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© 2024 The Emerald
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The Emerald explores the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination. Brought to life through the wise, wild, and humorous vision of Joshua Michael Schrei — a teacher and lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — the podcast draws from a deep well of poetry, lore, and mythos to challenge conventional narratives on politics and public discourse, meditation and mindfulness, art, science, literature, and more. At the heart of the podcast is the premise that the imaginative, poetic, animate heart of human experience — elucidated by so many cultures over so many thousands of years — is missing in modern discourse and is urgently needed at a time when humanity is facing unprecedented problems. The Emerald advocates for an imaginative vision of human life and human discourse as it questions deep underlying assumptions about societal progress.
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4In the deepest, oldest caverns of human memory, a fire burns... and that fire has been with human beings since the very beginning. Scientists now say that the human relationship with fire goes back over 1.5 million years. And so — fire has played a profound role in shaping human bodies and human consciousness in ways we're often unaware of. For fire... changed everything. It took us out of the immediacy of the animal experience and gave us a focal point, a place to gather and tell stories, to...
In recent years, the practice of 'mindfulness' has become ubiquitous. Mindfulness has outgrown its traditional Buddhist roots and now permeates modern wellness and optimization culture, finding its way into corporate boardrooms, therapist's toolkits, and an ever-increasing number of calmness apps. Yet modern iterations of mindfulness practice often live removed from their original context. The forest ecology from which mindfulness grew was animate and alive, and what we call mindfulness...
Practices of guardianship — invoking guardian deities, enlisting spirit help, clearing spaces of questionable energies, and establishing boundaries around ritual, communal, and personal space — are common to animate traditions across the world. In many traditions, guardianship is absolutely central as we navigate a world of forces, not all of which are traditionally seen as beneficial. So traditional practitioners — even as they commune with the natural world — also draw clear boundaries, sen...
The story of human ritual and cultural tradition is one of depth and deep connection to land, to place, and to processes and protocols that remain steady across generations. But it's also a story of constant mutation, assimilation, and re-expression. There is a fluidity to culture and tradition that is not always acknowledged in modern discourse. Religious scholars will tell us that all traditions are — to one degree or another — syncretic, and when we lift the lid off of traditions and look ...
In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated with restriction, burden, and arbitrarily imposed rules. Yet historically, tradition after tradition sees an innate, artful order to the natural world and views the Law of the Land as something vibrant and alive, present in the breath and in the waters and in the endless cycling of the clouds. In this living vision of Law, nature unfolds along particular patterns an...
In times of global upheaval, ecological destruction, and societal inequity, justice can seem very far away. Justice in the modern world is often viewed as a contract, an agreement forged between human beings rather than something inherent to the natural world. And yet, for many cultures and traditions, justice is seen as a living presence, as the actual dynamic flow of cause and effect that serves to keep a larger natural balance. Tradition after tradition speaks of the larger law of the cosm...
Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why? Perhaps it is because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emphasis on forward progress, its commitment to the removal of mystery from daily life, and its encouragement of numbness over feeling, is fundamentally at odds with the seer's sensitivities and alignment to larger forces beyond human control. So modernity ...
Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premonitions that come to pass, to have dream experiences that translate into day-to-day life, and to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, and with a larger world of animate forces. For most of human history, the people that received su...
There is... a sound. Many, through the ages, have heard it. It echoes in the world all around us, it reverberates in songs of joy and lament, it vibrates in the names of the gods and goddesses themselves. Across the world, tradition after tradition describes a sound that is the source of all sound, a sound that can be heard if we practice attuning ourselves to it. So the Indian yogi follows the sound OM to its source, the Brazilian Umbanda practitioner rides a thread of vibration to the great...
Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word ‘trauma.’ Yet addressing trauma is nothing new — traditional cultures across the globe have historically had their own forms of trauma work, without ever labeling it trauma work. For many cultures for many years, cathartic ritual practice that bypasses the conditioned mind has served multiple purposes as it regrows and re-patterns brains and bodies and communities. These...
The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the need for ethics and regulatory measures. Yet it may be that the only way to truly understand the implications of AI — the powers, the potential consequences, and the protocols for dealing with world-altering technologies — is to speak mythically. With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths....
In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges that move of their own will. Mirrors speak. Swords dance. There are flying carpets and far-seeing spyglasses and cloaks and boots that leap by themselves. This pervasive insistence in the old stories that absolutely everything is alive — that everything has eyes — butts up against modern rationality and therefore gets marginalized as childish 'f...
For 98% of human history — over 10,000 generations — our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate — imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an "-ism." I...
Báyò Akómoláfé is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with. In this episode of The Emerald, Báyò joins Josh for a deep-dive discussion into how the Western psychological vision shapes modernity, and the need to expand into alternative stories of what 'being' means. Says Báyò: "Psychology is complicit in the creation of Western modernity. It is ...
Once upon a time, psychologist James Hillman spoke of anima, the breath of life, the soul of the world, as something that had to be rescued by psychologists from theologians. Now, with pop-psychology vernacular inundating all aspects of life, it may be time for the breath of life to be rescued all over again. The New York Times recently released an article entitled 'The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything.' Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes of the need to 'decenter Western ps...
Human beings adorn. Scientists now say that the earliest adornments date back over 160,000 years. Why is adornment so universal? It is easy to see adornment as simply an indication of status, wealth, and identity. But adornment is also more than this. The word 'adorn' and 'ornament' relate directly to the word 'order,' to the pattern of the cosmos. And so to adorn has also been associated with aligning to a greater pattern, a pattern evident in the harmonic structures of nature and expressed ...
Birds in myth are messengers, deliverers of prophecy, and instigators of journeys. But birds are much more than this. Human neurobiology is deeply linked to birds, who, through the arcing patterns of their flight, their hypnotic songs, and their high, piercing calls, awakened human sense faculties, taught us to look up in wonder, and therefore gave us the ability to soar into imaginal spaces. Somatically, we ideate, journey, and soar because of our coevolution with birds. So we find the influ...
Modern embodiment discourse has arisen as a reaction to the Western world's fraught history with bodies. In a world of deep fracture from the natural world, the current emphasis on embodiment serves to help reclaim a relationship with ecology and with the sacredness of the immediate. But what does 'embodiment' really mean? For some, embodiment is synonymous with wellness. For others, embodiment is related to ongoing personal processing. Often, traditional cultures are held up as example...
Death is universal, an undeniable fact of existence that every single one of our ancestors faced, just as we will. So mythic traditions around the world are full of stories of death. Many initiatory rituals directly enact death, taking the initiate through a process of dying while alive. For Ancient Egyptians and Tibetan Tantrikas, death was not something to run from, but something to actively embrace, as acolytes regularly plunged into the intermediary state. Yet modern culture tries to run ...
Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessary role in human culture and in the shaping of human history, causing some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonial animal' that is the human being. Trance states traditionally help communities reinforce shared bonds, establish values, gain insight into the nature of reality, establish reciprocal relation with the natural world, and even heal. Yet in the modern wor...
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A maze3 meant to awaken to flight like bats down into the dark; flight like swallows swimming in the body of the Sky; flight like hummingbird darring about like a warrior searching for nectar to feed the Sun as he makes his way through the dark of night. Flight formed from ecstatic shamanic insight to climb to soar to stream to fly through the movement of Earthen Sky as the Up and Below of the Night Sky where the Milky Way shows us the Way. "Saq Beey" Sacred White Road to fly up upon Milky Way
Sei and the Soul of Sei saw one another in the recognition of sickened state of the animate when soul and senses are forced to seperate into dis-association states of being...Nosis and Nature; danger...intuition is a sign of sickness amongst the rationalists...So how then can we consciously chose to live oit our trance states at the gates of consciousness...NWC...Follow the path Mother-Fathers form for us and our fractured; ruptured minds causinf Soul Loss in Our Times & Its Consciousness...
My favorite play with divinity is to write commentary while listening to Lord Vishnu speak through his devotee know here as the Joshua Tree. This tree of mystical myth-trickstery speaks while I open up to the Flowering of language within me; this blissful blooming of images of imaginal imagery will cross paths with the voice spoken as Josh's podcastering poetry and boom in a flash the word written co-incides with the word spoken in a tantalizing throwing of dice in the play of Homo Ludens...Sync
Longing then is the hunger driving the appetite of Tricksté who wants the Blue Green Emerald Rain to fall on him; on her all one and the same...So comes the wishing wanting of hunting the sacred sustenance of that which will fulfill our desire for the fire the devour the essence of our divine power. Calling down the drenching rain from the Cloud Thunderers is sung out over a blazing fire of burnt offerings providing, feeding; sustaining, supporting all things here on our beloved Face of theEarth
It took me three days to arrive at the Source; the Heart of the Universe; Seed Source of Creation...the release found through surrender to the Great Mother-Great Fathers...So letting go may well be the way to sow the seeds that grow to show the way to for us to move forward on the road in our quest to find a way to go...We who live in the glitch of lives in which we make the switch away from enslavement of the soul to the freedom found in walking across the Land and its Sacred Landscape...
Why no comments? I am new to internet participatory engagement so I am not sure if 'comments' are wanted or not but this lesson given here requires comment because this is idea of giing to battle with malevolent forces is so very real in a world of Sky Sea Land Lake River Butte Canyon Cave Ravine Mountains and Valleys that are governed over by Dueños del Mundo...Landlords and Reef Lords of Wave and Trough...We would do well to awaken to these powerful Agents of Change keeping an Eye on our acts.
Stay with this painful podcast exposing GRIFT and the GRIFTERS feeding off our Numbinosity that must become our Numenosity...Grift; small-scale swindle; coaxed to participate in Hoax Costumbre as we seek in search of the Right-On Story telling of our being Human Becomings thru Our Ancestral Mythistory Our Ancestral Past; Dream, Imagine, Speak You Our Ancestor; Our Dead who survived Our Past's Constant Harvest of Blood, Body, Breath, and Bone. Atone, yes, for la Doctrina del Descubrimiento...
This is a PHENOMENAL Time Marker Type Talk that Questions our Charlatanistic Trickster Hipster Coyote making Footprints on an Ancient Ancestral Mapa...Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca sprouts forth asking who the Civilized; who the Civilizer; Giver of Work; BUILDER of Unalterable Structure; the Seer Sees from up on the Knoll looking over El Paso and Ciudad Juarez...The Knower; el Nawal Seeking the Path forward in yhe footsteps of the Past...We must know us for Revelation to rise up and out of Dust..
Here then, the Story of the Feeling One; the Seer, the Invisioned One; Down Deep Deeper still the Descent as go Below into the Beyond; Fringeland where Our Souls No Longer are Allowed to Go. No Speech with The Dead; No Dance Party with the Ancestral Glow. Seek the Seer; Know the Knower but which One in a Sky Earth now filled with Un-Initiated Fire Keepers...DANGER says the Intuitive; Who the Seer; indeed Who then the Seen? Blood on Snow; Mtns. of Bones We must Sort to then Adorn; Look Back; Forw
This Podcast is genius in its ingenius play on and above words through new first time spoken metaphor. These two Mother-Fathers of the Ancient Ancestral Word speak to make their message be heard and understood. Walking the faultline of signification, they leave us questioning the Myth of Analysis and our willingness to be flayed after being laid out on the Couch of the Psychologist...Dismembered Trickster opressed by our own internalized oppressor; victim? yes, yet who the victomizer; who pyre
I wiped out my comments to attempt a participation in an Other Way...Mistletoe is a Killer Parasitic Epiphytic type beast.Starting with bird droppings on top of the Oak Tree; there it goes the Devouring Evergreen Mistletoe...Oh no, oh no...Tiny opportunity; a small opening is what the Boundary Crosser calls for to slip through the intersticios of the very veins of the mighty oak tree whose life is sucked away by the now thriving sap sucking emerald green Mistletoe...Stay low Baldor...oh no Loki
Fantastic episode
I absolutely loved this episode of The Emerald! The storytelling is captivating, and the insights shared are both profound and enlightening. The way the host delves into the topic with such depth and clarity is truly impressive. https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-sticker-nyc-199421919/episode/creating-effective-custom-labels-199421920/
this podcast was recommended to me by my therapist, and she's obviously very good at her job bc i love this already
का। a"_ , ©
Fabulous, powerful exploration of the topic. Thank you
Absolutely love this podcast!!! Josh is just brilliant! Can't recommend this highly enough!! 👌👌
remarkable
brilliant!