This is a retrospective of week 3, 2025 (2025-01-13–2025-01-19).
This week I’ve listended to Matthew Segall,1 and interviews with Ram Dass,2 and Christopher Bache.3 I’ve also started reading William Barnard’s books Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson and Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition.
Matthew Segall on Psychedelics:
These substances, for my experience at least, they give you a temporary glimpse at reality. You don’t get to stay there, and it wears off here right back, you know, to your in your conceptual dualistic mind and language, and way of thinking and behaving acting with others. And, yet, you retain a memory of that original experience, of that transcendent experience of reality itself, without these concepts and representations that we use to describe it. And that alters the way you perceive the world forever.
—Matthew Segall https://youtu.be/0fO2v0fD9bc?t=280
Ram Dass on Love, Intellect vs. Heart, Oneness, and Practices:
I would say that…if you’re deeply enough in love with the universe, then the passion that arises out of it is different than if you aren’t. And I think…there’s a passion that comes out of a joyful involvement in the universe…
—Ram Dass https://youtu.be/_skjT_uOzyo?t=247
Well, you seem to be suggesting that the quality of one’s actions…is really determined by internal factors.
—Jeffrey Mishlove https://youtu.be/_skjT_uOzyo?t=272
To me the intellect…is a very small system within a much larger context, and to deny the context in which the intellect functions is to leave one little segment of nature trying to subsume everything under it. …
—Ram Dass https://youtu.be/_skjT_uOzyo?t=522
What it also does is it makes the whole world [an] object. The intellect makes the world [an] object, it’s all thing[s]. You always think about things, and that always puts you one thought away from where it is. So you’re always an alien in your own universe…when you mediate everything through your intellect. …
It’s a wonderful servant, but it’s a lousy master.
[The heart is] the deepest place of truth, the deepest intuitive place in one’s being.
—Ram Dass https://youtu.be/_skjT_uOzyo?t=595
[In] monotheistic [religions] they believe in the One… And yet, they always live within the two. It’s like it’s all one, it’s it’s one except for me, or except for us. And so we end up muling ourselves, because it’s chutzpah…to think that you are one with the One. We say it’s all one, but we don’t really act as if it we’re all one… No, we typically act as as if we’re very distinctly separate, distinctly distinct, and…we got, you know, the bad end of [the] stick, original sin, because we fell out of something. And if you see it as the one, exploring itself through us, I mean through these multiplicity of forms that are all part of the one, and that it goes into the dream, or the illusion, or…it gets entrapped in the separateness in order to awaken out of the separateness, in order to see itself, and it’s just a beautiful dance of this delicate form of the one at play the whole thing lightens up a lot.
—Ram Dass https://youtu.be/_skjT_uOzyo?t=709
Every practice is entrapping you.
—Ram Dass https://youtu.be/_skjT_uOzyo?t=804
Christopher Bache on developing An Entirely New Way of Teaching taking Fields of Consciousness into account:
There’s an energetic resonance which happens underneath the verbal exchange of ideas as a consciousness directly engaging consciousness. And so I published a book in 2008…called The Living Classroom in which I lay it all out.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/q-caGhIlKS8?t=1813
The key question I think is, will we have the courage to do what is within my reach to do? That’s the key question. If everybody does what is within their reach to do, we will make it through this.
—Christopher Bache https://youtu.be/q-caGhIlKS8?t=3126
William Barnard on Henri Bergson:
…he [Bergson] affirmed the validity of human freedom and the priority of consciousness over matter; and while he acknowledged the data of evolution, he reinterpreted evolution in a way that made it a meaningful cosmic process.
—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson
Bergson, like most profound thinkers, is someone who can inspire and provoke; he is someone who, if we listen carefully, if we pay attention, can open up new worlds inside of us; he is someone who can prompt us to reexamine many of our most cherished philosophical assumptions. Do not, therefore, take Bergson lightly.
—William Barnard, Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson
…at times…we can start to broadcast a “pushing out energy” or forcing current—and at some point, it’s really important to learn how to switch our…attitude to one of opening up…, moment to moment. …when we are able to do this, we are opening up our capacity to see what’s really happening, underneath it all.
—William Barnard, Liquid Light: Ayahuasca Spirituality and the Santo Daime Tradition
Notes:
1. Matthew Segall, “An inquiry into Psychedelic Drugs (episode 2)”, 20070525, 6:11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fO2v0fD9bc.
2. Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove, “Ram Dass (1931-2019) Part 1 Complete: Compassion in Action”, 20110603, 27:33, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_skjT_uOzyo.
3. Accidental Gods, “#268 The Phoenix Always Rises: Evolving into the Future Human with Prof Chris Bache”, 20250108, 1:14:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-caGhIlKS8.
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