fi references you can handle. Featuring music by Charlotte Malin and Sidibe. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.

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Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate (Or Objects) Jun 06, 2023

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In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges that move of their own will. Mirrors speak. Swords dance. There are flying carpets and far-seeing spyglasses and cloaks and boots that leap by themselves. This pervasive insistence in the old stories that absolutely everything is alive — that everything has eyes — butts up against modern rationality and therefore gets marginalized as childish 'fantasy.' But as science discovers more and more that the lines between living and dead, conscious and not, human and non-human are not as clearcut as we'd once imagined, as science starts to unpack the sentience of trees and the latent life within clay, we start to (re)discover that 'things' are not just dead objects at all, and that this whole world hums with animacy. And so the vision of a world of persons, a world with eyes, is not simply a child's eye view — it's actually much closer to the way things are. In taking our attention to the least of things, and remembering that we inhabit a world with eyes, we open up the possibility of redefining our relationship with the cosmos itself. Sparked to life by a conversation with sculptor Rose B. Simpson and featuring original music by Peia, Marya Stark, Sidibe, Ben Murphy, and Andy Aquarius, this episode takes us on a journey through talking stones and living clay and animate bells and drums into a world in which everything has eyes, everything has agency, everything is a portal to the infinite — even the seemingly 'inanimate.' Even... your car. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.

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Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released) May 09, 2023

Show notes

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." It was direct, felt experience. It was, simply, how things were. Which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time. In this musically reimagined reissue of a classic episode of The Emerald, we explore how foundational the animate worldview is to the human experience and to human consciousness, and what we lose when it starts to fade. Listen on a good sound system when you have time to devote your full attention.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé) Apr 07, 2023

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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 not a thing apart. Its disciplinarity, its history, and its legacies are tied up with the industrialization, commodification, the manufacturing, the replication and the reproduction of the human subject. How we think about what it means to be human, what it means to have agency, what it means to think, who has cognition, who doesn't have cognition — all of this is tied in with the historicity of psychology." Using animate tradition as a foundation, Josh and Báyò explore Norse and Polynesian trickster myths, trauma discourse and Puritanism, and pay homage to the gods of in between spaces as they explode open a vision of being, bodies, and sentience that is vast, wild, and porous.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized Feb 20, 2023

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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 psychology.' It seems that psychology discourse has grown from a simple means of understanding and evaluating the forces at play in the psyche to be the medium through which much of modern discourse takes place, through which nearly everything is evaluated. If there is a value to ritual, it is increasingly articulated as a psychological value. The traditional yogic process has become deeply conflated with the psychological process. Traditional plant medicines are on the verge of a global psychologization. Psychology vernacular has been adopted en masse — and also weaponized en masse — so that simple disagreements in viewpoint or worldview are now called out as psychological pathologies. Activist movements have abandoned the spiritual vocabulary of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and the Dalai Lama in favor of outing narcissists and addressing collective traumas. Part spoken-word rant à la Gil Scott-Heron, part devotional ode to the breath of life, this episode is not an indictment of psychology or of therapeutic systems that benefit many people, but rather a glimpse into what goes missing as we increasingly evaluate everything through the psychological lens. As always in the modern west, what gets sidelined first is... the animate itself. There are textures and depths to the way that traditional systems understand relationality with the larger animate world that get lost when seen through the modalities that have arisen out of individualism. And in traditional animate systems, we find visions of consciousness, animacy, and relationality that make us deeply rethink psychological visions of trauma, safety, agency, and alterity. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.

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Universe, Adorned: Ornament in Culture, Cosmos, and Consciousness Jan 09, 2023

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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 in the aesthetics of culture and ritual. So in many traditions, to adorn is to directly enhance and pattern consciousness. To assume the boar-tooth mask or the macaw-feather crown is to bring consciousness into greater unification with the pattern of nature — to both heighten perception and to defend against unwanted forces. So adornment plays a key role in the shamanic navigation of the cosmos. In Tantric traditions, deep, loving, attention is paid to adornments. Hymns are sung to the goddess's adornments. The entire universe itself is seen as the adornment of the primal mother power, and practices of invocation and imaginal architecting deliberately adorn the consciousness of the practitioner. Such meticulous adornment has been foundational in many animist traditions. Yet in a world of decontextualized spirituality, the architecting and adorning of consciousness through ritual patterning is often discarded in favor of spiritualities that put all the emphasis on ridding the mind of constructs rather than deliberately patterning it. Perhaps in a post-modern, post-structuralist world, modern minds need deliberate patterning. Like the Sumerian goddess Innana, we need to adorn... for survival. Featuring music from Sidibe, harpist Andy Aquarius, and Nivedita Gunturi and drawing on the work of Tantric scholar Sthaneswar Timalsina, this episode is a patterned journey through that which shines, shimmers, jingles, defends, and aligns... listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.

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On Birds, and the Imperative of Mystic Flight Nov 23, 2022

Show notes

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 influence of birds everywhere in human culture —particularly in the core foundations of global spiritual traditions, whose visions of spirit are deeply tied to birds. The first recorded word for spirit itself is a picture of a bird, and birds have provided the primary means of shamanic and mystic travel for centuries. All across the world, birds influence language, poetic meter, musical composition, ritual vision and artistic expression. Most fundamentally, birds invite us to see farther, soar higher, imagine, initiate, ideate and dream. At a time when planetary futures seem bogged down in bleak inevitability, birds remind us that the ability to soar upwards, see far, imagine, ideate, dream, and navigate spaces of heightened awareness is more vital than ever. In fact, mystic flight is a somatic necessity that provides potential solutions for the future. For if we are going to ideate our way out of the mess we're in, we have to be able to see far and soar high. With original music from Peia, Sidibe, and Charlotte Malin, this episode recounts mythologies of eagles, falcons, macaws, roosters, ravens, hummingbirds, hoopoes and more as it invites a whole lot of upward soaring. Note — The Emerald podcast is meant to be listened to with full attention, preferably on a rocking sound system or a good set of headphones.

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Embodiment Means Being Torn Apart and Flying Away Oct 24, 2022

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Modern embodiment discourse has arisen as a reaction to the Western world's fraught history with bodies. In a world of deep fracture from the natural world, the current emphasis on embodiment serves to help reclaim a relationship with ecology and with the sacredness of the immediate. But what does 'embodiment' really mean? For some, embodiment is synonymous with wellness. For others, embodiment is related to ongoing personal processing. Often, traditional cultures are held up as examples of embodiment. Yet traditional mythic and ritual visions of embodiment are very different from modern wellness embodiment and from therapeutic/psychological visions of embodiment. Bodies, in ritual, go through agonizing repetition. Bodies are driven to the point of rupture. In myths, bodies do not exist in a kind of happily embodied stasis — bodies are ripped apart. Bodies shrink. Bodies expand. The individual self in initiation is specifically meant to be taken to the brink and then ritually dismantled. Ritual and mythic visions of embodiment ask us to expand our vision of what the body is, to embrace all the paradoxes of embodiment. As we explore in this episode, sometimes, to be embodied requires tearing the body into pieces. Sometimes it requires soaring out of the body. Ultimately, we find that in mythic and ritual traditions, embodiment is less about us and our individualized journey, and more about the great transformative journey of the body of the community and the cosmos itself. This episode seeks to challenge some of the common narratives of embodiment discourse in order to help return embodiment discourse to its living, breathing, paradoxical body. Best listened to when you have time to devote your full attention, on a bumping sound system or with really good headphones.

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