Future Primitive

This is a part two of our interview with Richard Doyle.

Click here to listen to part one of this interview.

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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

You can listen to PART TWO of this interview here.

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Amanda Seyderhelm creates her life from the inside out. As a writer and life coach she specializes in coaching creative people who want to uncover their Big Dream and start living it.

“My biggest ‘wake up’ was in 2002 when I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.  This was my body and soul speaking up for me, and I was initiated into an intense healing journey.”

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Natalie Goldberg is the author of Writing Down The Bones: Freeing The Writer Within (1986), which broke open the world of creativity and started a revolution in the way we practice writing in this country. The book has sold over one million copies and been translated into fourteen languages. Since then she has written nine other books, including the novel Banana Rose. Natalie is also a painter and her watercolors are exhibited at Ernesto Mayans Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a poet and has been teaching seminars in writing as a practice for the last thirty years. People from around the world attend her life-changing workshops.

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Gregg Levoy is the author of Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life and This Business of Writing (Writer’s Digest Books). He has written for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Omni, Psychology Today, American Health, Reader’s Digest, New Age Journal, and many others, as well as for corporate, promotional and television projects.
A former adjunct professor of journalism at the University of New Mexico, and former columnist and reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer and USA Today, he is the recipient of a 1st-Place writing award from the Associated Press, and a Genesis Award for “Outstanding Newspaper Commentary” for a New York Times Magazine essay.

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Miriam Sagan is the author of over twenty books, including a memoir, Searching for a Mustard Seed : A Young Widow’s Unconventional Story (Winner best Memoir from Independent Publishers, 2004). Her poetry includes Rag Trade, The Widow’s Coat), and The Art of Love.

Sagan directs the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College, and has taught at the College of Santa Fe, University of New Mexico, Taos Institute of the Arts, Aspen Writer’s Conference, around the country, and on line for writers.com and UCLA Extension. She has held residency grants at Yaddo and MacDowell, and is the recipient of a grant from The Barbara Deming Foundation/Money for Women and a Lannan Foundation Marfa Residency.

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Ruth Gendler is an artist, writer, and teacher committed to the transformational potential of the arts. Her experience with the rhythms of creativity is evidenced by a diverse background in art, writing, publishing, teaching, and lecturing. She is the author of The Book of Qualities and Notes on the Need for Beauty and the editor of Changing Light: The Eternal Cycle of Night and Day. The Book of Qualities, now in its 40th printing, has been adapted as a two act theater piece and translated into German, Japanese, and Chinese, as well as being widely excerpted in literary, psychological and educational publications.

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Tina LeMarque Denison is an artist and author who documents primordial memory, myth and archetype using paint, digital photography, mediated imagery, and mixed media.

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