Future Primitive

An award winning writer, Teri is the author/co-author of ten non-fiction books, including The Fiery Muse: Creativity and the Spiritual Quest (Random House of Canada) and one for young adults, The Canadian Junior Green Guide (McClelland & Stewart). Written in conjunction with the highly respected environmental watchdog, Pollution Probe, it became a Canadian best-seller.

After completing two books on the environment, Teri began to focus much of her writing on topics related to creativity and contemporary spirituality, subjects of deep personal interest to her. Teri first began studying yoga in her twenties in Paris with a teacher who had lived in Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram for more than twenty years. Several years later she traveled to India to meet Gopi Krishna – considered by many to be the world’s leading authority on kundalini. Since then she has been a student of the philosophy behind yoga and has been involved in researching the link between creativity, inspiration, and mystical experience. Both her latest book, The Divine Feminine Fire: Creativity and Your Yearning to Express Your Self (Dreamriver Press), and The Fiery Muse deal with this topic; she has also written a number of articles and spoken widely on the subject.

Her workshops on creative writing and the link between creativity and spirituality have met with great success, and she now divides her time between leading workshops and writing.

She is an active member of PEN Canada, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and the Institute for Consciousness Research, and she was one of the founders of the Kundalini Research Network in the United States.

http://www.teridegler.com/

Teri speaks with Joanna about the serpent power as an evolutionary force of transformation, longing & fear, Shakti/Shekinah/Sophia, creativity and the Divine Femenine…

Introductory music: ”Amazon Beginnings”

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Richard Doyle earned his Ph.D. in Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. He was the Mellon Post Doctoral Fellow in History and Social Science of the Life Sciences at MIT in 1993. Professor of Rhetoric, Doyle holds appointments in English, Science Technology & Society and the College of Information Science and Technology at Penn State University and was Visiting Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, Department of Rhetoric in 2003.

Doyle teaches courses in the history and rhetoric of emerging technosciences – sustainability, space colonization, biotechnology, nanotechnology, psychedelic science, information technologies, biometrics – and the cultural and literary contexts from which they sprout. Professor Doyle has published two books: On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, 1997) and Wetwares:Experiments in PostVital Living( Minnesota, 2003) – in a putative trilogy about emerging transhuman knowledges. These knowledges and practices, linked to molecular biology, artificial life, nanotechnology, psychedelic and information technologies render the experiential distinctions between living systems and machines frequently dubious and often indiscernible. This excited and confused rhetorical membrane between humans and an informational universe nonetheless broadcasts a clear message: humans, in co-evolution with the technical matrices transforming the planet, find themselves in an evolutionary ecology that is as urgent as it is experimental.

Continuing his collaborative work on the “transhuman imperative”, Doyle ( aka mobius) has now completed the trilogy with a scholarly book about archaic and contemporary psychedelic media technologies and the evolution of mind: The Ecodelic Hypothesis: Plants, Rhetoric and the Evolution of The Noösphere, currently in press with University of Washington. Other current projects include a book, Admixtures: Dialogues After Genomics with Anthropologist Mark Shriver. The Admixtures Project has grown The Penn State Center for Altered Consciousness, currently investigating the genetics and phenomenology of legally altered consciousness with the help of a flotation tank.

Doyle directed the Penn State Composition Program from 2004-2006, and serves as Expert, Wetwares and Human/Machine interaction for international organizations and a volunteer to the Penn State Center for Sustainability. More about mobius’ work and teaching can be found by browsing his web site.

Richard speaks with Joanna about language and the ecstasy of creativity, ego-death as a revelatory practice, eco-humility, Timothy Leary, freedom & Imagination…

Introductory music: “Amazon Beginnings” (At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, soundtrack) by Zbigniew Preisner

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Jennifer Palmer is the news editor of Reality Sandwich and Community Director of Evolver – two dream jobs merged into one.  She is a writer, DJ and internet philosopher who goes by the name TRUE online. Her blog, BRANDTRUEBOY http://www.brandtrueboy.com, started as an art experiment in 2002, in which she posted as three fictitious characters that she passed off as “real” people who emailed, commented and chatted with other bloggers. Her current projects include willing the (r)evolution with love, writing a novel, honing her Twitter stream skills and building the dopest vinyl based beat library in NYC.

Jennifer speaks with Joanna about the co-creation of reality, opening to interconectedeness, love as the strongest psychedelic, Gaia and the conciousness shift… among other topics

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David Spangler is an internationally known spiritual teacher and writer. Instrumental in helping establish Findhorn in northern Scotland.

In 1974 Spangler helped the social philosopher and cultural critic William Irwin Thompson, to found the Lindisfarne Association and became one of the first Lindisfarne Fellows, a group of scientists, artists, religious teachers, political activists, economists, and visionaries whose number included Gregory Bateson, Elaine Pagels, E. F. Schumacher, Stewart Brand, Paul Hawken, James Lovelock, and Paul Winter, among others.

His themes have included the emergence of a holistic culture, the nature of personal sacredness, our participation in a coevolving, co-creative universe, partnering, and working with spiritual realms, our responsibility to the earth and to each other, the spiritual nature and power of our individuality, and our calling to be of service at this crucial time of world history. Many of these themes come together in his primary work, which is the development of a spiritual perspective and practice called Incarnational Spirituality.

His books include, among others, Emergence; The Call; Everyday Miracles; Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent; Blessing: The Art and the Practice, and Subtle Worlds: An Explorer’s Field Notes.

David speaks with Joanna about earth-oriented/higher-order spirituality, his experience of the soul and its relationship to embodiment, the essential quality of playfulness, holopoesis, the second ecology of Spirit… among other topics.

http://www.lorian.org/davidspage.html

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Jason Kirkey grew up in the North Atlantic watershed of Massachusetts in a small town north of Boston. He moved to Boulder, Colorado where he attended Naropa University and in 2007 obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in “Interdisciplinary Studies with concentrations in Contemplative Psychology and Environmental Studies.” Throughout his undergraduate career he was also heavily influenced and inspired by deep ecology, ecopsychology, Buddhism, and the Shambhala tradition of enlightened warriorship as taught by Chögyam Trungpa.

He has released three collections of poems, Portraits of Beauty (2006), Songs from a Wild Place (2007), and The Ballad of the Sea-Sweet Moon and Other Poems (2008).

In late 2008 Jason completed a manuscript entitled The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality which deals with the themes of Irish mythology and the re-invention and integration of the human species into consonance with the living cosmos. It draws heavily on ecological studies, mythology and folklore, and the nondual mystical traditions.

Most recently Jason has moved to San Francisco to study at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the “Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness” program. He is in the early stages of writing a fourth collection of poems and is developing experiential programs in order to bring his work with Place, Nature, Soul, and Story to the public.

http://www.jasonkirkey.com

Jason speaks with Joanna about nature, soul, storytelling, ecological mysticism and his own initiatory experiences from the diferent facets of the Irish Dreamtime

“We can’t engage with the entire universe, or with the aspect of our being that is the universe until we start engaging with our local identity, our local place, our local culture, our ecosystem, through that engagement, we can find the larger story, but it has to start with the local wawtershed, and finding our own story there, before finding the Big Story.”

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David Cumes, M.D. was born in South Africa and received his medical training at the Witwatersrand Medical School in Johannesburg. Specializing in urology, Dr. Cumes was trained and has previously taught on the staff at Stanford Medical Center. He has published extensively in professional journals and currently has a private practice in Santa Barbara, CA.

Although Dr. Cumes has had classical training in a profession that relies heavily on science and analytical reasoning, he has pursued a personal quest that evokes his intuitive and introspective capabilities. After extensive travel which included time with the San Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, Dr. Cumes explored the role wilderness plays in personal healing and transformation. He founded a company called Inward Bound, and leads groups on healing journeys to remote wilderness areas. As a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School of North America, he has formal training as a wilderness guide.

He has published three books. In the first, “Inner Passages Outer Journeys”, Dr. Cumes explores the restorative power of nature. It discusses practical theories of wilderness psychology and synthesizes relevant aspects of ancient traditions such as yoga and Kabbalah. The second book, “The Spirit of Healing” , discusses the interrelationship between the patient, the healer, and the Divine Force or “Field” as essential components of the healing process. The book is filled with personal anecdotes and insights from his surgical practice, his travels and his studies of ancient healing wisdom, shamans and San trance dancers. More recently Dr. Cumes has been initiated as an inyanga or sangoma (South African shaman.) The third book is about this journey. He has established a healing center in the far north of South Africa (Soutpansberg mountains) where he has built “Tshisimane”.

http://www.davidcumes.com

David Cumes speaks with Joanna about the rol of wilderness in healing transformation, the calling of the ancestors, his own initiation as a Zulu sangoma (shamanic healer), the multiple factors in the healing process…

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Joan Heartfield, Ph.D. has been involved in the exploration of human consciousness for most of her life.

“I opened to a quality of intimacy so empowering and linked to The Divine, I realized I had stumbled upon what seemed like a missing link I never knew existed. I realized that the core of the human experience is all about our ability to love and be loved on all levels. I began to see how we filter and diffuse the love that wants to come into our life. Everything I had learned up till that point suddenly deepened and I began to teach from a place I can only identify as Source. This is a literal place where all experience becomes accessible and tangible. We live what we teach, and the joy in our lives is a real testimony to what we’ve embodied.”

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