Saturday, November 5, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #240 - 05NOV16

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:
  • With regular host, Stuart Goodnick, the Mystical Positivist, out of town this week, co-host Rob Schmidt flies solo on today’s show. He writes: 
  • With Stuart’s absence, and as the paroxysm of the 2016 US national election draws to its close this coming Tuesday, I have decided that something different is in order for this installment of the show. The national conversation about who’s up and who’s down distracts us from contemplation of those questions that will always remain larger than political wins and losses. I don’t at all mean to suggest that the political questions at stake in this election are trivial; far from it. In fact I am persuaded that the great dis-ease of politics we are currently experiencing, in both the US and abroad, offers both profound dangers as well as enormous possibilities for the future. Yet I also want to create in this installment of the show a format that can be helpful to remind us that there are contexts even bigger than politics. So instead of our usual fare of conversation, this week the Mystical Positivist offers an eclectic mix of music, interspersed with inspirational short quotes and longer passages from some of my favorite spiritual/religious literature. I’ve brought along a big bag of books, and a bag of cds, and I am not even sure, at the moment, what I’ll play and what I’ll read. We’ll let ourselves discover all that together in each moment during the next two hours. For now, I invite listeners to relax in whatever way seems appropriate, and let a more contemplative, generous space open among us.
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.

More information about Tayu Meditation Center can be found at:

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