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 we feature a conversation by telephone with Philip Goldberg, author or co-author of numerous books, including Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path: Living at the Heart of Paradox, American Veda, and The Life of Yogananda. He is a public speaker and workshop leader; a spiritual counselor, meditation teacher and ordained Interfaith Minister, and he co-hosts the Spirit Matters podcast.
He was born and raised in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles with stops along the way. As a college student in the 1960’s, he shuttled uncertainly from one major to another while relentlessly searching for higher truths, scratching his way to passions that would mark his adult life: spirituality and writing. Despite having been raised by atheists who disdained religion — or maybe because of it — he was drawn to the pragmatic mysticism of the East, at first through public thinkers like Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley, and then directly from the texts of Buddhism, Taoism and Hinduism — especially Vedanta and Yoga.
This led inexorably to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation. Philip spent much of the 1970’s teaching TM (changing the world, one mantra at a time, as he thought of it) and working for that organization in other capacities.
That affiliation led to an independent spiritual path as a pragmatic mystic —a yogi for whom transcendence is a means, not an end — and also catalyzed his career as a professional writer. Phil’s spiritual pursuits and his writing career ran on separate tracks, coming together only on occasion. In his books, he was able to indulge his interests in psychology, human potential and holistic health. Early on, to pay the bills, he accepted offers to collaborate with experts with good ideas but neither the capacity nor inclination to write. That led to his version of a day job — ghosting, collaborating, editing — while working on his own books screenwriting. Then in 2010, American Veda was published. The book earned good reviews, won awards and spawned related ventures like American Veda Tours, the Spirit Matters podcast, a documentary film project (now in the development and fundraising stage), satisfying lecture and workshop gigs and, of course, more and more writing. Earlier this year (2018) his latest book The Life of Yogananda was published by Hay House.
More information about Philip Goldberg's work can be found at:
