Mind That Ego

Please subscribe on your favourite platform! This episode features my talk from the 2024 edition of Too Mad to be True on the theme of The Paradoxes of Madness. In exploring Transrationality and the Paradox of Divine Madness, I use philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's theory of language games to demonstrate how the models of reality directly influence how sanity and insanity is framed. If we change our model from conventional materialism to non-duality or pure consciousness, what changes?

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Stijn Vanheule is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and professor at Ghent University, Belgium. Our conversation was inspired by his most recent book, Why Psychosis Is Not So Crazy. Stijn overviews the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Wouter Kusters is a Dutch philosopher and linguist. He is the author of five books, including the award-winning A Philosophy of Madness, which was translated to English in 2020. His writing details his experiences of psychosis through a philosophical lens, including stays in psychiatric institutions and solitary confinement.

The term psychosis was introduced in the 1800s as an alternative to the stigmatised labels of madness and insanity, due to its lineage of asylums, lobotomies, straitjackets, and forced medication. Its history is persecution, ridicule, and incarceration, and its enduring legacy is illness, a break from reality, something less than sanity. But is this true? Or is psychosis misunderstood spiritual awakening, from a lineage of shamans, mystics, visionaries, and prophets, something more than sanity?

My relationship to synchronicity has evolved across three stages. Initially, on rare occurrences of coincidence, I’d be dismissive and mildly freaked out. I was “scientifically-minded,” atheistic, and intellectual. If coincidences were shared (suggesting a song a friend was about to play was eerily common on car journeys), we’d pause, hold bemused eye contact, we’d say, “that’s weird,” forget about it, and move on with our lives.

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Fariba Bogzaran is an artist, scientist and pioneer of dream studies. Between 1986 and 1989 she conducted scientific studies on lucid dreams at the Lucidity Institute at the Stanford Sleep Laboratory. Fariba mixes psychology, art, contemplative practices, shamanism, Taoism, and more.

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Daniel Ingram returns to the show following our first conversation, Awakening and the Search for Meaning. Daniel is best known for his cult classic Mastering The Core Teachings of the Buddha, within which he maps the stages of insight.

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Claudia Barfoot is a psychotherapist, Ancestral Healing Practitioner, and founder of the Land of Possible, which merges western theories of the psyche with indigenous systems of knowledge to facilitate growth and healing. Claudia’s cross-cultural approach combines psychology, psychoanalysis, dreamwork, sacred plant medicines, and ancestral traditions.

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Welcome to episode 58 of the MindThatEgo Podcast. I’m joined by Lisa Marchiano, an award-winning author and certified Jungian analyst with a private practice in Philadelphia. Lisa is the author of Motherhood: Facing and Finding Yourself and The Vital Spark: Reclaim Your Outlaw Energies and Find Your Feminine Fire.

OTHER PLACES TO LISTEN: Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts + all other major platforms. Please subscribe on your favourite platform! Welcome to episode 57 of the MindThatEgo Podcast and the first of a new series on dreams. I’m joined by David Bedrick, the founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-based Studies, where he trains therapists, coaches and healers, and offers workshops for individuals. David graduated from the Process Work Institute and has been adjunct faculty for over 15 years.