Interview with Dr. Martha Stout

" . . . understanding this problem [sociopathy] creates an entire paradigm shift in the way we view human nature."
--Dr. Martha Stout
This episode of our program brings you an interview with Dr. Martha Stout, clinical psychologist and bestselling, award-winning author on the subject of sociopathy. For twenty-six years, she served as a Psychology Instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and also taught at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Wellesley College, The New School for Social Research, and the National Institute of Mental Health. Dr. Stout has worked at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Psychiatric Hospital. She is author of The Myth of Sanity, The Paranoia Switch, and The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us, a National Bestseller and winner of a Books for a Better Life Award.
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Election Day Exchange with Living Hero Suzi Gablik

Living Hero Suzi Gablik is composing a new blog post and asking friends and fellow writers this question, which I received yesterday:
Last night, instead of trick or treating at the neighbor's house up the road, I watched 60 Minutes instead, a program of interviews in towns and with people who have tragically lost businesses and jobs. It was very painful to watch. I have seen quite a bit of this kind of media coverage done across the country. The people being interviewed can't stop crying, including even the men. Parents who can't send their kids to college. The bleakness in people's eyes is excruciating. And then $3 billion dollars (repeat, 3 billion) just spent on election attack ads. Has the human race always been this way? What do you think? How do you suppose Tutu and the Dalai Lama manage to chuckle over human foibles and frailty? Do you believe the human spirit will ultimately prevail? Or are we, as Derrick Jensen says, f-ed?   (Sent on the eve of the invasion of the body snatchers.)
Quote by Desmond Tutu from my blog:
Now 79 years old and ever cheery, another world-renowned black leader, the Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, recently told Time magazine that the chief lesson he has learned is that "the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail...In the end, the perpetrators of injustice or oppression, the ones who strut the stage of the world often seemingly unbeatable--there's no doubt at all that they will bite the dust." And then he roars with laughter: "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Wonderful!" So what do you think? Has the Archbishop Tutu discovered the culminating secret of the universe, or is he just singin' in the rain?
Full blog post containing Tutu's quotation, 10-30-10 http://virgilspeaks.blogspot.com/2010/10/waiting-on-big-flip.html
Here is my response to Suzi:
In truth, everybody’s is right and nobody knows anything.
Derrick Jensen is right that we’re f-ed, Tutu is right that goodness will prevail. You are right to worry. And I am right to see things in the context of very vast pictures. For instance, this very second people are being tortured somewhere(s) and elsewhere(s) people are having fantastic orgasms looking into each others eyes. Right this second planets are being born and stars are blowing apart: end of an eon.
In our own lifetimes on Earth, in the 20th-21st centuries, extraordinary, beautiful, and heartwarming happenings of many kinds have taken place; some people have behaved in magnificent ways to one another. And at the same time horrible, sick, twisted, maniacal and catastrophic events have taken place and people have been cold, punitive, destructive to one another. Tears of sorrow and tears of joy flowing, flowing all the time. At some point there will be no more humans here. There will be something else going on. This universe cannot and will not be otherwise.
We don’t know much about the nature of our existence; for example, if there is anything more to luck than blind luck, or if we can have any influence whatsoever on whether or not we could miraculously survive a carpet bombing, running through with mind serene and coming out unscathed by heavy shrapnel.
The mind can be all defended or all relaxed or very nimble and flexible. What difference does it make? I have seen that it can make a lot of difference, so I cultivate my mind and body to be healthy, strong, resilient. And still, I could be hit by a truck later today or ravaged by microbes two months from now.
We can reliably cultivate ourselves so we could be wise, helpful, comforting, even when others are in panic, rage, or icy authoritarian rigor. We can help soothe those whose luck has run out. We can share what we have that is good. We can expand our minds and hearts to have many choices of apertures and ways of looking that we can access to stay wise, helpful, and comforting. It’s worthwhile doing that.
For some singing in the rain is only natural, for others it is very annoying to watch.
This world, the big picture world is forever in states of flux of dark and light, forever turning itself inside out through both creation and destruction. Sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of the destruction: it’s in the nature of things. Why shouldn’t we? Who are we to escape that part of the universe forever? Every polarity we can think of love-hate, light-darkness, good-evil, miraculous-impossible, is always simultaneous in the whole. It’s all flickering and flowing and moving as one and we are part of that. It’s all congruent and necessary. There is always peace somewhere; don’t forget that. And depending how you look at things 3.141592 . . . is a numeric linearity that just will not stop: and this could frustrate a person’s desire to see an end to it. But to someone else it is a marvelous expression of how every single simple circle that ever was has an outline that you can continue to follow around and around without end. Or not. Ugh, big deal. Or yes, a very big deal.
William Blake said that “a fool sees not the same tree a wise man sees.” To my reckoning, it is wholesome for our souls to see things in vast terms, to be expansive, and also to be very humble.
Nobody knows what a tree is. Can anybody tell me how the seed of a tree knows how to unfurl and grow up out of itself and form wood and bark and self-organize systems that circulate water and sap, that can draw nutrients up from the soil and turn light into energy for itself to carry on and thrive? Does anyone know what all this stuff is growing up out of the stuff? It’s all a giant mystery and here we are in that mystery together, some snatching and fighting, some giving and holding hands.
What do you think about these things?
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Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
©2010 Jari Chevalier

Conference Report:: Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics

Several hundred people gathered for the 4th annual Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics conference at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South on September 24-26.
This conference surveys the current research and social issues in the field of psychedelics. Readings by John Perry Barlow from Birth of a Psychedelic Culture and Don Lattin, author of The Harvard Psychedelic Club, provided historical context and Cosmo D set the atmosphere with a performance of textured cello improvisation over original electronic rhythms to open the weekend.
Why has psychedelic research been discriminated against in academia? Dr. Torsten Passie took us through the reasons. He showed slides of tribal people lying back all together with their eyes closed: not very productive! A Western capitalist worldview, which requires relations with nature to be utilitarian and depth of feeling to be kept private is not likely to embrace the potential value of trance states, the sharing of dreams, or the hallucinogenic experience.
Furthermore, ecstatic experience through psychedelics can engender direct, unmediated experience of the divine in oneself and in all of nature. This does not comport particularly well with the teachings of the Christian church, which holds forth that each and every one of us needs Jesus Christ to mediate our salvation.
Psychedelics deconceptualize and deconstruct entrenched value systems and, therefore, authority over truth is destabilized. So let's add that those who socially engineer and control populations don’t much care for that sort of thing. It becomes a real problem for those in power when people tap into a larger, more satisfying and holistic sense of reality, endemic to their own true natures, accessed intuitively.
Dr. Passie does not expect interest in psychedelics to spread beyond a small, secret society in the foreseeable future.
Dr. Jeffrey Guss, who heads up a current study at NYU on psychedelics in the reduction of cancer anxiety with very positive psychospiritual results, agrees with Dr. Passie that psychedelics will not become mainstream in society and he doesn’t believe that they should, that they are not for everyone.
But, standing in disagreement with these men on this point is independent Manhattan and Sag Harbor-based psychologist in private practice, Neal Goldsmith, PhD. Along with organizer Kevin Balktic, Dr. Goldsmith facilitates the conference. His sense is that to move into an age beyond post-modernism, one integrating the Cartesian split, psychedelics may play an important role.
He speaks of his own transformation through psychedelic experiences and how it altered his personality theory and views on personal growth and change. He describes a step-wise developmental process with dramatic growth to a new level of development after periods on a plateau. In essence, he says the issue is not to change a pathology, but to form genuine trusting relationships through which his clients can re-identify with their core selves. The person you were born, before you “punted” to a compensatory Plan B, personality, to get by in early childhood, is who you really are. Healing is getting back to that core self.
He's seen that transformative developmental change takes a long time and is very difficult to sustain in this culture. A combination of transcendent and cathartic approaches are most effective, and in this, psychedelics can be catalysts to insight, although insight alone, he says, only goes so far.
The large-scale collective process of what he calls psyche-ology, the study and healing of soul, is really concerned now with successfully joining mechanistic, scientific and technological knowledge with the realities of human psychosocial needs.
Eric Davis, a current PhD candidate, author, speaker and radio host discussed inner and outer Cartesian dualities by way of a metaphor, a mobius strip on which the material at some point turns over into the spiritual, the secular into the sacred and vice versa, in a flow.
There is a hunger in our culture (with its resistance to all things mystical) for the ritual and ceremonial context in which the hallucinogen Ayahuasca is taken by tribal peoples from the rain forests of South America; and this is likely why Ayahuasca has become so popular in North America in recent years.
Davis also pointed to Roland Griffiths’ 2008 Johns Hopkins study which proved that the use of psychedelics gives rise to religious experience (“No shit, Sherlock,” he said, “we knew that!”) And so the open question is: what does a secular, materialistic research model do with this scientific confirmation? And does moving the psychedelic experience into the psychopharmaceutical, clinical environment of the lab, perhaps diminish its potential for healing self and society?
The scientific approach is valuable, Davis upholds, because of the nagging questions it prompts us to ask about the brain. For instance, if you’re going to coin terms like “neurotheology” as a way to account for the experience of God, then you must also account for déjà vu, clairvoyance, and many other experiences of the mind.
For scientists to be seriously engaged in psychedelic research they eventually must take the psychedelics themselves. And that could just stimulate changes in the scientific approach itself. We may find ourselves up against our culture’s addictions to limiting ideas.
Psychedelic use for the treatment of addiction was reported on by researchers Matthew Johnson and Mary Cosimano of Johns Hopkins University who are currently investigating psilocybin in the treatment of nicotine dependence.
Most striking was the presentation by Clare Wilkins, director of Pangea Biomedics in Tijuana, Mexico on the remarkable properties of Ibogaine, a hallucinogenic root from Gabon, Africa that reverses addictions to opiates; such as heroine and methadone, as well as to cocaine, methamphetamine, alcohol, nicotine, and all manner of addictive behaviors and neurotic thoughts.
Ninety-two percent of clients who enter the clinic leave free of their chemical dependency, and without any withdrawal symptoms. Eighteen percent are still living without their drug of choice after six months, and this is a remarkable liberation rate. The hallucinogen gives addicts a real chance at choice. While exactly how ibogaine works is still unknown, there is clearly repair to brain receptors and an adjustment in neurochemistry.
She describes Ibogaine as a “relationship interrupter,” accomplishing “shame washing, empowerment, and the reawakening of the body’s intelligence.” Ibogaine “enables you to look at your life and eliminate anything that is not serving you.” Self-harm becomes self-care. “You fall back in love with yourself, with others and with life. It brings love back into the equation.”
Several of the non-academic speakers praised visionary experience and its influence on art, music, fashion, film, eco-consciousness and the integration of Eastern and Western mysticism. Annie Oak spoke about her grant-making organization, the Women’s Visionary Congress, and how this multigenerational community of “psychedelic women” support one another in their ongoing catalytic work as artists, healers, activists and visionaries.

But some brought up the dark side and limitations of psychedelics. Associate producer of the annual Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, reminded us that in the 60s many a psych-ward and hospital was packed with LSD casualties. And poet, Dale Pendell, while acknowledging that we have yet to complete the psychedelic revolution, that the Earth is in need of a deep and radical cure, also cautioned us to consider that psychedelics are not effective on narcissism. In fact, with their tendency to stimulate messianic fantasies in some people, psychedelics may have contributed to the rapid rise of Me-ism in society.
Jill Harris of the Drug Policy Alliance urged the Horizons audience to come out about their psychedelic experiences, to break the taboo and share stories. “They have been important to us; they have mattered.” Let’s be vocal about how transformative these drugs can be and about the fact that prohibition doesn’t work. At the 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs, “it’s time to set the exit strategy.”
Heading home through Washington Square park at twilight, the great stone arch with its bold, engraved quotation was all lit up:
“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.”
Washington spoke those words to inspire his delegates to aim high in the writing of the Constitution of the United States. It was crafted, in this spirit, over the next 17 weeks.
And I thought, yes, here it is, the time Washington expected for the wise and honest to repair to those standards. And it will be, indeed, up to the wise and the honest to do the job.
“There are methods for changing social policies,” Neal Goldsmith tells us, “and we’ve got to power through, shoulder to the wheel, and do the work.”
©2010 Jari Chevalier

Gabor Maté at The Rubin Museum in New York

Living Hero Gabor Maté, M.D. appeared on July 7th at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City to kick off a seven-part series of live events related to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Dr. Ramon Prats, curator of the contemporaneous Bardo exhibition, conversed with Dr. Maté on stage and then invited questions from the audience.
Dr. Maté is author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. He explained that the hungry ghost realm is a symbol for a state of being, part of the Wheel of Life, described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. This is a state of unquenchable longing and craving, a state well-known to the addicts Dr. Maté treats in Vancouver, British Columbia’s downtown eastside.
Maté began by stating that 2500 years ago Buddhism presaged almost every discovery of contemporary neuroscience. For example, it has been scientifically corroborated that neurologically there is no abiding self to be found in body or brain. This is one of the central teachings of the Buddha. What we perceive as a continuity of self is but a stream of micro-second mind-states, which can be remembered; electrical information that follows patterns conditioned by former mind-states.
These brain circuits were fundamentally conditioned by our earliest experiences. Maté says that the “anti-infant North American ethic,” which permits a parent to just let their infant cry and cry to exhaustion, conditions that infant to become a human being resigned to a world that “just doesn’t give a damn.”
The addicts he works with have all been severely abused, and without exception all the women have been sexually abused. These people’s minds and brains have been deeply conditioned to expect to live in a hostile, dangerous, uncaring world.
Gabor Maté says there are two fallacies currently operating in the treatment of addicts in our society and that both of these fallacies erroneously take society off the hook of responsibility. The first one is the fallacy of choice, the idea that addicts choose to be addicts. They don't, he says, and the whole legal structure, the systems that punish them would have to come apart if you correct this fallacy.
And the second fallacy is the genetic disease fallacy. Addiction is not a result of genetic potentiality, but of the combination of nature and nurture, of genetic potential and the conditioning forces of the environment.
All of Dr. Maté’s various books underscore the importance of early attachment relationships in the formation of human lives. A healthy attachment in early life brings about a self-regulated, satisfied, and socially connected adult. In the abused child, these circuits don’t form properly and the person is then likely to replace those necessary healthy attachments with self-destructive ones.
The Buddha taught that habit energies wrestle the untrained mind. And so, strengthening the mind with the training of concentration, of self-observation, gives people an opportunity to perceive their own thinking-and-feeling processes and thereby realize that there’s more to us than our conditioning.
The consistent observation of one’s own mind can have the power to create new neural circuits that can override the conditioned patterns established in early experience. Based upon actual self-awareness, such mindfulness helps to create emotional balance, spiritual ease, and an increased capacity for self-regulation.
Dr. Maté reminded the audience that Christ had said: you can do everything I can do; and that Buddha nature and Christ nature are actually human potentials. What makes these potentials realizable is getting the conditioned mind and false attachments out of the way.
One of the questions posed by an audience member was about free will. “Freedom of choice is relative and it’s conditioned,” Maté said. What promotes free will? What liberates people? When it comes to individuals working on their own, what promotes choice is awareness; among people it is compassion. Stress hormones, on the other hand, interfere with our power of choice.
In the spirit of compassion, Dr. Maté acknowledged the difficulties people, especially Westerners, have in cultivating mindfulness. He confessed that he, himself, has not sustained a meditation practice and admitted that he is actually terrified of his own mind because of the traumas he endured as an infant.
Speaking further of Western culture, he referenced Sogyal Rinpoche, who wrote The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, based on the traditional Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sogyal Rinpoche says that Westerners, in general, have an active form of laziness, one in which they cram their minds so full of stimuli that there’s no time at all to confront their relationships.
Maté turned things around a bit and asked the audience a question, “What would you think if someone in your life kept on boasting: ‘I’m the greatest; I’m the most creative; everyone wants to be like me’? You’d think this person is really insecure! At the heart of the American dream there’s a terrible insecurity.”
Can we get over our vain insecurity? Both Dr. Prats and Dr. Maté spoke of how the term “rebirth,” found in Buddhist literature, refers to a process of recreating ourselves (our patterns of thought and perception) moment by moment. The Buddha taught humanity how to not rebirth that same pattern of self; how to free our minds; how to die without dying, to let the painful conditioning of our minds die back as our bodies live on, so that we may realize a liberated state and live out of our deeper nature.
How common it is to live without living. But to die without dying is rare.
©Jari Chevalier

Interview with Derrick Jensen

"We need to bring down civilization, because it's killing the planet," says our guest, author and activist Derrick Jensen.
Formerly a college professor and a commercial beekeeper, Jensen's prolific career as an author has given us A Language Older Than Words, The Culture of Make Believe, Endgame, Listening to the Land, Strangely Like War and Walking on Water. He also co-authored Railroads & Clearcuts and Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control. He has written for The New York Times magazine, The Sun, Audubon, and many other publications.
In 2008 Derrick Jensen was named one of Utne Reader's "50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World."
We talked about:
Preparation for truth-telling ● Above ground and below ground activism ● The only language destroyers understand ● The essence of Derrick's philosophy and passion ● Normalizing insane behavior ● Reform or revolution? ● What do we need to do? ● Living in the culture of make-believe ● The relationship between eroticism and violence ● Collapse and the shape of things to come ● Hypocrisy in the environmental movement ● Owning prejudices and shifting alliances ● Do we need to harden our hearts or to open them? ● Discernment, compassion, compliance and fierce love
Visit: derrickjensen.org
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 52 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy some of Derrick's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.
This podcast episode contains explicit language.

Interview with John Taylor Gatto

State-run schools don't educate; they inculcate. They dumb people down! John Taylor Gatto gives us a stunning synopsis of his tireless scholarship and long-term experience as an award-winning guerilla educator in New York City public schools.
John Taylor Gatto resigned from school-teaching in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, the year he was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Since then, he has traveled three million miles lecturing on why we should abandon and subvert public schools, which deliberately ruin minds and mold lives of obedience to the system. Schools thwart imagination, self-reliance, and individuality and make good, dependent slaves of the industrial-consumer state.
Gatto is author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling; The Underground History of American Education and, most recently, Weapons of Mass Instruction.
We talked about:
The only thing anyone can teach ● The official outlook on human nature ● The chilling Western philosophical movements behind forced schooling ● Compulsory schooling and the University of Berlin ● Sacrificing justice and quality of life for predictable stability ● School, economics, and the social classes ● Overproduction and hyperdemocracy ● Power and the methods of power ● The crime of removing classics from the curricula ● How we will transform ● Superstar entrepreneurs who dropped out of college ● Liberty and the tyranny of measured time
Visit: johntaylorgatto.com
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 51 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy John's book son Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.

Interview with Jonah Lehrer

Listen in on an illuminating conversation with science writer and author Jonah Lehrer as he shares insights on the work of eight historic creative geniuses and how contemporary neuroscience can lead us to more conscious and fulfilling lives. Lehrer is author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide and a frequent contributor to national magazines featuring his articles on what we're learning about the brain and how our minds work. He also hosts the highly regarded blog The Frontal Cortex.
We talked about:
Insight, intuition and introspection: roads to discovery ● Self Comes to Mind: collaborative work among artists and scientists ● Some common ground among cutting-edge creative artists ● Truth in fiction ● Metacognition and its pay-offs ● Getting better at the marshmallow task ● Making better decisions ● Asking the right questions of contemporary neuroscience ● The right side of our kindergarten report card ● Torturous moral dilemmas ● How to kill a rat with pleasure ● Some of Jonah's goals as an author
Visit: jonahlehrer.com and The Frontal Cortex
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about 46 minutes.)
Listen at your convenience!
Click through to buy Jonah's books on Amazon right from this site in the sidebar to the left.

Interview with Jim Merkel

Radical Simplicity! The Living Hero program presents an interview with author, educator, and activist Jim Merkel.
Jim began as a military engineer. Just after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Jim quit his job and took immediate personal responsibility for his own part in global problems. This meant taking radical actions to scale back consumption and deeply reconsider life in all its dimensions. He subsequently authored Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth. Merkel received an Earthwatch Gaia Fellowship to research sustainable living in Kerala, India and in regions of the Himalayas.
He founded the Global Living Project and was hired by Dartmouth College to serve as its first Sustainability Director.
Jim lives the life of radical simplicity—cycling hundreds of miles to give lectures and workshops at colleges , universities, and community centers. He is a homesteader, growing and preserving his own food, and living on about $5,000 a year. Jim has given hundreds of hours of his time as a volunteer to share his wealth of knowledge on the new good life of sustainable living.

We talked about:
• the present pulse of the sustainability movement
• the real root of simplicity
• engaging the heart
• Jim's childhood and influences
• the real challenge of society: the common good
• how radical simplicity crosses party lines
• Jim's revolutionary shift after Exxon-Valdez
• what it means to exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth
• what is an ecological footprint
• Jim's view of the economic crisis
• living on $5000 a year in America
• the roots of violence and fear
• population control, women, and wisdom
• falling in love with the Earth

Enjoy the show! (The program is around 50 minutes)
Listen at your convenience!

Interview with Riane Eisler

The Living Hero show is honored to present an interview with author, speaker and thought leader, Riane Eisler. She is recognized as one of the most original minds of our time, and has been included among the world's 20 great thinkers and peacemakers. She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies and is best known for her international bestseller The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Riane holds degrees in sociology and law from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and has done pioneering and transformative work in the fields of human rights and relations, history, sociology, economics, psychology, and education. She is the author of over 200 essays and articles and five books.
We talked about:
• The redistribution and redefinition of power
• What is the real wealth of nations?
• Political ironies and transformation
• Playing economics with a full deck
• The psychological underpinnings of domination and control
• Gender relations and notions of male and female power
• Is human nature fundamentally flawed?
• Riane's own path of transformation
• The neurochemistry of pain and pleasure
• Creativity as a force for leadership and change
Visit Riane Eisler's websites at www.rianeeisler.com and The Center for Partnership Studies (partnershipway.org)
Enjoy the show! (The interview is 50 minutes)
Listen at your convenience!

Interview with Dr. Scott Baum

The Living Hero podcast welcomes our distinguished guest, clinical psychologist and bioenergetic analyst, Scott Baum, Ph.D.
Dr. Baum is a licensed Clinical Psychologist and a Diplomate in Clinical Psychology. He is also a certified Bioenergetic Therapist, and a member of the Faculty of The International Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis. He has been affiliated with the DiMele Center for Psychotherapy since 1994.
Scott Baum views psychotherapy as an experiential, problem solving process. He believes that the deepest, fullest, and most complex understanding of a person’s problem yields the best, most creative and enduring results.
We talked about:
• The premise that underlies bioenergetic analysis
• A more refined view of stress
• How human beings are biologically organized
• What goes on in a bioenergetic session
• Males, fathers, patriarchal society, power and the unknown
• The disparity between mothers and fathers
• Why men don’t ask for directions
• Healthy narcissism, narcissistic disorders and the true self
• A dividing line among therapists
• What’s possible with therapy
• How to learn more about Bioenergetics.
Visit the website for the New York Society for Bioenergetic Analysis
Enjoy the show! (The interview is about an hour)
Listen at your convenience!