Saturday, November 12, 2016

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #241 - 12NOV16

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 once again this week, co-host Rob Schmidt flies solo on today’s show. He writes:
  • With Stuart’s absence, and as responses to the 2016 US national election emerge all around the world, on this week’s show I have decided that continuation of last week’s focus on “something different” is in order for this installment of the show. As I said last week, the conversation about who’s up and who’s down in our social hierarchies and distribution of power distracts us from contemplation of those questions that will always remain larger than the ups and downs of wins and losses. I don’t at all mean to suggest that the political questions at stake in the aftermath of the election are trivial; far from it. What I want to create in this installment of the show is a reminder that there are contexts even bigger than politics, bigger than the zero-sum game of human social hierarchies, the game where I believe that if I win, you must lose, and vice versa. So instead of our usual fare of conversation, this week the Mystical Positivist offers an eclectic mix of music, interspersed with readings of short quotes and longer passages from books, literature, and sacred texts that I appreciate. I’ve brought along a big bag of books, and a bag of cds, and don’t know 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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