Voices of Esalen Podcast

Laraaji is often thought of as one of progenitors of new age music. He was discovered by Brian Eno while playing meditational music in Washington Square Park in the early 1980's. After studying classical composition at Howard University’s College of Fine arts from 1962 to 1964, Laraaji was initially drawn to the world of stand-up comedy, which he excelled in. He was featured in the movie Putney Swope, but though the career path of an actor did not blend well enough with his interest in spirituality, laughter remained a key trope in the composition of his life. His playful, trickster persona pleasantly offsets the meaningful koans of wisdom he gifts throughout his work.

Laraaji’s approach to creating music and to making speech is not just an art form; it's a deep, meditative process that invites both the performer and the listener into a state of present-moment awareness. In doing so, Laraaji bridges the gap between the terrestrial and the cosmic, awakening a dormant understanding that everything in the universe is interconnected, and playing out simultaneously.

Beyond his unique perspective, Laraaji is quite simply a musical genius, very very prolific, with more than 50 albums to date and a full 2024 performance schedule. His music provides a wonderful companion to meditation, to journeying, to walking, to breathing, to being.

Laraaji was at Esalen as part of Esalen’s inagural Go Within series, curated and hosted by Sadia Bruce, which also featured performances from Mary Lattimore and Snow Raven.

Laraaji and Voices of Esalen host Sam Stern sat down and did this in front of a live studio audience in late December 2023. We began with a beautiful micro concert, performed by Laraaji and Arji Oceananda.

See Laraaji's 2024 tour schedule and more.

Good gracious. 2023 was a heck of a year: Not only did Voices of Esalen pass the 1 million download marker, yes indeed, but we had a host of superb guests, and I managed to make friends with the AI and not get replaced — yet.

Beyond the walls of Esalen, 2023 was a little terrifying. By all accounts it was the hottest year in recorded history; according to European Union scientists, global temperatures have not been this high in 125,000 years. Ukraine’s counteroffensive fizzled, and in the United States, Ukraine fatigue set in among lawmakers who dug in their heels against sending more aid to Kyiv. Civil war broke out in Sudan. US China tensions rose. Israel and Hamas embarked upon a bloody conflict that threatens to spread further throughout the Middle East. India became the world’s most populous country — not China. Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed it’s name to X, tanked it’s stock price, and in the name of so-called free-speech absolutism replatformed a host of dangerous conspiracy theorists, including snake oil salesman and Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting denier Alex Jones. Tucker Carlson got fired from Fox. Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and money laundering as well as defrauding investors in his crypto exchange, FTX. Hawaii wildfires burned 17,000 acres of land in Maui, killing 100; in Canada, 68 % of the Northwest Territories were forced to evacuate to other regions of the country in their own enormous set of wildfires. Oregon rolled out the United State’s first legal psychedelic services program, while MAPS inched closer and closer to an FDA-approved MDMA therapy program.

But alongside this cavalcade of geopolitical news, AI made great strides. In this episode, we'll explore the AI tools that apply to audio, including voice cloning, voice translation, audio dubbing, automatic song creation, voice to voice chatting with Chat GPT for educational purposes, and voice to voice connecting with Pi for advanced emotive and brainstorming purposes.

Much love to you and to yours in 2024. Thank you so much for being on this Voices of Esalen ride. Your support and interest means so much to Esalen and so much to me. Peace.

Drawn from the prodigious Esalen archives, this delightful episode is actually part one of a really long, cool, strange conversation between Terence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham that would eventually lead to a book authored by these three great minds titled Trialogues at the Edge of the West.

Please note that Terence McKenna spools forth a kind of complicated, highly erudite babble of text that is designed to be imbibed or absorbed in an almost osmotic fashion. His words don’t necessarily need to be decoded; they can simply be enjoyed, for their texture, for their sound, and absolutely for their message, though the message is often so abstract or so dense or so inventive as to render it difficult to comprehend. Here are his words, from a random Terence talk delivered at Esalen in 1992: “Our task is not to understand. It is to appreciate.” Yes indeed.

Rupert Sheldrake is a scientist and author, sometimes accused of being a new age author, who’s achieved some level of notoriety primarily due to his widely-debated concept of “morphic resonance.” Morphic resonance essentially suggests that there is a kind of collective memory in nature. According to Sheldrake, similar forms — or morphic units — resonate with and influence each other through time and space. For example, he suggests that if rats learn a new trick in one part of the world, rats elsewhere will learn it more quickly, as the morphic field of rats has been "tuned" to this new behavior. In Sheldrake’s words, natural systems ... “inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind." This collective memory is responsible for "telepathy-type interconnections between organisms.” Critics have cited a lack of evidence for the concept of morphic resonance, and noted the ways that it contrasts with established thought in genetics, embryology, neuroscience, and biochemistry. Yet this is precisely the sort of reasoning that a man like Terence McKenna, who was highly scientific and precise in his thinking yet wildly out of the box and creative when it came to systems of thinking, would be fascinated by.

Ralph Abraham is a mathematician and pioneer in the study of chaos theory. What is chaos theory? Simply put, chaos theory explores how any action, no matter how small, can lead to complex and unpredictable behavior in physical systems. Abraham founded the Visual Math Institute in Santa Cruz and continues to teach there now. His work, like McKenna’s and Sheldrake’s, examines consciousness, the nature of reality, and the intersection of science and spirituality. He is the author of a great number of books that tackle a variety of subjects, including the tome Foundations of Mechanics, the Evolutionary Mind, written with McKenna and Sheldrake, as well as Hip Santa Cruz: First-Person Accounts of the Hip Culture of Santa Cruz, California in the 1960s. Like the other two persons showcased in this episode of Voices of Esalen, he is undoubtedly a really smart person.

Dr. Bia Labate is a queer Brazilian anthropologist and Executive director of the Chacruna Insitute for Plant Medicines. She also serves as Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Chacruna promotes reciprocity in the psychedelic community, and supports the protection of sacred plants and cultural traditions. They advance psychedelic justice through curating critical conversations and uplifting the voices of women, queer people, Indigenous peoples, people of color, and the Global South in the field of psychedelic science.

Rahshaana Green is the Director of Equity and Contemplative Psychotherapy at the Nalanda Institute. After receiving her BA in Biophysical Chemistry from Dartmouth College and an MBA from University of Texas-Austin, Rahshaana combined her passion for science and business skills to spend 15+ years in marketing and business development for medical device and life science companies.

One day, a car accident helped her find her way to a yoga mat as a means of recovery, and it opened her eyes to the power of embodied practices as a tool for self-discovery, self-care and self-healing. Rahshaana got trained in Forrest yoga to help bring these tools to others. She then pursued personal study in meditation, mindfulness, and compassion practices to deepen her own growth and to empower others to cultivate well-being and resilience. When she’s not teaching or coaching, Rahshaana is a global explorer, continuously seeking new methods of movement to enrich her life and the lives of those she teaches.

In this conversation, we really drilled down into what makes diversity initiatives successful versus unsuccessful, potent versus ineffective. We discussed how and why code switching functions, what are some of the key traits of a truly inclusive leader, what she believes is the future of diversity and equity work, and how she’s able to stay positive, focused and radiantly alive while pursuing what can be a challenging career path.

Visit Rahshaana on the web.

Neil Baldwin is a longtime Esalen community member and preschool teacher, first with Esalen's Gazebo Preschool, established 1977, and now with Big Sur Park School, still located at Esalen. Neil came to Esalen from England in the early 1980’s at the behest of a psychic named Jenny O’Connor. He would end up living at Esalen for more than two decades, working in a great many capacities over the years, and finally settling into his zone of genius, at the Gazebo preschool, where he held sway as a trusted and beloved park keeper and teacher. In this chat, Neil and I discuss the Esalen of the 1980’s, with its profound emphasis on many flavors of Gestalt psychology, as well as the influence of Dick Price before his untimely passing in 1985, Werner Erhard's est, the work of Paula Shaw, his friendship with Dick Price's son, David, the ways that Esalen assisted his own personal growth, his experiences with dolphins and whales, and much more.

Sadia Bruce is head of experiential programming at Esalen Institute, where she also teaches yoga in the tradition of Krishnamacharya but enjoys drawing from rich array of teachers, a panoply of movement modalities, and indeed the entire spectrum of human experience to share an understanding of yoga that is integrative, sensorial, and enlivening.

Sadia’s work revolves around creating energized, radically-inclusive learning environments that are guided by breath and driven by inquiry. She is also deeply committed to bringing yoga-based practices to non-traditional environments and underserved populations, to mentoring new teachers, and to reaching economically, ethnically and culturally diverse populations.

This interview was conducted live at Esalen on October 18, 2023.

Today, we're taking a journey into the Esalen archives to explore the thought-provoking theories of Terence McKenna — an Esalen luminary if there’s ever been one — a thinker who's had a profound impact on modern culture, particularly regarding our understanding of altered states of consciousness.

For those of you who've been with us on this Voices of Esalen journey for a while, you'll know that this isn't our first foray into the world of Terence McKenna — he lectured at Esalen hundreds of times, and we've featured his insights in multiple previous episodes.

But I believe that the more you listen to McKenna, the more you recognize the layers of depth and significance in his body of work. It's a bit like the Talmud, or maybe the Grateful Dead, where every piece feels like a vital segment of a larger tapestry. There simply are no missteps or unremarkable talks when it comes to McKenna. It all matters. Thus, we venture on.

This episode is actually just part of a talk that McKenna gave in August, 1992 at Esalen, but in it, McKenna outlines one of his most popular theories, that which has been referred to as his Stoned Ape Hypothesis. (If there was a greatest hits album for Terence McKenna, this would certainly be on it.) The Stoned Ape hypothesis posits that the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms had transformative effects on early Homo Sapiens communities, likely shaping the course of our evolution. McKenna believes psilocybin may have altered human behavior and societal structures, by suppressing male dominance hierarchies, enhancing communal values, improving hunting capabilities and in many cases fueling ecstatic orgies.

Plus, he just says some absolutely magical sentences. Like this: " . . . the book called 'Food of the Gods' was deliberately designed as a kind of Trojan horse... It is something left on the doorstep of anthropology, a foundling as it were . . and when they open the door, they will find this thing on their doorstep and it hopefully take it inside and then discover too late that the elf machines of hyperspace like Greek militiamen are inside, ready to pour out and take over the bastions of human emergence theory."

So sit back, relax, and savor the eloquence of one of the most compelling orators in the annals of Esalen history.

Rod Stryker is the founder of ParaYoga®, and the author of The Four Desires: Creating a Life of Purpose, Happiness, Prosperity and Freedom. He is renowned for making ancient wisdom and practices accessible to modern audiences. Raised in Los Angeles, Rod was just 19 years old when he began his study of yoga. He taught his first class in 1980 and went on to teach here at Esalen, among many, many other locales. In addition to mentoring thousands of students worldwide, Rod also serves on the board of Give Back Yoga Foundation and is a featured faculty member of Yoga International. He is a father to four amazing souls and currently lives in Boise, Idaho.

In the role of co-host and wisdom contributor is Sadia Bruce. Sadia serves as head of Experiential Programming at Esalen, where she also teaches yoga in the tradition of Krishnamacharya. Sadia endeavors to create energized, radically-inclusive learning environments that are guided by breath and driven by inquiry — she hopes to share an understanding of yoga that is integrative, sensorial, and enlivening. Sadia is also committed to bringing yoga and yoga-based practices to non-traditional environments and underserved populations, and to mentoring new teachers in relational dynamics, development of teaching voice, and teaching to economically, ethnically, and culturally diverse populations. She is an insightful, sensitive teacher whose breath-based teaching encourages pleasurable practice that nourishes rather than depletes — inspiring new openings rather than the deepening of old patterns.

Dr. Ken Dychtwald is best described as a visionary thinker — he’s a psychologist, a gerontologist, a masterful public speaker, and the best-selling author of more than 19 books. Ken has dedicated his life's work to understanding the implications of human potential for all people. Over the course of his career, he has become one of America’s foremost authorities on aging-related issues, shaping our understanding of lifestyle, marketing, healthcare, economics, and the workforce, all in the context of an evolving and aging society.

Ken Dychtwald is the co-Founder and CEO of Age Wave, an acclaimed think tank and consultancy focused on the global opportunities of rising longevity. His groundbreaking insights have garnered international recognition, earning him prestigious awards and accolades. In 2016 he and his wife Maddy Kent Dychtwald received the Esalen Prize for outstanding contributions to advancing human potential.

In this captivating talk recorded live at Esalen in April of 2023, Ken dives deep into his Esalen story, from the first encounter groups he ended up in as a 19 year old, to rubbing shoulders with John Lilly, Ram Dass, and Timothy Leary, to the best-selling book he would write at age 22, Body Mind. He also traces his path into the field of gerontology, and reveals some of the cosmic magic that awaits us as we embrace the power of aging.

Please note: all the of the wonderful stories and life lessons you’re about to hear, and many, many more can be found in Ken’s newly released memoir Radical Curiosity: My Life on the Age Wave. And by the way, all of Ken’s earnings from this book are being generously donated to Esalen.