Wide-ranging talks on all things relating to spirituality, meditation, yoga, current affairs and philosophy - all with a practical aim of encouraging and helping those engaged in self-exploration and creative living.
This short squib deals with the insecurity of life, particularly mortality and suffering, and how these invite and potentiate meditation whilst not precluding the perennial human endeavours to secure and enhance life practically. I jump off from Alan Watts' The Wisdom of Insecurity, but thereafter go my own way. [Free. 15 minutes.]
This podcast deals with Chapters 18, 19 and 20 of The Tao Te Ching. In these chapters, Lao Tzu extols the virtue of alignment with the Tao for individuals and society. Simplicity is the way, he says, to come into that alignment. Instances of misalignment are consumerism, over-sophistication and acquisitiveness. Again, the character of the sage-leader is explored. [Free. 42 minutes.]
In this podcast I give a brief outline of breath disciplines described by Patanjali and Svatmarama and discuss their practicality and significance. I draw attention to the common tendency to manipulate the mind-body complex and endow the resultant effects with significance derived from received models of the human being and metaphysical narratives. I ask, 'how do these fit in with the fact that this is it?' [Free. 26 minutes.]
In this podcast, I consider the mysticism of numbers of the Pythagoreans and its influence down the ages on Plato, Aristotle, Kepler, Newton and on to the scientism of the modern age. I contrast this with a mysticism of endless, unfathomable mystery and tease out the ramifications for the Socratic question of how life is to be lived. [Free. 38 minutes.]
A Zen master was asked,"What is the Tao?" He replied, "Your everyday mind." How can this be? Shouldn't the Tao be something exhalted, unlike the most ordinary everyday mind? In this podcast, I attempt to dissolve this conundrum in the hope that it may help someone. [Free. 15 minutes.]
This podcast deals with Chapters 16 and 17 of the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tzu revisits the character of the sagacious ruler who is rooted in contemplation, this time drawing on a metaphor of plant growth and nuture by deep roots. Not only is contemplation to be nurtured by our roots in the earth, but the sage should quietly nurture those around him. This leads on to considerations of styles of government of which a pure anarchism is evaluated as the most desirable. We suggest that this would only be possible for a population deeply rooted in contemplation of nature and its underpinning processes and cycles. [Free. 23 minutes.]
In this podcast, we discuss Chapter 15 of the Tao Te Ching in which Lao Tzu delineates the character of an ideal ruler. For Lao Tzu, this ruler, though a politician, is deeply grounded in meditation and oneness with the Tao. [Free. 29 minutes.]
In this podcast I elucidate devotional music which a great sufi called "Nothing other than the portrait of our beloved". It covers modal music and raga, the role of culture in our experience of music, and improvisation as an expression and communication of immediate emotions, particularly of love. [Free. 29 minutes.]
This one was impomptu. Consequently, it was free-range, across questions of mystery, knowability, certainty, belief and faith. As always, the matter of living well presses itself into the picture, as does the matter of the puzzling limits of language. Thanks for your continued patronage. I'm planning some good stuff for patrons in 2018. [Patrons only. 23 minutes.]
In this podcast, we discuss Chapter Fourteen of the Tao Te Ching. LaoTzu, here, points out the lack of qualites of "The One" and the boundary-less-ness that allows us to encounter it. We hasten to add that there is no boundary between the ten thousand things and their boundaries [which are the luminous ordinary] and the One. [Free. 20 minutes.]
