The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #383 - 29MAY21

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This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Professor Kate Crosby, author of Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia. Theravada Buddhism, often understood as the school that most carefully preserved the practices taught by the Buddha, has undergone tremendous change over time. Prior to Western colonialism in Asia—which brought Western and modernist intellectual concerns, such as the separation of science and religion, to bear on Buddhism—there existed a tradition of embodied, esoteric, and culturally regional Theravada meditation practices. This once-dominant traditional meditation system, known as boran kammatthana, is related to—yet remarkably distinct from—Vipassana and other Buddhist and secular mindfulness practices that would become the hallmark of Theravada Buddhism in the twentieth century. Drawing on a quarter century of research, scholar Kate Crosby offers the first holistic discussion of boran kammatthana, illuminating the historical events and cultural processes by which the practice has been marginalized in the modern era.

Kate Crosby is professor of Buddhist Studies at King’s College London. Her work focuses on Sanskrit, Pali, and Pali-vernacular literature and on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods. Her other publications include Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, Identity and The Bodhicaryavatara.

More information about Kate Crosby's work can be found at:

Esoteric Theravada at the Shambhala: www.shambhala.com,

Interview with Kate Crosby at Tricycle: tricycle.org,

Kate Crosby at King's College London: www.kcl.ac.uk.

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #382 - 08MAY21

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This week on The Mystical Positivist, we feature a pre-recorded discussion with returning guests Anne Sweet and Amir Freimann about spiritual transformation through conversation. As Anne and Amir have found in multiple conversations with a number of spiritual exemplars that the interviewer/interviewee dynamic can somehow dissolve and give rise to a truly intimate and profound shared experience. It is this shared, intimate, profound spiritual friendship that Amir and Anne are discovering is the most compelling aspect of their respective spiritual endeavors and at the very heart and soul of their work. We cover such topics as risk taking and vulnerability, the giving up of control, spiritual practice as the Art of Living a Life, and conversation as creating an invocational space.

Anne Sweet has been involved in spiritual life for over four decades. During that time, she lived for many years in ashrams and committed spiritual communities in India, the U.K and America. She has studied with both Western and Eastern teachers and completed thousands of hours of spiritual practice and enquiry. Anne writes, “I was no closer to finding what I was looking for, however, until 2004, when utterly disillusioned with spiritual life I struck out on my own and in the midst of an ongoing crisis and the intense period of self-enquiry that ensued, finally discovered the truth of my own Self beyond the personal identity.”

Anne lives and works in Sydney, Australia with her partner Dr Jesse Shore. Together we have created Sweet+Shore, an art/science collaboration. She is also an exhibiting solo artist under the name of Anne Penman Sweet and is represented by Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London. Most recently, Anne has been creating a website called The End of Seeking: demystifying the spiritual path - a straightforward, no frills, no cost, guru-free guide to Self- knowledge, which aims to assist the (often weary!) seeker, not from a teaching position in the usual sense, but as a fellow traveler and spiritual friend.

Amir Freimann was born in 1958 and grew up in a village in Israel. After studying Tai Chi, medicine, and the Philosophy of Science, he lived for two years in a Zen monastery in Japan and for more than two decades in a small community with a spiritual/philosophical orientation in the United States called EnlightenNext. These days Amir lives with his wife, Ruti, and Corgi (their dog) in the village where he grew up, earns a living by translating pharmaceutical papers from Japanese to English, serves as executive director of an NGO called The Education Spirit Movement and writes books. He has published two books on the connection between formal education and philosophical/spiritual inquiry, Education: Essence and Spirit and Education: The Human Questions, as well as his recent, Spiritual Transmission: Paradoxes and Dilemmas on the Spiritual Path. In 2018, he began studying for a Ph.D. at the University of Haifa and writing a Doctoral dissertation (and a book) on the subject: Enlightened Life - a Phenomenological Study of Spiritual Masters.

Note: a Video version of this conversation is available here: www.YouTube.com

More information about Anne Sweet's work can be found at:

The End of Seeking website: www.theendofseeking.org,

Anne Sweet's website: www.annepenmansweet.com,

Sweet + Shore Collaboration website: www.sweetandshore.com,

Amir Freimann's website: The Freedom to Question,

Amir Freimann on Facebook: www.facebook.com,

Spiritual Transmission at Monkfish Book Publishing Company: www.monkfishpublishing.com.

The Mystical Positivist - Radio Show #381 - 01MAY21

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This week on the show we feature a pre-recorded conversation with Trevor Stewart, practitioner and writer in the Fourth Way tradition. Trevor Stewart has experience in both the Zen Buddhist monastic and Gurdjieff Work buy-a-farm-and-try-to-fix-it-up traditions. A longtime Beelzebub's Tales practitioner, he leads private online study groups. He presents regularly at the annual international All and Everything Conference, has written for Parabola Magazine, and is a returning guest on The Mystical Positivist podcast. In daily life, he runs a design and build firm in Portland, Oregon.

In our conversation today we discuss two of Trevor’s recent papers for the All and Everything Conference, A Universal Language: Gurdjieff’s Exact Language and New Tools for Insight into Beelzebub’s Tales and Unity and Multiplicity: Observation, Remembering, and Objective Consciousness in Beelzebub’s Tales. We cover how Gurdjieff’s writings demonstrate and reflect the operation of our minds while at the same time training us to stand beyond this operation, how Dual and Non-Dual perspectives show up in the Tales, and points of tangency between Buddhist and Fourth Way understandings of Awakening.

More information about Trevor Stewart's work can be found at:

All and Everything Conference website: aandeconference.org,

PDF: A Universal Language: Gurdjieff’s Exact Language and New Tools for Insight into Beelzebub’s Tales,

PDF: Unity and Multiplicity: Observation, Remembering, and Objective Consciousness in Beelzebub’s Tales,

Lucid Cubed blog: lucidcubed.wordpress.com,

JNT Design & Build website: www.jntdesignandbuild.com.