Listen now (60 mins) | “Historically, there's no such thing as a pure tradition. And I also think as human beings, we transcend these religions and we transcend these cultures. And so..."
This podcast was great! I was flipped I 8 months ago. I felt so ashamed as a scientist. I started talking about it with people I trusted but it felt like I had to be very careful. While I had tried to understand religion rationally as a way to understand spirituality it was not until I flipped that I understood how misguided this was. Reading the perspective of Georges Lemaître, a premient 20th century cosmologist and priest helped. This podcast helped even more and was the right thing at the right time. I am glad I found your substack.
That was a really great conversation. I’ve never heard of Jeffrey but I’m excited to read more of his ideas now.
I loved his framing of Marian apparitions and alien abductions, etc. and I’ve often put reincarnation experiences in that category. I think it’s so easy for our ego to believe that our individual self keeps taking new form but Jeffrey's idea makes more sense to me - that we’re tapping into a huge pool of human experience and consciousness, and for some reason that particular life is showing up in our imagination, so it’s not that we were a fighter pilot in a past life, but that somehow our consciousness/imagination is connecting with that of a fighter pilot.
The only part of the conversation that had me a bit frustrated was the talk of transcending and verticality. That masculine paradigm that shows up over and over seems hard to escape.
But it also makes me really excited for your chat with Ian McGilchrist. I’ve been a huge follower of his work for quite some time and his elucidation of brain hemispheres has really changed how I think about so many things, including what we would call the masculine and feminine principal. (Although I know he doesn’t like that framing)
I came across his book, The Master and his Emissary around the same time that I was taking a course on embryology and these two fields meshed so well together for me and have moved me away from the idea of masculine and feminine as polarities. Instead, I think of sperm energy (left brain) and egg energy (right brain) not as polarities but sperm energy in the service of egg energy - or in MacGilchrist's metaphor - emmisary in service of commander.
Our old idea of the fertilization of human egg is that the sperm is a powerful, active essence that attempts to swim up the uterus and into into the fallopian tube and then penetrates the passively floating egg to fertilize it. The truth is that the sperm energy is a very simple cell, very small and with a singular focus. Whereas the egg is a very large cell. In fact, it’s the only cell that’s visible to the human eye without any magnification and it’s a very complex cell. It is not passively waiting for a sperm to penetrate it, but it is very actively reading the surroundings, moving through the fallopian tube, and when sperm approach it, it actually takes a kind of reading of the sperm to decide which sperm it’s going to allow to pass through its outer membrane. And when the sperm enters, it is enclosed and embraced in the egg energy. The sperm energy is in service of the egg. So it’s this idea of pointedness versus holistic. Like MacGilchrist talks about. The egg is this very round holistic, multidimensional energy, and the sperm is a very simple, directional, tiny tail wagging cell.
I’m not seeing this as gendered - we are all the product of a sperm and an egg, so we all have sperm energy and egg energy. I’m just saying that the sperm energy in all of us is meant to serve the egg energy in all of us individually and collectively.
Thanks for these thoughtful conversations - they are engaging and thought provoking. Clearly. :)
This podcast was great! I was flipped I 8 months ago. I felt so ashamed as a scientist. I started talking about it with people I trusted but it felt like I had to be very careful. While I had tried to understand religion rationally as a way to understand spirituality it was not until I flipped that I understood how misguided this was. Reading the perspective of Georges Lemaître, a premient 20th century cosmologist and priest helped. This podcast helped even more and was the right thing at the right time. I am glad I found your substack.
Hi Elise,
That was a really great conversation. I’ve never heard of Jeffrey but I’m excited to read more of his ideas now.
I loved his framing of Marian apparitions and alien abductions, etc. and I’ve often put reincarnation experiences in that category. I think it’s so easy for our ego to believe that our individual self keeps taking new form but Jeffrey's idea makes more sense to me - that we’re tapping into a huge pool of human experience and consciousness, and for some reason that particular life is showing up in our imagination, so it’s not that we were a fighter pilot in a past life, but that somehow our consciousness/imagination is connecting with that of a fighter pilot.
The only part of the conversation that had me a bit frustrated was the talk of transcending and verticality. That masculine paradigm that shows up over and over seems hard to escape.
But it also makes me really excited for your chat with Ian McGilchrist. I’ve been a huge follower of his work for quite some time and his elucidation of brain hemispheres has really changed how I think about so many things, including what we would call the masculine and feminine principal. (Although I know he doesn’t like that framing)
I came across his book, The Master and his Emissary around the same time that I was taking a course on embryology and these two fields meshed so well together for me and have moved me away from the idea of masculine and feminine as polarities. Instead, I think of sperm energy (left brain) and egg energy (right brain) not as polarities but sperm energy in the service of egg energy - or in MacGilchrist's metaphor - emmisary in service of commander.
Our old idea of the fertilization of human egg is that the sperm is a powerful, active essence that attempts to swim up the uterus and into into the fallopian tube and then penetrates the passively floating egg to fertilize it. The truth is that the sperm energy is a very simple cell, very small and with a singular focus. Whereas the egg is a very large cell. In fact, it’s the only cell that’s visible to the human eye without any magnification and it’s a very complex cell. It is not passively waiting for a sperm to penetrate it, but it is very actively reading the surroundings, moving through the fallopian tube, and when sperm approach it, it actually takes a kind of reading of the sperm to decide which sperm it’s going to allow to pass through its outer membrane. And when the sperm enters, it is enclosed and embraced in the egg energy. The sperm energy is in service of the egg. So it’s this idea of pointedness versus holistic. Like MacGilchrist talks about. The egg is this very round holistic, multidimensional energy, and the sperm is a very simple, directional, tiny tail wagging cell.
I’m not seeing this as gendered - we are all the product of a sperm and an egg, so we all have sperm energy and egg energy. I’m just saying that the sperm energy in all of us is meant to serve the egg energy in all of us individually and collectively.
Thanks for these thoughtful conversations - they are engaging and thought provoking. Clearly. :)