Wide-ranging talks on all things relating to spirituality, meditation, yoga, current affairs, politics and philosophy. contact me via info AT peteyates.uk.
In this podcast we jump off from Chapter 66 of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching into a discussion of the central metaphors that can be used to understand the world and society. We also discuss the notion of trust and the high value accorded to it by Lao Tzu. We explore the role of trust in naturally occurring communism. And more. BUY ME A COFFEE. Click to make a small donation. [Free. 35 minutes.]
This podcast is a meditation on the contrast between natural ecstasies which affirm the human enterprise and can emphasise our connectedness to all things and the chaos engulfing the world as ecological, economic and cultural systems increase in instability, all at the same time. I arrive at a few practical suggestions which arise directly out of the meditation. Buy me a coffee by following the link. [Free. 18 minutes.]
Some music that I used as the soundtrack for a short video animating a water colour painting. BUY ME A COFFEE! Follow this link to make a small one-off donation.
[Free. 6 mins. 11 sec.]
In this podcast we compare and contrast the current situation in the UK, particularly the initiative to produce a mass refusal to pay exorbitant energy bills, with the success that mass action had in getting the 1990 Tory Government to reverse its poll tax policy. The discussion is set in a wide historical/economic context. [Free. 42 minutes]
In this podcast we entertain the likelihood of an impending sublime moment in which a variety of people's actions bring about some fundamental disruption of the status quo. We think that such an event is highly likely but that it will present revolutionary and civil-disobedience movements with the problem of what to do the day after the sublime moment. This is a point often elaborated by Zizek. We offer the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring as examples. We proceed by way of allowing the ideas in two recent books, both offering some utopian speculations informed to some degree by Marx, to collide in order to produce some analytic tools. Those books are Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani and Beyond Money by Anitra Nelson. [Free. 44 minutes]
In this podcast, we jump off into the matter of spontaneous, natural liberation from a consideration of the text The Natural Liberation Through Naked Vision. We discuss the practicalities of this way of being, its resonances with Zen, the question of asceticism and Nietzsche's take on it. Amongst other things! [Free. 26 minutes.]
In this podcast, we consider Chapter 65 of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Unusually, we take issue with a proposition put forward by Lao Tzu. This manoeuvre proves to be quite fruitful in underscoring the need to retain ones critical faculty, to push for more and better education throughout society and to expose the forces of psychological manipulation at play in our fractured culture. [Free. 14 minutes.]
In this podcast, we consider the Tory Government proposal to institute eight 'Charter Cities' in the UK. Charter Cities are planned to be areas which are given over to governance by a corporation which is likely to remove workers protections, ban minimum wage laws, dismantle welfare, quash restrictions on working hours and more. All this is thought to be facilitated by Brexit and the subsequent revocation of EU regulations. For its neoliberal proponents, who are universally drawn from the big oil funded right international, this is a utopia which will end world poverty. We argue the contrary, that it will be a monstrously dystopian anti-democratic nightmare in which workers will be treated like disposable things and which must be stopped. For background, a good shortish read is here - https://medium.com/@cormack.lawson/charter-cities-the-real-reason-for-brexit-and-the-bigger-picture-4de80dbb69fbhttps://medium.com/@cormack.lawson/charter-cities-the-real-reason-for-brexit-and-the-bigger-picture-4de80dbb69fb [Free. 58 minutes.]
