Monthly Archives

May 2017

It's All Happening Podcast

Episode 91 – IAH – Robert Thurman

The brilliance and poetic spiritual genius of Robert Thurman is revealed on this episode of the podcast. Bob beamed in from his abode in NYC and took me on a stream of consciousness journey through the process of enlightenment, our current state of affairs and why you shouldn’t worry, the nature of the universe and one’s role in it and the fate of the Dalai Lama. Bob is truly one of the great thinkers and spiritual gateways on the planet today. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did!

Pick up a copy of his new book “Man of Peace: The Illustrated Story of the Dalai Lama of Tibet” by clicking here

Robert A.F. Thurman is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University, President of the Tibet House U.S., a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization, and President of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a non-profit affiliated with the Center for Buddhist Studies at Columbia University and dedicated to the publication of translations of important artistic and scientific treatises from the Tibetan Tengyur.

Time chose Professor Thurman as one of its 25 most influential Americans in 1997, describing him as a “larger than life scholar-activist destined to convey the Dharma, the precious teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, from Asia to America.” The New York Times recently said Thurman “is considered the leading American expert on Tibetan Buddhism.”

www.bobthurman.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's All Happening Podcast

Episode 90 – IAH – Govind Das

Govind Das returns to the podcast for Episode 90! We talk a lot about the path of yoga and it’s integration from the mat into the world. So much happens within ones personal practice that we must learn how to take those experiences and incorporate them into our daily lives. The podcast also covers our current state of collective confusion and what can be done about that, raising yogi children in LA, living from the non-ego state and living ones dharma. Week in and week out, Govind Das is one of the pre-eminent yogis who is living in a world beyond just teaching – it’s as if you are watching someone living their purpose and experiencing a total surrender right before your very eyes.

Of course this episode also talks about the loss and impact of the great Chris Cornell.

This is episode is brought to you by Siddhi Herbals – the best in CBD Technology. Visit their site for more info.

Govind Das (Ira Jeffrey Rosen) first came to yoga while living in Los Angeles in 1994 because of health concerns- specifically ulcerative colitis/crohn’s/inflammatory bowel disease… After years of many different practices with the intention of healing(hatha yoga, ayurveda, buddhist meditation etc), Ira Rosen found his yogic “home’ in the path of Bhakti Yoga… the aspect of yoga frequently described as the “yoga of the heart” or “the yoga of love and devotion”. Not by avoiding or denying our life and health challenges, but only by accepting and courageously moving through and forward, the flower of our full appreciation and devotion to Life blooms.

www.bhaktiyogashala.com

People Pop Culture

1967 and The Hippie Idea. BIG Exclusive!

1967 was a pivotal year in American history. The “sixties” was in full swing with Vietnam being a full blown conflict, LSD was penetrating the hearts and minds of an entire generation, rock and roll was taking on new shapes and forms and the hippie movement was maturing into a real ideology.

Danny Goldberg’s new book “In Search of The Lost Chord – 1967 and the Hippie Idea” chronicles the time and culture like nothing else ever written. It takes you through all the wild twists and turns that are now things of legend.

You may know Danny as being one of the great figures in music business history due to his managing of Nirvana, being Steve Earles chief advocate and of course doing PR for a band called Led Zeppelin. Through those experiences he’s developed a refined cultural voice that comes in the form of commentary and astute written analysis. The book, due out June 6th, is not to be missed.

IAH is pleased to offer you an exclusive excerpt from the book. Dig it!

Excerpted from In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea, copyright 2017 by Danny Goldberg, used with permission of Akashic Books (akashicbooks.com).

FROM THE INTRODUCTION

The word “hippie” morphed from a brief source of tribal pride to a cartoon almost immediately. Ronald Reagan, who began his first term as governor of California in 1967, said, “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.”

Most of the mainstream liberal establishment of the time was almost as dismissive. In August of 1967, Harry Reasoner delivered a report for the CBS Evening News in which he referred to the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco as “ground zero of the hippie movement.” After an interview with members of the Grateful Dead, Reasoner questioned the premise that hippies were doing anything to make the world a better place: “They, at their best, are trying for a kind of group sainthood, and saints running in groups are likely to be ludicrous. They depend on hallucination for their philosophy. This is not a new idea, and it has never worked. And finally, they offer a spurious attraction of the young, a corruption of the idea of innocence. Nothing in the world is as appealing as real innocence, but it is by definition a quality of childhood. People who can grow beards and make love are supposed to move from innocence to wisdom.”

A similar disdain was prevalent in most liberal circles in Washington. After Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg testified in front of the US Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Thomas Dodd, the Democratic committee chair, denounced them as “pseudo-intellectuals who advocate the use of drugs in search for some imaginary freedoms of the mind and in search of higher psychic experiences.”

Fifty years later, reading those sanctimonious put-downs reminds me of the revulsion I had for such “respectable” men. For many of us, the idea of breaking the addiction to climbing the ladder of officially sanctioned “success” was not an “imaginary freedom” but a reason to live. None of us felt, individually, that we were “saints,” but we did believe that there was a growing subculture that could come up with a better value system than the one we were born into. We didn’t see “innocence” and “wisdom” as mutually exclusive, and we bitterly resented it when unhappy authority figures insisted on this false choice.

There was indeed a danger from indiscriminately using hallucinogens, but we also knew that for most people they were nowhere near as dangerous as the corrosive effects of legal drugs like beer and gin and tonics, or tranquilizers like Librium, which were inexplicably accepted by many of the same people who were so down on pot and acid—the criminalization of which further eroded the credibility of their authority for many of us.

As for Senator Dodd’s condescending use of the word “pseudo-intellectuals,” he was among the majority of Democrats who sided with the supposedly wise Ivy League “intellectuals” in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who were responsible for the escalation of the Vietnam War.

– by Danny Goldberg

It's All Happening Podcast

IAH (MAPS too) – Episode 89 – Live from Psychedelic Science ’17

Recorded live from Psychedelic Science ’17! This is a dual podcast swap with The MAPS Podcast and features Shane Mauss, Lex Pelger and Berra Yazar-Klosinski. It was recorded live as a panel format and took place at the very tail end of the Psychedelic Science conference in Oakland, CA. Because it was the end of the conference we collectively reminisced and riffed in a loose, funny and free conversational feel about where psychedelic research is headed. We also spoke of our culture outside of our own echo chamber and how the rest of America is keeping up. I was so honored that these guys spent some time with me on stage and it took a lot for me to keep up with their brilliance and accomplishments. The intro was recorded live in India about two hours after the one-two punch of darshan at Kaishi-Vishwanath and the burning ghats of Varanasi. If you don’t know what that means have a listen then book a plane flight. Enjoy!

Shane Mauss is a comedian and the host of the Here We Are Podcast 

Lex Pelger is the Captain and Chief Genius over at Pymposia.org

Berra Yazar-Klosinksi is the Chief Research Scientist at MAPS