The Emerald

“We don’t go to other planets because our planet is dying. Our planet dies, specifically because we perpetually want to go somewhere else.” Fresh off of the Initial Public Offering of Space X, the largest IPO in human history, it's worth revisiting the deeper implications of humanity's incessant drive... beyond. Today on the podcast, we look at humanity’s increasing obsession with transcending planet Earth, in the context of the mythologies of human restlessness. How human beings, whether through certain religious visions of transcendence or through the increasing transhuman and supernatural focus of modern science, are ultimately looking to be anywhere but right here, with ourselves, in nature. This misplaced spiritual drive, in which we perpetually seek wholeness out there when wholeness ultimately lives right here, has been the subject of some of our most central stories about ourselves. Many in fact, have seen it as… a primordial curse.
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Seven years ago last Tuesday, The Emerald podcast was born. This episode reflects on the journey of the podcast so far and gives hints of what's to come, all through the prism of the number 7, which is — to say the least — a mythically important number. The myths often iterate in cycles and families of seven—seven swans, seven dwarves, seven ravens, and seven gates of the underworld. In many traditions, seven represents the completion of a cycle and the beginning of a new one. In Ayurveda, in order for something to be fully embodied, it must pass through seven dhatus, or tissue layers. In many traditions, initiates pass through a journey of seven stages. This recurring 'journey through seven' is not just arbitrary, it is a reflection of nature itself, which often repeats in cycles of seven. The ancients saw seven at play in the architecture of the cosmos, in the musical scales and the spectrum of light and in a world that they saw as expressing through seven cosmic layers. The vision of seven as a number of threshold, passage, and reconnection can be understood through the numerical and geometric attributes of seven itself, which displays strange characteristics not found in any other number. Featuring Nivedita Gunturi singing the seven-note scale progressions of Hindustani and Carnatic music, and excerpts of beloved stories of seven, this episode is a celebration of seven years of The Emerald, and a preparation for what's to come. 
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The dragon, or serpent, in myth and story, is the coiling, spiraling power of nature itself. And so, how cultures have treated the dragon depends a lot on how they view nature and how they view the world. Some have celebrated and honored the serpent power, some have sought to harness or direct it, others to contain or tame it, while some have labeled it as chaos and sought to subdue and slay it. The history of the Western world's relationship with dragons and serpents is fraught, and Western mythic tradition is rife with monstrous serpent beings that are vilified as 'evil'.  How does this primal undulant power come to be seen as 'evil'? As author Veronica Strang explains, it has to do with how human beings interact with forces we cannot control. With the rise of large scale societies, forces outside the civilizational order — floods, unpredictable weather, and movements of the water cycle — became labeled as 'chaos.' Whereas once 'chaos' signified primal oceanic generativity, chaos became seen as wanton disorder, and in Western tradition, a polarity forms between that which is stable and eternal and good that which is shifting and changing and undulant and evil. This dichotomy — this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of stability and movement, of boundary and flow — informs the entire history of the Western world and is still playing itself out across the sociocultural, political, and spiritual spectrum today.  In traditional systems, this power is not dichotomized but is met with deep protocol, in which it is understood that the dragon-serpent power is not to be vilified, nor is it to be invoked without caution. For in relational polytheistic systems, there may be serpent powers that are helpful and those that aren't, and there may be powers that require deep preparation before they are met. So the dragon-serpent asks us — what does it mean to be in real relationship with that which is awesome, powerful, and potentially dangerous? How do we treat... the dragon? Featuring interviews with author Veronica Strang, Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup, Shipibo professor Eli Sanchez Pakan Meni, and Mythosomatic practitioner Eve Bradford and featuring music from Victor Sakshin, Travis Puntarelli, Jeunae Elita, and Marya Stark, enjoy this spiraling journey that concludes our exploration of THE DRAGON. 
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Dragon lore is everywhere in global mythology — no matter what continent you live on, the land you inhabit holds dragon story, and quite possibly was shaped by dragons, or has sleeping dragons in it. Such dragons have captured human imagination across hundreds of cultures and thousands of years. But the dragon is much more than a category of fantastical beast.  In many traditions the world-dragon, or world-serpent, is creator, land-shaper,  present in the water cycle and in weather systems and in the vast temporal cycles of the cosmos itself. More deeply, the dragon is related to kinetic power — to all that moves in spirals. So the coils of the dragon draw us in to a deep discussion of the fundamental energetic power of a cosmos whose basic movements are serpentine —  coiling and releasing, gathering and dispersing, shedding and regenerating — one sinuous energy that is also multifaceted. This power is paradoxical — it creates and destroys, it births and it devours. Like the world itself, it is beautiful and it is terrifying. So this power is met in vastly different ways — with awe and reverence, and with fear and suspicion. How a culture views dragons says a lot about how they view... the world. For the dragon is the primal power of creation, and to explore dragon story is to explore how human beings have interacted with the world and its powers, its cycles and convolutions, across cultures and generations. Discussions on the world-dragon have deep relevance at a time when socio-historical power patterns are repeating, and forgotten monsters waking, and old power structures crumbling and new ones rising. At stake are questions of how we as human beings treat vast, monstrous, beautiful, paradoxical, primal powers. Featuring interviews with Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup and Shipibo Professor Eli Sanchez Pakan Meni and original music from Victor Sakshin, Jeunae Elita, Travis Puntarelli, Charlotte Malin Collins and Marya Stark, this episode asks us to stare deep into the eyes of the flashing, feathered, scaled, fractal power at the heart of creation itself. Enter.... THE DRAGON. 
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There is a weight to modern existence — perhaps you've felt it. In a world in which social and environmental crises only seem to be deepening and our familial, communal and spiritual support systems are steadily crumbling, individuals are buckling under the weight. This weight is not simply metaphorical. When the web of relationships that traditionally hold human culture together is fractured, then sociocultural, ecological, and even cosmic burdens are funneled to individuals to carry. We often try to tackle these burdens on our own — but they are far too big for one person to bear. Traditional cultures, by contrast, tend to be constructed around networks of support — not only in their sociocultural and spiritual systems, but in their understanding of a cosmological and ecological mandala of animate forces, gods and goddesses and spirit helpers that literally bear weight. So animate traditions invoke various weight bearers, from turtles to elephants to the great mother goddess herself — who is known as the 'support' of everything that is. Such figures invite us into a deeper vision of support that is not generated or borne by us alone and that requires that we rethink the human role in the web of life. In such relational visions, people are not gods. They have responsibilities to the web of life, but they are not responsible for bearing everything. The tendency of the modern individualist mind to put itself at the center of the cosmos and try to bear universal burdens on its own has roots that go back to the creation story that lives at the heart of western history, a story that imbues individual beings with the greatest burden of all — the burden of salvation. If we look closely this unconscious burden is still at play everywhere, across the social and political spectrum, in wellness narratives and psychotherapeutic narratives, and even in the stories we tell about how it's our imperative to 'save the world.' Perhaps it's time to unpack this deeply rooted burden and regrow it as something else. Featuring a beautiful telling of the story of Sky Woman by Mohawk Chief Beverly Cook, and original music from Beya, Balladir, Olivia the Bard, Hummbbugggg, Victor Sakshin and Marya Stark, This episode dives deep into the roots of the cosmic burdens that individuals in modern culture bear, and explores what it means to redistribute the burden as we find cosmic, ecological, and communal support.
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