The Mystical Positivist: August 2015

Saturday, August 29, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #194 - 29AUG15

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:

Hour 1: A telephone conversation with Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, author of The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. She is the guiding teacher of Still Breathing Meditation Community in East Oakland, California, and is a Zen Buddhist priest in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, ordained and invited to teach by Zenkei Blanche Hartman. Zenju combines Zen meditation, intuitive knowing, and indigenous ritual in a path of liberation. She has a keen capacity to apply spiritual teachings to our lived experiences in the context of race, sexuality, and gender and at the same time hold these experiences as gateways to absolute freedom.

Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Marselean Manuel was born in Los Angeles, California to parents that migrated from Creole Louisiana. With the deep suffering of violence experienced as a child she became a poet at the age of eight. In college she joined a community of Pan-Africanists where there was deep healing for her. This led to the next spiritual gate opening within the African tradition of Yoruba, which was the beginning of her experiencing the vastness of things unseen and the world of divination. Forever grateful for their blessings, her deep experiences of suffering led her to the path of Buddha, without any desire to be Buddhist. After 15 years in the Nichiren tradition/Soka Gakkai, she eventually followed the path of Soto Zen for many years and was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in the Suzuki Roshi lineage.

Her spiritual writing is steeped in ancient memories of her ancestors and therefore explores the deep inner spiritual journey of our human existence. She is the author of a popular Kindle free e-book Be Love: An Exploration Of Our Deepest Desire. In addition to her most recent published book, The Way of Tenderness, she authored Tell Me Something About Buddhism, which includes a foreword written by Thich Nhat Hanh, with poetry and illustrations by her. In addition, she is contributing author to many books, including Together We are One (Parallax), Dharma, Color and Culture: Voices From Western Buddhist Teachers of Color (Parallax) and Hidden Lamp: Stories from 25 Centuries of Awakened Women (Wisdom Publications). She holds Ph.D. in Transformative Learning from the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Hour 2: Hosts Stuart Goodnick and Robert Schmidt continue to discuss themes raised in the conversation with Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel.

More information about Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel's work can be found at:

Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel's website: zenju.org

Saturday, August 22, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #193 - 22AUG15

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 Rick Whitney, author of AlignIt: A Tale of a New Civilization. This sophisticated utopian novel, set in an imagined context on San Francisco Bay, posits a kind of reformed university that brings together ancient sacred sciences with contemporary, cutting edge sciences. The novel discusses many alternative ideas about economics, society, community, human nature, and the ultimate concern of human life.

Rick Whitney is a pseudonym adopted for publication of AlignIt. Regarding the adoption of a nom-de-plume, on the AlignIt website Rick writes: “I chose a pseudonym to keep a fire wall between my public role at the university I work for and my private interest in writing and developing the ideas expressed in AlignIt…. At the university, I have a public role as director of an office. It's an externally facing role. People around the world Google me or look me up on LinkedIn prior to calling or meeting. And I have colleagues at the university itself, of course. It seemed prudent to keep the two distinct--my professional life and my writing life… AlignIt is fiction, not a guide for how I run the office, do my work, or meet with guests…. I articulated expansive views in AlignIt, including alternative models of university structure, research and technology transfer. They're experimental, hypothetical, fictional. To me, this is a worthwhile private endeavor. ”

More information about Rick Whitney's work can be found at:

The AlignIt website: alignit.blogspot.com

Saturday, August 1, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #192 - 01AUG15

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:

A telephone conversation with Dr. Michael Changaris, a clinical psychologist and a Zen practitioner with a specialty in the biological bases of behavior, stress physiology, and the neuro-anatomy of PTSD. He completed his post-doctoral fellowship with the child, family and adolescent intensive outpatient program with Kaiser Permanente. He continues to deepen his own practice through his work and his relationships with family. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Conscious Family Festival, which is one of the ways that Rob and I have come to know and appreciate his quick intelligence, his copious energy, and his generosity of spirit.. We’ll be discussing his soon to be published book called Touch: The Neurobiology of Health, Healing, and Human Connection.

A review of the 2015 book, The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Harvard Law School, Massachusetts, and Lee Smolin, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada. Cambridge Books writes:

Cosmology is in crisis. The more we discover, the more puzzling the universe appears to be. How and why are the laws of nature what they are? A philosopher and a physicist, world-renowned for their radical ideas in their fields, argue for a revolution. To keep cosmology scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve. Then we can hope to explain them. The revolution that Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Lee Smolin propose relies on three central ideas. There is only one universe at a time. Time is real: everything in the structure and regularities of nature changes sooner or later. Mathematics, which has trouble with time, is not the oracle of nature and the prophet of science; it is simply a tool with great power and immense limitations. The argument is readily accessible to non-scientists as well as to the physicists and cosmologists whom it challenges.

More information about Mike Changaris' work can be found at:

Mike Changaris' Website: www.touch-neuroscience.com

More information about The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time can be found at:

Cambridge University Press Website: The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time

"The Mystical Positivist" Radio Show

The Mystical Positivist is a weekly radio show on KOWS-LP FM 107.3 Occidental, CA, and on the web at KOWS-LP Live Feed, Saturdays from 4 - 6pm PST. Coming up on The Mystical Positivist:

April 20: A pre-recorded conversation with Ken McLeod, Buddhist teacher and author of the newly released book, The Magic of Vajrayana. In this conversation, we plan to explore a compelling quote from Ian McGilchrist's The Matter with Things: If you had set out to destroy the happiness and stability of a people, it would have been hard to improve on our current formula: remove yourself as far as possible from the natural world; repudiate the continuity of your culture; believe you are wise enough to do whatever you happen to want and not only get away with it, but have a right to it—and a right to silence those who disagree; minimise the role played by a common body of belief; actively attack and dismantle every social structure as a potential source of oppression; reject the idea of a transcendent set of values.

One of the more innovative Buddhist teachers today, Ken McLeod is known for his clear explanations, poetic translations, and pragmatic approach to practice. He is one of the first generation of Western teachers in the Tibetan tradition and one of the few to be authorized to transmit the full scope of these teachings to students. In particular, his approach resonates strongly with those whose path lies outside established institutions.

After graduating with a degree in mathematics, Ken cycled across Europe to Istanbul and then continued his journey overland to India. In 1970 he met his principal teacher Kalu Rinpoche at his monastery near Darjeeling. There Ken began a study and practice in Tibetan Buddhism that lasted more than twenty years. He completed the traditional three-year retreat program two times, translated for many teachers, and helped set up Buddhist centers in Canada and the United States. After his teacher's passing, Ken moved away from the hierarchical structures of Asian Buddhism to explore new approaches.

In 1990, he founded Unfettered Mind in Los Angeles. His approach of one-on-one consultations roiled the Buddhist world in the early '90s, but was quickly recognized as a viable way to teach and guide students in the West. He made individual interviews a central feature of the many retreats he taught in California, New Mexico, and British Columbia. Through numerous small groups in Southern California, he developed the materials that became the encyclopedic meditation manual, Wake Up to Your Life.

Now retired from formal teaching, he lives in Northern California where he hikes and writes. His writings and translations include The Great Path of Awakening (1987), Wake Up to Your Life (2001), An Arrow to the Heart (2007), Reflections on Silver River (2014), A Trackless Path (2017), and The Magic of Vajrayana (2022), as well as a corpus of articles and translations in Tricycle and other Buddhist magazines.