Heart Yoga Radio

LAO TZU 58

In this podcast, we consider Chapter 71 of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. This chapter is about self-deception, understood as a sickness. We appraise the character of many modern politicians in the light of Lao Tzu's insights on this matter. [Free. 25 minutes.]

REMARKS ON FREUD PART 1 - THE UNCONSCIOUS

This podcast is the first in an ongoing series on Freud and psychoanalysis which is meant to be useful to our series on fascism and reason, as well as to our many considerations of the workings of propaganda and ideology. Here, give some background to Freud's intellectual journey and elucidate the notion of 'the unconscious' and its significance for humanity's self-image. [Free. 34 minutes.]

FREUD'S INFLUENCE ON US GOVERNMENT & BUSINESS

This podcast ranges wide over the uses of Freud's insights for manipulating mass thinking and behaviour on behalf of the state and corporations. We review Adam Curtis' four part documentary  The Century of the Self (2002),  as a way in. There is particular focus on the work of Freud's nephew Bernays, the father of modern PR and advertising and author of Propaganda (1928). We also draw attention to philosophical problems with Freudianism, particularly those noted by Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Though standing alone, the podcast is also groundwork for future podcasts on the psychopathology of fascism.

The Century of the Self available on YouTube. Episode 1- https://youtu.be/DnPmg0R1M04

REASON ON REASON 4 - MADNESS

In this podcast we examine madness or the loss of reason to further our picturing of reason. We start out with the fact that madness, like reason has a history which offers us a variety of causal explanations of madness, treatments for it, and accounts of its meaning. We also give a brief account of nosological drift. Both of these preliminaries serve to cast suspicion on the notion that we can discern madness through contrast with a supposedly sane consensus reality. Accordingly, we are drawn to consider madness in terms of suffering people and to appraise crazy social and political situations through the employment of a critical awareness rather than accepting the status quo understanding as a yardstick. That critical awareness, we claim, entails acquaintance with ones own potential for irrationality. [Free. 54 minutes.]

TWITTER BANS AND FREE SPEECH - INTERESTING TIMES 21

This episode in our current affairs series is a wide ranging analysis of the significance of the banning of the POTUS, Donald Trump, by Twitter and other social media platforms. This leads into considerations of the benefits and drawbacks of free speech, and the multi-stranded power dynamics that surround it in our current discursive world, dominated by vastly influential information technology as it is. I make recommendations on how to situate ourselves in this situation and note the skills we need to proceed towards understanding and independence. [Free. 39 minutes.]

DESIRING TRUTH [YES & NO 4]

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.]

WHAT IS ART?

This podcast is the first part of an open-ended and ocassional series on issues in philosophical aesthetics. I examine problems in defining art in the strict sense and in applying Wittgenstein's account of family resemblances in language use. I then look at the consequences of Dada and the way in which artists can act by fiat to declare event or object X a work of art. I sketch attempts to give an account of art in terms of the psychology and/or phenomenology of the creative process, and approaches which contextualise artist and/or work of art in culture, the economy and social relations. There is a small detour into the way in which Wittgenstein's account of family resembalces upends Platonism. [Free. 29 minutes.]

NUMBERS ONE: SEDUCTIONS OF THE ALGORITHM

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.]

ORGANIC, FREE-RANGE [MYSTERY AND BELIEF]

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.]

LANGUAGE AND SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

In this podcast, I consider the attempts of Lao Tzu and Wittgenstein to urge upon us that the ineffable cannot be spoken of whilst themselves continuing to speak of it. This can be made sense of if we inderstand that language has many more possibilities than just fact-stating and indeed that it can point us in the direction of 'spiritual experience'. [Free. 24 minutes.]