The Emerald

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The Many Voices of Water, Part 2: Imagining Water Beyond Lines Apr 02, 2021

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With the announcement that water futures have begun trading on the stock market, it's time to take a deeper look at our relationship with water. Water challenges us to ask how we are in relationship to something that is both continuous and discrete, something that flows, moves, evaporates, seeps, and pours forth. Yet rather than honor this multivalent nature of water, humans have tended to treat water as an object and a servant. Water is compartmentalized, sequestered, and marginalized, bottled and sold in plastic, all in the effort to make it 'just another commodity.' This episode examines what right relationship with water looks like and advocates a relationship not simply based in metrics of quantity but in metrics of quality — in feeling, in longing, in reciprocity, in reliance, in ritual, in art, in song, in bodies — a relationship in which we construct our lives around water instead of expecting it to serve us, in which the mutable aspects of water are honored. Water, beyond plastic, beyond lines. Special guests include Water Activist Isabel Friend, Designer and Professor Dilip Da Cunha, and Greenpeace USA's Oceans Director John Hocevar.

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How Trance States Shape the World Mar 11, 2021

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Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessary role in human culture and in the shaping of human history, causing some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonial animal' that is the human being. Trance states traditionally help communities reinforce shared bonds, establish values, gain insight into the nature of reality, establish reciprocal relation with the natural world, and even heal. Yet in the modern world, trance states have been pathologized by both institutionalized religion and science, and ecstatic ritual has lost its centrality. Finally, anthropologists are recognizing what many cultures have known all along — that trance states are essential for human thriving, and that when we lose access to these states we seek ecstasy in darker, more destructive ways. This episode goes deep into the trance states that have defined cultures and traditions for thousands of years. We look at trance in India, Ancient Greece, Africa, South America, and beyond and explore what it means when a culture loses its ecstasy.

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The Many Voices of Water, Part 1: Oceans of Melancholy and Bliss Feb 04, 2021

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Water is life — all life on planet earth depends on it. So it is no surprise that in the mythic visions of all peoples, water teems with personhood and agency and speaks with many voices. The Ancient Greek world was populated with water beings, who existed not just as abstract concepts but as living entities that were deeply tied with ecstatic trance rituals. The Greeks heard the voices of hundreds of distinct animate forces in the sea, voices of melancholy and bliss and rapture. This joyous longing is also present in the profound Afro-Brazilian traditions that honor Iemanja, the Queen of the Sea. The songs sung to Iemanja from Nigeria to Benin to Brazil to Cuba invoke qualities of the sea that are also qualities of consciousness itself — and many are the traditions that have viewed consciousness as an ocean. This understanding of consciousness is more than a mythopoetic metaphor, when we consider that all of the conscious processes of the human being happen in a matrix of water. With a range of diverse voices, including water activists, scholars of water traditions, free divers, and more, this first installment of a series of three episodes on water explores the ocean's many voices, and sets the stage for a deeper look at some of the profound issues facing our planet's waters today.

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Give the Drummer Some: Trance, Danger, and Rapture in the Oldest Instrument of All Jan 19, 2021

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The link between music and trance is so deep that many ethnomusicologists will say that every single culture on the planet has some form of musically-driven trance tradition. Right at the heart of these traditions sits the drum. Far from being a 'primitive' instrument, the drum is advanced technology — more often than not, it is the essential instrument that opens up the doorway to states of rapture. This long-known power has led to the development of intricate cultures of trance drumming from West Africa to Cuba to Tibet to Scandinavia. This power has also led the drum to be vilified, even banned. 17th century European witch trials banned ritual drumming, even, in some cases, executing drummers. But as ritual drumming and trance traditions reached the New World via the slave trade, they rose to prominence again, in the new musical forms of blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll. European and American youth went crazy for the trance states offered by the rhythms of amplified music, and the same culture that once vilified drumming now came to adulate it. It is no exaggeration to say that all popular modern music is based on what were once African ritual trance rhythms. In this way, the recent history of drumming has a lot to teach us about how the postmodern mind — in a culture that outwardly marginalizes trance states — still longs for trance, and what it looks like when trance rituals are taken out of their traditional context and become more of a free-for-all. Anthropologist Wade Davis and producer/DJ Walker Barnard chime in on this episode that takes us from the Orixá traditions of Brazil to the Tibetan Bönpo shamans to John Bonham and Clyde Stubblefield. Take a journey on the wings of the drum. This time, on The Emerald.

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When Exactly Was the Age of Reason? Dec 30, 2020

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Telling people to 'just listen to reason' or 'just look at the facts' in a post-fact world mired in addictive consumption is akin to telling an addict 'just stop using.' Well intentioned, but not ultimately addressing the root of the issue. So while rational analysis of factual sources is certainly necessary to combat conspiracy and widespread untruths, there are deeper forces at play within human minds, hearts, and societies that ultimately must be addressed in order to find a harmonious way of living in the world. Within this, pursuits that have long been deemed ‘irrational’ — structuring societies around a living, breathing, ritual core, enacting forms of regular cathartic expression, telling stories that reinforce deep access to the imaginal, forwarding a vision of life in which we are deeply linked to animate forces of nature — such ‘irrational pursuits’ that reprioritize harmonious relationship with a living world as the pinnacle of all human purpose may be the only rational way to get us out of the mess we’re in.

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Animism is Normative Consciousness Dec 01, 2020

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For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate. Imbued with lifeforce. Inhabited by and permeated with forces, 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 felt experience. It was, simply, how things were. Which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time.

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Giving Thanks Nov 26, 2020

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Spontaneous expressions of gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day, and a look at the role that gratitude plays in consciousness, community, and cosmos.

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Seeking the Luminous in an Age of Manufactured Light Nov 14, 2020

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Light, within nature, has always drawn us in, held our attention, and revealed marvels through its variegated displays. Coleridge said that the “eye is to light like lover to the beloved.” Light and human attention share a very deep relationship. And with our attention increasingly drawn towards a luminous focal point that is manufactured, it becomes more and more difficult to experience something essential that exists in the meeting point between us and the light of nature around us. This meeting point has been envisioned as a place of revelation, of germination, of ideation, and as the home of the imaginal itself. At this meeting point, the architectures and harmonies of nature reveal themselves to us and we see right into our own relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world — and so it informs our perceptions of truth, ecology, art, beauty, harmony, and justice. All in that little place where the light of our attention meets the light of the natural world.

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Medusa and #MeToo: How Modern Narratives Miss the Heart of Myth Oct 31, 2020

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Who remembers Medusa? Hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseus… that Medusa. She's in the news again, because a sculptor has re-imagined the story of Perseus and Medusa as a tribute to the #MeToo movement — and this time, Medusa's the one doing the beheading. Some have embraced this re-telling, but the founder of #MeToo has spoken out strongly against it, saying that #MeToo isn't about vengeance or simply 'turning the tables.' Lost in the current dialogue is the sacred place that Medusa actually holds in the original myth. The original myth is not about Medusa 'losing' and Perseus 'winning.' Like so many myths, the story of Medusa is about deep cycles of nature, sacrifice and regeneration, and in these myths the place of the 'slain one' — whether Medusa, or Vrtra, or Ouranos, or Ulu — is the heart of the myth. In this episode we dive into the story of Medusa and find her original power as the slain-creatrix, the primordial goddess herself, who through her unending involutions leads us to eternity. And we explore how when myths are bent to fit modern narratives about punitive justice and socio-political issues, we lose out on the beating, animate heart of myth, which, like nature itself, doesn't always fit into neat boxes.

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When Bread is No Longer Bread: The Importance of Context in Consciousness, Community, and Cosmos Oct 08, 2020

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The defining characteristic of the postmodern capitalist world is a cycle of decontextualization for the sake of monetization. It happens everywhere — with the products we buy, the food in our grocery stores, and the spiritual traditions we import from other lands. Modern Yogic and Buddhist practices have been removed from the deep context of their original practice — and often what is lost in the process is the living, breathing, animist heart of tradition. This episode explores how consciousness naturally exists in context — mythic, animate, communal, and cosmic — and looks at the consequences of this deep loss of context on our minds and our world.

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