The Mystical Positivist: August 2016

Saturday, August 27, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #233 - 27AUG16

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 Jill Nephew, technologist and founder of Inqwire, PBC, a public benefit corporation on a mission to help the world make sense. She spent the last 7 years collecting 'blueprints' from across many different domains of research to inform how to build technology that could help people make sense of life and actually grow wiser. She shares insights from this journey that she is capturing in her upcoming book: 'Race Against Insanity: Engineering for Natural Intelligence Amplification and its Essential Role in the Future of Humanity'.

More information about Jill Nephew's work can be found at:

Race Against Humanity website: www.raceagainstinsanity.com
A Natural Intelligence based personal interactive tool to make sense of life: www.inqwire.io

Saturday, August 20, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #232 - 20AUG16

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 with Siddhartha V. Shah. Siddhartha Shah received his BA in art history from The Johns Hopkins University (2000) and his MA in East-West Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies (2003) with an emphasis on Hindu philosophy from a Jungian perspective. He has been an art dealer for 15 years, specializing exclusively in Hindu and Buddhist art of the Kathmandu Valley since 2005, and has written for numerous publications including Art Asia Pacific Magazine, Marg, Namarupa, and Orientations. Siddhartha is currently a Ph.D student at Columbia University. His academic interests include theories and uses of Indian ornament in Britain and British India, Tantric cults of the Divine Feminine, and late 19th century French and British painting. Siddhartha is also a yoga instructor and serves on the Editorial Board of Illumine, a Chicago-based publication focused on yoga, wellness and psycho-spiritual development. He is a recipient of the Steven Kossak Graduate Fellowship in South Asian/Indian Art (2014 & 2016), the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Doctoral Summer Fellowship (2015), a Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship (2015), and an Honorary Mention for the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by Graduate Students (2016). This conversation was pre-recorded at Tayu Meditation Center in Sebastopol, CA.

More information about Siddhartha Shah's work can be found at:

Siddhartha V. Shah biography at Columbia: www.columbia.edu
Siddhartha V. Shah article in Journal18: Objects of Orientalism
Siddhartha V. Shah Fine Art on Facebook: www.facebook.com

Saturday, August 13, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #231 - 13AUG16

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 by telephone with author, entertainer, and two-time former guest on the show, Rick Lewis, in which Rick turns the tables and interviews hosts Rob Schmidt and Stuart Goodnick about aspects of their Tayu spiritual practice, including the admonition Follow Your Dread.

Rick Lewis is an author, speaker and entertainer who has taken the title “professional misbehaver” to describe what he sees as his role in the world - reminding others that we are born to break our own rules and the unconscious limits of our culture. Rick is a father of 3, the husband of 1, and an over-fastidious control-freak who meditates regularly so he can appear to be a normal person when not on stage. Rick travels extensively presenting to corporate and non-profit organizations on the subject of professional and personal growth. He is the founder of Break a Rule Presentations and Trainings, www.FreedomHabits.com, and is always working on finishing his next book.

More information about Rick Lewis' work and interests can be found at:

Break a Rule: Discover the Power of Intelligent Misbehavior: www.breakarule.com
The new Freedom Habits website and forum: freedomhabits.com

More information about Tayu Meditation Center can be found at:

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

Saturday, August 6, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #230 - 06AUG16

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 on the Mystical Positivist, hosts Rob Schmidt and Stuart Goodnick discuss the topic of Hope as inspired from a variety of sources including the Gurdjieff Work, the Prayer of St. Francis, and the writing of Andrew Harvey. Originally we were scheduled to be in conversation with Andrew Harvey himself today, but he had to reschedule until September 3rd due to a family situation in India.

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
Conscious Family Festival Website: www.consciousfamilyfestival.org
Tayu Meditation Center Website: www.tayu.org/~tayu/
Old Many Rivers Blog: www.manyriversbooks.com/blog1/

"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.