The Emerald

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Festivals! Initiation and the Brilliance of Eternity Nov 18, 2021

Show notes

Just in time for Holiday season, an episode that dives into the deep role of festivals in providing regular, ritualized access to states of rapture and initiation. For thousands upon thousands of years, the festival formed the drumbeat of culture. Festivals forged bonds and provided communal and individual focus. The festival gave space for grief, for rapture, for joy, for renewal. Hurts were healed at the festival… thresholds crossed, revolutions hatched, at the festival. The festival renewed our relationship with the vegetal world and established us in right relation with plants. The festival was able to accomplish all these things specifically because the festival was a shared agreement around time, an architecting of temporal reality to construct a portal to the eternal. Yet at a certain point in the history of the modern west, the festival was de-sanctified. And so, we are left with a schism between the sacred and the profane, in which the festival and its associated arts become simply ‘entertainment.’ The results of this schism are deep. Traditional festivals took participants on a fully enacted journey through pain, grief, loss, death, and then renewal and ecstatic communion, while the modern holiday celebrates only the consumptive side of this cycle. The ethos of modern capitalism removes all possibility of ‘sacred time,’ and gives space only for debauchery as an antidote to the numbing cycle of the workplace. What do we lose with the de-sanctification of the festival? Ultimately, we lose the potential for the festival to provide one very important thing — enacted access to the initiatory moment, to what Byung-Chul Han calls the brilliance of eternity.

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On Resonance: Caves, Hooves, Hearts, Harps... and the Birth of Culture Oct 12, 2021

Show notes

The word ‘resonance’ is commonly used these days to convey agreement with a point of view or perspective. But resonance is much more than this. ‘Resonance’ implies a universe that is sonorous and reverberatory and that operates according to the principles of harmony. Within this, many cultures have seen the role of the human being to become an instrument — to cultivate, through ritual repetition, a resonance with our fellow beings, with land, and with cosmos. This vision is not metaphorical. Science is increasingly finding that nature operates through resonance, that music predates language, and that when human beings decide to do things — to embark on adventures, to vote for politicians, to join groups — the primary driving force to do so is not ‘fact’ but resonance. Culture itself almost certainly arose through resonance, as we entrained to one another, in sync, through musical somatic ritual in resonant spaces. From the deep sounding board of the Paleolithic cave to the resonant spaces that birthed Greek prophecy to mythic visions of humans-as-instruments, this episode explores how resonance is utterly central to human experience, how modernity has become what one sociologist referred to as a ‘catastrophe of resonance,’ and what we can do to reclaim our deep resonance with one another and the natural world.

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Becoming a Ruin: Decomposing and Regrowing the Mythic with Sophie Strand Sep 16, 2021

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Sophie Strand describes herself as a writer, an animist troubadour, and a giant pile of composting leaves. Her lyrical, eco-centric vision of the mythic has gained her a wide following, as she blasts monomyths wide open into swarms of glittering spores. With essays entitled 'My Saint is a Weed,' 'Confessions of a Compost Heap,' and 'Becoming a Ruin,' Sophie's work brings the mythic into the tangible, helps myths regain their body, and places stories deep in the middle of a living ecosystem of time, place, and specificity. In this episode, Josh and Sophie discuss her model of looking at stories through the triple lens of Myco Eco Mytho, and then go on a rhizomatic conversational journey into kingdoms of astonishment, Orphic root systems, flowering wands, and visions of how to give the Gods back their bodies.

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Mapping The Mystic: Geographies of Ecstasy in Consciousness and Culture Aug 31, 2021

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Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience — the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like. Yet mystic experience might be indescribable in modern culture simply because we’ve failed to culturally describe it. For those cultures historically who tread the mystic space with great regularity, there’s nothing indescribable about it. Mystic unity has been mapped. The people who have tread its spaces for thousands of years describe in scintillating detail landscapes, architectures, points, vortexes, luminosities, mandala-like configurations, all alive with animate entities. And these geographies are not simply described as personal visions, but as tangible externally existing landscapes that others can visit too. So where do such mystic scapes live? Are they a function of brain chemistry? An externally existing reality? An overlap of individual consciousness and the external world? All of the above? This episode unpacks the articulated geographies of mystic states and looks at the mystic experience beyond 'just brain chemistry' but rather as a state of alignment to greater patterns and forces that already exist within nature, forces that shaped our biology to begin with. Within this ongoing relationality, art, ritual, story, and song, work together to create a fully formed mythic structure through which human beings contextualize the world, and in an age of decontextualization and fragmentation, this mythic structure is as vitally important to the human bodymind as it has ever been.

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The Shape of Stories: How Myths Move Through Bodies and Worlds Aug 05, 2021

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Author Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that stories have shapes — that there are a few common wave-trajectories that underlie all of our stories. This episode builds on Vonnegut's thesis and explores the energetic shapes and trajectories of myths — trajectories that serve, within oral myth telling cultures, to take the listener on an experiential journey of scattering and rejoining, of rupture and cascade, of coiling and release, and of journey and return. These wave dynamics exist throughout nature and are inherent to our somatic structure, which is also why certain story structures, like the Hero's Journey, are difficult to get away from. Stories of journey and return mirror energetic cycles that exist in the breath, in the brain, in seasonal cycles, and in the phases of the moon. So while the socio-political externals of Hero's Journey stories can — and in some cases probably should — change, the underlying circular energetic of departure and return is as fundamental to human experience as the breath is. From the tale of Sisyphus, a breath-journey of rise and fall, to the vibrant spiral dynamics of the Indian goddess tales, this episode explores myths in terms of their directional energetic dynamics and cracks open a way of understanding and feeling story that is somatic rather than analytical.

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TRA is for Trance: On the Linguistics of Crossing Over Jul 15, 2021

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Trance, traverse, transformation, tradition, transcendence, transgression — all come from a single Indo-European linguistic root TRA, which signifies some type of crossing over. Crossing over is something human beings have always been inclined to do — populations migrate across great expanses as explorers seek new horizons. Too much emphasis on crossing over, however, can lead to worldviews of transcendence, in which the purpose of existence is to 'get past' rather than exist in harmony with what is. Transcendence worldviews are alive and well in modern apocalyptic religion and in modern science, which seems determined to transcend nature, blast us to mars, and extend human lifespans. Yet traditionally, this human need for traverse was addressed through ritualized trance, which carried practitioners across a great inner divide. The great inner traverse offered by trance practice brought the practitioner into a state of focused presence, a flow state that is the heart of mystical tradition, and that requires the greatest of traverses to reach — the traverse across the torrent of agitated discursive thought to a state of seamless integration. These days, this traverse is harder and harder to make, as we are inundated with technologies that 'carry us across', and we spend most of our waking lives in an unwitting trance, perpetually crossing over without even realizing it. TRA is for trance — choose your trances wisely.

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On Trauma and Vegetation Gods Jun 22, 2021

Show notes

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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Tyson Yunkaporta on Pattern, Kinship, and Story in a World of Decontextualized Minds May 26, 2021

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In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, author, teacher, artist and Apalech clan member Tyson Yunkaporta presents a model of five minds — kinship mind, story mind, ancestor mind, pattern mind, and dreaming mind — that together form a way of seeing, knowing, and interacting with the world in a relational context. This episode looks at the rampant fragmentation in the modern world — which impacts everything from spiritual movements to transhumanist science to conspiratorial worldviews to progressive discourse — through the lens of these five minds. From Aboriginal rain rituals to QAnon pattern-seekers, from sorcery and curses to alternative communication models, this vibrant and polytropic discussion between Tyson and Josh explores what context means in a fragmented world, and how to truly find it requires seeing beyond obvious dichotomies into deeper layers of connectivity.

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Semele, Kuṇḍalinī, and the Path of Interiorized Lightning May 08, 2021

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Stories of lightning and lightning-bearers pervade global mythology. With so many tales of mighty gods who punish mortals with lightning it can be easy to view the presence of lightning in the myths as simply a metaphor for power or brute force. Yet the lightning myths go a lot deeper than this. Across the world, the traditions most familiar with states of ecstatic rapture use a common language of lightning. This lyrical episode re-awakens the story of Semele, mother of Dionysus — herself incinerated by lightning — and uses it as an entry point into a network of global myths and traditions that sing of lightning as a central aspect of the rapturous experience. Across the globe, we find a common somatic language of interiorized lightning from the Dionysian mysteries to the Kuṇḍalinī traditions of India to the Sufi illuminationist traditions to the trance practices of the Kalahari. In an era when Kuṇḍalinī is a buzzword, Zeus is a scorned adulterer/patriarch, and the story of Semele is a scholar's footnote, this episode seeks to restore somatic sanctity to the force of living lightning that has guided ecstatic practice for millennia. Listen with headphones, preferably in a quiet meditative space, and maybe even in the dark.

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Trickster Jumps Sides: Disruption and the Anatomy of Culture Apr 21, 2021

Show notes

Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to Èṣù and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deliberate and unintentional offenses and generally mess with established orders. Yet they are often seen as indispensable to these orders — they are renewers and cultural innovators and often pave the way for great change. So in many cultures, Tricksters, despite their shenanigans, are seen as sacred. In modern society, we have no such ritualization of cultural disruption. Trickster is relegated to the margins. So when Trickster comes along these days, he tends to upend everything. Sometimes, we welcome that change — it's a wonderful thing when Trickster shows up and topples the gods that we want toppled. It's a lot more disconcerting when it's our gods being toppled. And ultimately... Trickster isn't on our side. He's the mythic embodiment of the other side. From ritualized mockery in Ancient Greece to the Merry Pranksters to Ol' Dirty Bastard to the Capitol riot, this episode explores how a society acts in relation to its own dirt...and how, when Trickster is not honored by keeping a society fed and renewed, he shows up in darker ways. Warning: This episode contains explicit subject matter — because that's how Trickster rolls.

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