Saturday, June 27, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #189 - 27JUN15

The Mystical Positivist is now a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. Listen live on Saturday evenings from 4:00 - 6:00pm, PST, via the web at KOWS Live Stream
This week's podcast features:
  • An in-studio conversation with Peter Russell, a faculty member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a fellow of The World Business Academy and The Findhorn Foundation, and an Honorary Member of The Club of Budapest.

    At Cambridge University (UK), he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. Then, as he became increasingly fascinated by the mysteries of the human mind he changed to experimental psychology. Pursuing this interest, he traveled to India to study meditation and eastern philosophy, and on his return took up the first research post ever offered in Britain on the psychology of meditation. He also has a post-graduate degree in computer science, and conducted some of the early work on 3-dimensional displays, presaging by some twenty years the advent of virtual reality.

    In the 1970s, he was one of the first people to introduce human potential seminars into the corporate field, and for twenty years ran programs for senior management on creativity, stress management, personal development, and sustainable development. Clients have included IBM, Apple, Digital, American Express, Barclays Bank, Swedish Telecom, ICI, Shell Oil and British Petroleum. In 1982 he coined the term "global brain" with his 1980s bestseller of the same name in which he predicted the Internet and the impact it would have. His other books include -- The TM Technique, The Upanishads, The Brain Book, The Creative Manager, The Consciousness Revolution, Waking Up in Time, and From Science to God.

    His principal interest is the deeper, spiritual significance of the times we are passing through. His work seeks to distill the essence of the world's spiritual traditions and present it in ways relevant to the current times.
More information about Peter Russell's work can be found at:

Saturday, June 20, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #188 - 20JUN15

The Mystical Positivist is now a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. Listen live on Saturday evenings from 4:00 - 6:00pm, PST, via the web at KOWS Live Stream
This week's podcast features:
  • An in-studio conversation with Christine Skarda. Born in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1952, Christine Skarda was educated in the United States and Europe. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1982 and subsequently taught internationally. In 1982, Skarda was invited to join the innovative Sloan program at UC Berkeley and MIT that brought together experts from diverse fields to study intelligence; she thus became a pioneer in the movement later known as cognitive science. Skarda's interest in perception led her to investigate its physiological basis. She held post-doctoral positions in a neuroscience lab at UC Berkeley from 1984 to 1992 and a fellowship in Cognitive Science at the École Polytechnique in Paris between 1986 and 1988.

    By the early 1990s, Skarda's own neuroscience research and her analysis of decades of data from the research of others convinced her that the theoretical model of perception prevalent in neuroscience was flawed. Instead of the perceptual system constructing internal representations of a fundamentally separate external world, Skarda presented an alternative model. Reality starts out as an unbroken web, which a perceptual system breaks up. All the data she had analyzed convinced her that our sense of ourselves as subjects completely independent from objects is created by perceptual activity; it is not an actual state of affairs. In fact there are no gaps between the perceiver and the world.

    To gain access to this undifferentiated level and to understand how the perceptual process breaks it up into the world we experience, Skarda then turned to Tibetan Buddhism. This tradition offers systematic methods to explore this foundational state. Since 1992, she has been using these methods to investigate where the model prevalent in neuroscience has gone wrong. To this end, Skarda has spent the last sixteen years in meditation retreat in India and the United States under the guidance of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Holiness Chetsang Rinpoche, and Khen Ngawang Jimpa Rinpoche. She now also teaches Buddhism, drawing from her background in Western thought and science to explain even the most subtle and difficult points of Buddhist philosophy by using the language of the modern world.
More information about Christine Skarda's work can be found at:

Saturday, June 6, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #187 - 06JUN15

The Mystical Positivist is now a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP 107.3 FM, Occidental, CA. Listen live on Saturday evenings from 4:00 - 6:00pm, PST, via the web at KOWS Live Stream
This week's podcast features:
  • This week and on the Mystical Positivist we continue our conversations with a panel of guests who are all presenters at the Conscious Family Festival 2015 event coming up in Santa Rosa on Saturday June 13, 10am—5pm at the Finley Community Center at the corner of College and Stony Point avenues. The diversity of the work that our panelists offer at the Conscious Family Festival bespeaks the amazing array of contributions that the Festival is bringing together.

    In the first hour we’ll speak in person with Myosho Virginia Matthews, Zen Teacher and Mother. Myosho finds her life support in the three pillars of family life, spiritual practice and her work as dancer/choreographer/teacher. Also in the first hour, we’ll be speaking by telephone with Regina Sara Ryan, author, editor, and seminar/retreat leader. A former Catholic nun, Regina has studied contemplation and mysticism throughout her adult life. In the second hour, we will speak by telephone with Theresa C. Dintino, a 20 year practitioner of earth-based spirituality, who was initiated in 2011 as a diviner in a West African tradition, and Jill Nephew, founder and creator of Life Constellation, a software platform for discovering, articulating and sharing life wisdom.

    • Myosho Virgina Matthews finds her life support in the three pillars of family life, spiritual practice and her work as dancer/choreographer/teacher. She has been a student of Rinzai Zen master, Kyozan Joshu Sasaki for 40 years, taking ordination in 2000 and dedicating the last 14 years to co-creating family Zen practices and leading women’s retreats. Concurrently she has had a professional dance career and has taught dance to all ages, from 3 to 73. She is the director of The Downtown Dance/Art Space in Sebastopol where she teaches dance, Pilates mat class and offers meditation through Dharma Heart Center. She is a graduate of The Buddhist Chaplaincy Program and is featured in the book, The Unknown She: Eight Faces of Emerging Consciousness. She is in a committed 43 year marriage and the mother of 3 grown sons.

    • Regina Sara Ryan is an author, an editor, and a seminar and retreat leader. A former Catholic nun, Regina has studied contemplation and mysticism throughout her adult life. After leaving the convent in 1971, she explored other religious traditions and was inspired by the lives of the great women of Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Sufism who had lived these ways. Since meeting her own spiritual teacher, the Western Baul master Lee Lozowick in 1984, Regina continues to follow what she calls a path of “unashamed devotion” in which she works to bring her life of contemplation into action. Her books include: Wellness Workbook, co-authored with John W. Travis, M.D.; The Woman Awake: Feminine Wisdom for Spiritual Life; and Praying Dangerously: Radical Reliance on God. Regina is the managing editor for Hohm Press/Kalindi Press, and a writing coach for aspiring authors of all ages. She lives in Paulden, Arizona with Jerome Pramuk, her husband of 42 years. While she has no biological children, Regina is a former HeadStart, elementary school, and homeschool teacher dedicated to all children, and brings to the Festival her passion for bringing sacred form into all aspects of our lives.

    • For more than 20 years Theresa C. Dintino has studied and practiced an earth-based spirituality. In 2011, she was initiated as a diviner in a West African tradition. She currently helps others reclaim their personal lineages through her divination work. Theresa is the author of The Strega and the Dreamer, a work of historical fiction based in the true story of her great grandparents, and Ode to Minoa and Stories They Told Me, two novels exploring the life of a snake priestess in Bronze Age Crete. Her latest title, just released, is Welcoming Lilith: Awakening and Welcoming Pure Female Power. For more on Theresa or her work, visit thestregaandthedreamer.com and ritualgoddess.com.

    • Jill Nephew is the founder and creator of Life Constellation, a software platform for discovering, articulating and sharing life wisdom. She is very passionate about hacking social interactions so that every voice is heard, every life imagined into, and everybody spirited - young and old. Her work is deeply informed by the actual wisdom part of wisdom traditions, and highly constrained by the latest research and scientific understanding of human social dynamics and cognitive evolution. She brings to her work a 30 year meditation practice, extensive training in physics and scientific modeling, and a career in developing complex software systems and models to tackle some of the world’s hardest problems.

More information about The Conscious Family Festival can be found at: