Wide-ranging talks on all things relating to spirituality, meditation, yoga, current affairs, politics and philosophy. contact me via info AT peteyates.uk.
This podcast deals with Chapters 21 and 22 of The Tao Te Ching. Chapter 21 is poetry impelled by Lao Tzu's encounter with the ineffable and Chapter 22 outlines the non-doing doings that can allow us to experience a similar encounter. [Free. 29 minutes.]
In this podcast, I examine the state of being 'into it' with respect to both creativity in writing and painting and receptivity in listening to music, engagement with dynamic creative projects, the flow of life itself and meditation. I contrast 'being into it' with its creative partner, critical distance, and its meditative other, self-cultivation - in order to recommend it. [Free. 16 minutes.]
In this podcast, we outline our top ten [or thereabouts] tips for honing your meandering skills. [Free. 60 minutes.]
This podcast is a mischevious engagament with a fagment from the TV series Vikings in which a protagonist confesses his desire to live each moment with the maximum possible intensity. [Free. 25 minutes.]
Rather than using our usual spontaneous exposition, this podcast is a reading of a formal paper. It deals with the way in which two metaphors structure Nietzsche's engagements with our culture and philosophical tradition. [Free. 23 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.]
An introduction to Nietzsche's thought in which I discuss Nietzsche's "great task" and his ludic, artistic method of persuing it. I touch on Nietzsche's anti-Platonism, anti-systematic approach to philosophy, notions of life-affirmation and life-negation amongst other things. The shifting concept of the will to power is elucidated, showing its various guises. [Free. 32 minutes.]
This podcast deals with Chapters 6, 7 and 8 of the Tao Te Ching. Themes covered include breath and the pulsation of the universe, poetry and the attempt to eff the ineffable, up and down mysticisms and letting be, water and flow, the sage, confucianism, politics, desires and political manipulation, maternal nurturing, compassion and strategies for living, etc. [Free. 40 minutes.]
In this podcast, we reflect on Chapters 4 and 5 of The Tao Te Ching. The cornucopean yet empty and ineffable nature of the Tao is further considered. The logic of the Taoist influence on the development of science in ancient China is explored. We also ponder how Freud's distinction between oceanic and super-ego religions is illuminated by Lao Tzu's account of religious experience. And more .... [Free. 39 minutes.]
In this podcast, we comment on the first chapter of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. Though it is very short, this chapter covers an immense amount of ground, including the paradoxical nature of talk about the ineffable, the creativity of nothingness and the character of 'the sage'. We intend to comment on the entire text over time. [Free. 41 minutes.]
