Heart Yoga Radio

In this podcast, I examine Elon Musk's recent take on empathy, which essentially claims that it has to be applied partially for the good of civilisation. I show Musk's take to be incoherent, practically unfeasible, and redolent with MAGA fascism. In the process, I believe that I caste some useful light on empathy itself. [Free. 25 minutes.]

In this podcast, we consider a passage from the Chuang Tzu entitled Action and Non-action. We describe how the processes of action and non-action are not stark opposites but mutually dependent phases of a profound meditation on the Tao. [Free.  31 minutes.]

In this podcast we consider Chapter 59 of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. This deals with the theme of simplicity of being as being at the heart of both meditation and the leadership qualities of the sage.  [Free.  16 minutes.]

In this podcast, we consider the conversation of humankind over millennia and the way philosophy can be understood this way. We give reasons for wanting to encounter it and share that encounter. The first is to equip ourselves with tools for enquiry, so that we are not 're-inventing the wheel'. The second is for its own sake, to delight in its sublimity and beauty. The third is so that we may be good ancestors.  [Free. 14 minutes.]

 

In this podcast we reflect on Chapter 31 of The Tao Te Ching. This Chapter deals with the pity and tragedy of war and the terrible nature of weapons and how the sage does not celebrate them. The sage, instead, loves peace and quiet and recommends it to rulers and peoples. We relate this to our current situation in which over $1.7 trillion are spent per annum globally on the weapons of war and in which many senseless and highly destructive wars are fought. We conclude that Lao Tzu's lesson in this chapter is one we urgently need to hear. [Free. 21 minutes.]

In this podcast I question the nature of revolution, particularly as to its ultimate ground, which for some should be consciousness, and for others, the power structures of society, particularly materialistically understood. I outline the thought that both must be involved as it is found in the ongoing historical conversation. This includes Freudian Marxism, and the existentialism of Simone de Beauvoir, who gives us the figures of the yogi and the commissar to imagine. [Free.  28 minutes.]

In this interview renowned Yoga Teacher Godfrey Devereux about a recent turn his work has taken. Godfrey has dropped the language surrounding contemporary Yoga to talk instead about resilience and how it is a consequence of a certain meditative self-enquiry. I ask Godfrey to elucidate this and particularly in the context of impending ecological catastrophe. I give my own take on these matters which is more inclined to speak up for activism. Listen to the following podcast, The Yogi and the Commissar, in which I explore some of the themes that emerged and in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialism. [Free. 32 minutes.]

In this podcast, I continue to explore the matter of human desire. I relate it to our embeddedness in time, to suffering and to our motivations to act. [Free. 26 minutes.]

This podcast is a commentary on the poem Desiring Truth from Songs of No and Yes. The poem outlines the enormous philosophical difficulties encountered in the quest for the truth about truth and contrasts them with the ease with which we employ our ordinary, common sense, adequationist notion of truth very effectively in everyday life. In the commentary, I draw on Patanjali's account of truth and knowledge in the Yoga Sutra, finding nothing problematic in our ordinary truth telling whilst suggesting that our various encounters with the ineffable, samadhi, have a valuable but unstateable truth content. I also note Patanjali's method of uncompromising truthfulness as an approach to the ineffable as encountered in the microcosm in the practice of self-study. [Free. 28 minutes.]

In this podcast, I elucidate Embracing the Human, one of the Songs of No and Yes. The discourse mostly takes the form of a recommendation against espousing asceticism and passive nihilism in the name of 'spirituality'. [Free. 27 minutes.]