The Mystical Positivist: December 2015

Saturday, December 26, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #207 - 26DEC15

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:

Today hosts Stuart Goodnick and Robert Schmidt provide a year-end show, looking back on some of the remarkable guests that they’ve hosted in 2015 on the Mystical Positivist. They reflect on how these radio conversations have changed and informed their own personal experiences of spiritual practice. They also celebrate their own spiritual teacher, Tayu Meditation Center founder Robert Daniel Ennis, who died in 1998, and who would have been 69 years old on the day of broadcast, December 26th, 2015.

Dr. Robert Schmidt, spiritual director of Tayu Meditation Center, met and began intensive, 24-hour study with Tayu Meditation Center founder Robert Daniel Ennis in 1977. After five remarkable training years, he received ordination as a minister of Tayu, and co-taught with his teacher until Mr. Ennis’ death in 1998. His work with Mr. Ennis included co-writing and publishing a book entitled God Is Gay: An Evolutionary Spiritual Work. Rob succeeded Mr. Ennis as Tayu spiritual director, a post he still holds, in collaboration with yours truly. With Stuart Goodnick and Jim Wilson he co-founded Many Rivers Books & Tea in Sebastopol in Sebastopol, CA, in 2002.

Currently he’s collaborating with practitioners of many spiritual traditions to create the Conscious Family Festival, a community event scheduled for October 2016 in Santa Rosa, CA. Along the way, Rob completed a Ph.D. in anthropological archaeology at UC Berkeley, where he was co-editor with his grad student colleague Barbara Voss of the award-winning Archaeologies of Sexuality, the first academic edited volume to examine the phenomenon of sexuality as a object of knowledge in archaeological contexts.

Stuart Goodnick, the Mystical Positivist, has been a practitioner of Tayu Meditation since 1985 and a Tayu Meditation instructor since 1993. He holds degrees in Physics from Caltech and UCSC, and has been an engineering manager in the electronics and software security industries since 1989. Stuart has also been a student of the shakuhachi (Japanese Bamboo flute) under Master Masayuki Koga since 1996. In recent years Stuart has been applying the principles of spiritual practice and transformation in daily life as a senior executive in both Silicon Valley start-ups and global industrial manufacturers. He co-founded Many Rivers Books & Tea with Robert Schmidt and Jim Wilson in Sebastopol in 2002.

A frequent writer and speaker on spiritual topics, Stuart maintains that rationality is no way the antithesis of deep mystical experience, but is in fact a necessary ally. He is currently working on a compilation of some of his essays and transcriptions of talks to be released later in 2016.

More information about Tayu Meditation Center can be found at:

Many Rivers Books and Tea Website: www.manyriversbooks.com
Tayu Meditation Center Website: www.tayu.org/~tayu/
Old Many Rivers Blog: www.manyriversbooks.com/blog1/

Saturday, December 19, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #206 - 19DEC15

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 conversation in the studio with Ken McLeod, a senior Western translator, author and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. He received traditional training mainly in the Shangpa-Kagyu lineage, through a long association with his principal teacher Kalu Rinpoche, whom he met in 1970. Under Kalu Rinpoche’s guidance McLeod learned the Tibetan language and completed two, traditional three-year retreats (1976-83). In the years that followed, he traveled and worked with Kalu Rinpoche on various projects and became a prominent translator of Buddhist texts. This includes a landmark translation of The Great Path of Awakening by Jamgon Kongtrul, a key text in the teaching of Lojong (the Seven Points of Mind Training).

In 1985 he settled in Los Angeles to run Kalu Rinpoche’s dharma center. He did so until 1990, when he founded his own organization, Unfettered Mind. He teaches strictly traditional material but is recognized (1) for having pioneered a new teacher-student model, based upon ongoing, one-on-one consultations and upon small teaching groups that have a high degree of teacher-student interaction; and (2) for his “pragmatic” approach to teaching, translation and practice.

The intent of “pragmatic Buddhism” is to preserve the essence of the teachings, unchanged, but to make them more directly accessible to the Westerner. It does so by bypassing the Eastern cultural overlay and using simple, clear language and methods that elicit direct experience in the practitioner. Also, it emphasizes an individualized practice path – with a key element being ongoing practice consults that allow the teacher to shape a path that’s tailored to each practitioner’s specific needs and makeup. McLeod has made this model available for others to use via the Unfettered Mind website, his teacher development program, and his publications – especially in his 2001 book Wake Up To Your Life, which lays out the Buddhist path & practices. His non-traditional commentary on the Heart Sutra, An Arrow to the Heart, presents a way into the material that’s poetic and experiential. His latest book, just published, is titled A Trackless Path, a commentary on the Great Completion (or Dzogchen) teaching of Jigmé Lingpa’s Revelations of Ever-Present Good.

More information about Ken McLeod's work and interests can be found at:

Unfettered Mind website: www.unfetteredmind.org
Ken McLeod's Blog: musingsbyken.blogspot.com
Unfettered Mind Podcasts: itunes.apple.com

Saturday, December 12, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #205 - 12DEC15

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 conversation in the studio with Amy Kittelstrom, author of the recently published Penguin Press book The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition. Amy Kittelstrom is an associate professor of history at Sonoma State University, and has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American History, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She received her Ph.D. in history from Boston University and is a past fellow of the Center for Religion and American Life at Yale, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, and the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton. Professor Kittelstrom is an historian of modern thought and culture who specializes in nineteenth-century American thinkers and their contexts. She is particularly interested in the lived intellectual connections between individuals and cultures of the past, how their ideas on religion and democracy informed one another, and how Americans engaged with books and thinkers from India, Great Britain, and the Romantic Movement.

More information about Amy Kittelstrom's work and interests can be found at:

Sonoma State University: www.sonoma.edu
Amy Kittelstrom on C-SPAN: www.c-span.org
The Religion of Democracy at Penguin Press: thepenguinpress.com

Saturday, December 5, 2015

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #204 - 05DEC15

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 conversation in the studio with Arnaud Delorme, Ph.D., , currently a research scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California, and a CNRS principal investigator in Toulouse, France, as well as a faculty project scientist at the University of San Diego California. In 2000, Dr. Delorme completed his PhD Thesis on visual categorization in humans, monkeys, and machines. Based on the results of his modeling work, he co-created with Simon Thorpe the Spikenet Technology Company, now a successful start-up. Dr. Delorme then moved to the Salk Institute for a post-doc in Terry Sejnowski and Francis Crick’s laboratory where he focused on statistical analysis of electro-encephalographic (EEG) signal recorded during various cognitive tasks. He developed the free EEGLAB software for advanced analysis of EEG signals in collaboration with Scott Makeig, software which is now amongst the most used software in EEG research worldwide. He was awarded a Brettencourt-Schueller young investigator award and a 10-year anniversary ANT young investigator award for his contributions to the field of EEG research.

Dr. Delorme has a keen interest in the scientific study of consciousness and spirituality. He is a long term Zen meditator, and has taught in India on the neural correlates of conscious experience in a Master's degree program for the Birla Institute of Technology. Starting in 2002, he has developed a strong ongoing collaboration with Dr. Rael Cahn to look at brain dynamical changes underlying extra-ordinary states of consciousness as experienced during meditation and due to the effects of psycho-active agents. He is the co-director in Rishikesh, India of the Meditation Research Institute. In 2010, he started collaborating with Dean Radin on analysis of electro-encephalographic (EEG) signal recorded during presentiment tasks.

More information about Arnaud Delorme's work and interests can be found at:

IONS Website: noetic.org
Arnaud Delorme on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org
Arnaud Delorme's website at UCSD: sccn.ucsd.edu/~arno

"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.