The Emerald

"We don’t go to other planets because our planet is dying. Our planet dies, specifically because we perpetually want to go somewhere else." Today on the podcast, we look at humanity’s increasing obse…

The third book of the Patañjali yoga sutras, the Vibhūti Pāda, is often skipped over in modern yoga teacher trainings. Why? Its descriptions of supernatural powers — of yogis who can shrink to the si…

The poet/bard/singer holds a special place of reverence in many cultures and traditions. Far from being seen as 'escapism,' sung music, incanted verse, and told story was essential technology for tra…

In this live storytelling episode, we look at mythological visions of the world axis or central column across a range of cultures. Starting with the simple upright alignment of the human spine, and j…

There’s a great myth that is told and retold in cultures throughout the world. The story goes like this — something is harnessed, raised upwards, suspended there, until finally there is a great crack…

More and more pandemic experts are saying that humanity's disruptions of natural environments are responsible for outbreaks of new viruses. This sense of disease as intimately tied to imbalances that…

Eyes have always held sway over the human imagination — mesmerized us, scared us, inspired us. The windows to the soul, they’ve been called. They’ve been the subject of song and poetry, folklore and …

We often assume that Paleolithic people lived in a world that was fundamentally less than ours because they didn’t yet have what we have. We assume that their existence was incomplete, because it had…

Bette Midler recently made headlines for tweeting a picture of three girls at a museum distracted by their phones instead of admiring the art. Yet the context in which we view art tends to be just as…

A few weeks back, wizard-yogi-talkshow host Russell Brand interviewed scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast Under the Skin. It’s the November 1st, 2019 episode and it’s highly worth listening …

In this poetic ode to the animate vision of the cosmos that has been so central to humanity for so long, we explore the idea that the ritual heart of both culture and cosmos itself is poetry, and tha…

The power of myth exists beyond representation and symbolism. Myths grow out of a time when to utter the word ‘sky’ around a fire at night would transmit something directly to the listener, something…

Bears have been right at the center of pan-global belief systems for a very long time, causing some anthropologists to speak of a circumpolar bear cult dating back possibly over 100,000 years. Given …

What's the point? Well, far from being an image of smallness or insignificance, the single point, the dot communicates a lot. In fact, in India, there are songs devoted to the point, texts that extol…

Cauldrons — cooking vessels — have been part of the human experience and have captured the human imagination for a very long time, from the ancient Celtic cauldron myths to Shakespeare's archetypal v…

In this episode we take a deep dive into the abyss — the seemingly unbridgeable gap that exists between science and spirit. Are there places where science — which sees the universe as something that,…

The active practice of imaginative visioning has been utterly central for many societies. Far from being fantasy, such practices reinforce a deep understanding of the cosmos in which the active culti…

The word 'enchanted' is used a lot, from old fairy tales to modern pop culture. But enchantment is not something reserved for fairy stories or for vague tingling feelings when we encounter something …

He’s stirred the imagination of poets and writers and artists for 30 centuries. Rilke wrung his pale heart out to him. He finds his way into Shakespeare and Nietzsche, into the librettos of Stravinsk…

It’s easy to dismiss the practice of sacrifice as brutal, but the fact is that sacrifice, enacted in varying degrees in both external and internal ritual, has dominated human traditions for thousands…