the idiotplayers

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The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Essence as Media

In this podcast I’m presenting material from my essay, “Essence as Media.” The essay is not yet available in a text form, but may be at some future date. I’m experimenting with reading it as a means of getting it out there and, I hope, generating interest.

The inspiration for the essay (series of essays really) was to explore JG Bennett’s presentation of the essential self. In podcast 09, “Hamlet and the Divided Self” I explored Bennett’s idea of the divided self through Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” At that time I mentioned I was working on material related to the essential self that I would present at some future date. Well, here it is. Except, that I cannot claim that “Essence as Media” is at all that closely related to Bennett’s material on the essential self. And so it is with all journeys. I ended up somewhere different than where I started.

download (right-click and Save as…)

The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Dr. Russell Schreiber

Clinical psychologist Dr. Russell Schreiber has worked with the Gurdjieff system of inner development for over forty years. He’s interested in how modern psychology and Gurdjieff’s Work enrich each other. Dr. Schreiber explores Gurdjieff’s methods within a psychological framework useful for beginner and advanced student. His book explores the modern psychological theory relevant to enhance Gurdjieff’s system. Schreiber emphasizes the gradual development of self-compassion as the foundation of self-study and inner evolution. He gives practical exercises to facilitate the ability to experientially apply self-study in an objective and compassionate manner. Some areas covered include: • Attention • Self-observation • Sensing • Development of Inner Life • Specific psychological traits as focus for self-study • Transformation of Negative Emotions • Advanced method of Participation • Compassion & Self-Compassion.

Dr. Schreiber is a practicing clinical psychologist in a community-based psychotherapy clinic in Northern California. As a staff psychologist, he supervises and trains psychologists and psychotherapists. He specializes in depth psychology and somatic psychotherapy. His recognition of the need for the development of self-compassion in his clients is emphasized in his clinical practice.

Links

• Gurdjieff’s Transformational Psychology: The Art of Compassionate Self-Study
• Russell Schreiber’s Gurdjieff Reading Group in Sonoma County: www.meetup.com
• Russell Schreiber’s Clinical Psychology Practice: russellschreiber-clinicalpsychologist.com

 

download (right-click and Save as…)

The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Biography
Anthony Blake (born 1939) studied Physics at Bristol University with David Bohm (see Bohm-Bennett Correspondence 1962-4) and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge with Gerd Buchdahl. He collaborated with engineer Edward Matchett on Creative Design (numerous papers) and worked with John Allen and the original team that built Biosphere 2 (see Biosphere 2 – the Human Experiment, edited by Blake). With the philosopher-technologist John Bennett, a leading student of the ‘fourth way’ teacher Gurdjieff, and his team he worked on the development of methods of structural thinking called systematics that led to ‘Structural Communication’ (see Kieran Egan, Structural Communication) and ‘LogoVisual Technology’ (LVT for short , see entry in Wikipedia). In 1998 he co-founded the non-profit organisation DuVersity (in the USA) centred on dialogue for which he is Director of Studies (see www.duversity.org). He has authored several books, including the most recent, A Gymnasium of Beliefs in Higher Intelligence. He has worked with leading practitioners of Group Analysis, specifically Patrick de Mare inventor of the ‘Median Group’ and Gordon Lawrence discoverer of the Social Dreaming Matrix, conducting and filming video-conversations with them and others in the field. He has conducted transpersonal psychological seminars in the USA, Europe, Mexico and China as well as conducting training in LVT in the UK, USA, Italy and China. He extended from physics into publishing and from philosophy into psychology but his core interests are dramatic process and dialogue, following the idea of the ‘dramatic universe’ he was introduced to by his main teacher, John Bennett; seeking spirituality in life’s uncertainties.

Information on Systematics Gathering XV, May 2-4 2014, Claymont Court, West Virginia, USA

Index of Topics: The overall theme of the conversation is systematics; it suffices to say the conversation is wide-ranging and engaging; we come to several very key moments where something useful arises, something to be come at again and again.

 Key links:

Unified Field Theory in a Curvature-Free Five-Dimensional Manifold by JG Bennett

The Myth of Invariance by Ernest McClain

Science & Sanity by ALFRED KORZYBSKI

TRIZ 

download (right-click and Save as…)

The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching. Biography Anthony Blake (born 1939) studied Physics at Bristol University with David Bohm (see Bohm-Bennett Correspondence 1962-4) and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge with Gerd Buchdahl. He collaborated with engineer Edward Matchett on Creative Design (numerous papers) and worked with John Allen and the original team that built Biosphere 2 (see Biosphere 2 – the Human Experiment, edited by Blake). With the philosopher-technologist John Bennett, a leading student of the ‘fourth way’ teacher Gurdjieff, and his team he worked on the development of methods of structural thinking called systematics that led to ‘Structural Communication’ (see Kieran Egan, Structural Communication) and ‘LogoVisual Technology’ (LVT for short , see entry in Wikipedia). In 1998 he co-founded the non-profit organisation DuVersity (in the USA) centred on dialogue for which he is Director of Studies (see www.duversity.org). He has authored several books, including the most recent, A Gymnasium of Beliefs in Higher Intelligence. He has worked with leading practitioners of Group Analysis, specifically Patrick de Mare inventor of the ‘Median Group’ and Gordon Lawrence discoverer of the Social Dreaming Matrix, conducting and filming video-conversations with them and others in the field. He has conducted transpersonal psychological seminars in the USA, Europe, Mexico and China as well as conducting training in LVT in the UK, USA, Italy and China. He extended from physics into publishing and from philosophy into psychology but his core interests are dramatic process and dialogue, following the idea of the ‘dramatic universe’ he was introduced to by his main teacher, John Bennett; seeking spirituality in life’s uncertainties.

Index of Topics: The overall theme of the conversation is science; science and mystical experience; who am I? and how do I relate to what I am in the midst of?; thinking requires contradiction to get it moving; mind/matter divide; this “divide” is not to be assumed; understanding is the same in all realms; Roger Bacon; Einstein and Clerk Maxwell’s equations; supreme acts of imagination to see; myths of a higher science that do not tell you how to do it; putting the work in; higher science is a masked appeal to authority; quantum loop gravity and string theory; tools of living or tools in intention; understanding is not from prefabricated parts; do we really look at this inner life?; The Society of Akhaldan; to understand is to understand; make understanding your own by putting it into your own language; Joseph Campbell’s vision quest; in the domain of understanding you must have uniqueness; understanding is not general, but concrete; Nietzsche said, “If thou hast a virtue and it is a real virtue, thou hast it in common with no man; it is thine very own.”; you have to make something; the agora, the marketplace of artefacts; Bayesian statistics, the mathematics of uncertainty; conscious and conscience; CS Lewis’ study of conscience; science is finding out and knowing in a way that you can share this with other people; Cantor’s transfinite numbers; science and business; military industrial complex; a war of purposes; studies of belief mechanisms; sleep and waking sleep; science is an independent means of questioning assumptions; Gurdjieff turned this technique of questioning assumptions onto the study of self; the fulcrum of self-sensing; Gurdjieff says we are not in the physical; we are starting in a dream; attaining one’s real I is just the beginning; Gurdjieff’s views on modern science; we are unaware of how extraordinary ordinary matter is; the greatest literature in the world id concerned with what is most ordinary; verification; science has to do with falsification, not verification; the value of cognitive dissonance; Bayesian statistics; mis-reading The Dramatic Universe; systematics; the present moment: the field of action over will; what’s the probability that I have a soul?; placing our bets; working on a new book on number and pattern;

Links Anthony Blake’s YouTube channel

[audio:http://idiotplayers.org/blog/audio/ip-podcast-2013-06-09-elan-sicroff.mp3|titles=the idiotplayers podcast 16: Elan Sicroff]

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The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Biography

Elan Sicroff is internationally known for his interpretation of the Gurdjieff / de Hartmann music. He was trained at the Juilliard School by Jeaneane Dowis, protégé of the great Rosina Lhevinne. He attended the International Academy for Continuous Education of Sherborne, Gloucestershire, England, a ‘Fourth Way’ School directed by John Godolphin Bennett, a leading exponent of Gurdjieff ’s teaching. Initially Elan was a student, and later became its Director of Music. From 1975-79, he received personal instruction in the interpretation of this music from Mme de Hartmann, widow of the composer, to whom he had been introduced by Mr. Bennett. Since then he has given numerous recitals of this music in the USA and Europe. In January 2009 he toured Italy, England and Malta. Elan has produced 2 cds, Journey to Inaccessible Places (1985, produced by Robert Fripp) and Sicroff Plays Gurdjieff (2002).

In 2010 he returned to Europe for recitals in Italy and England, including a performance at the prestigious St.John’s, Smith Square in London. His most recent CD, Laudamus… came out in June 2010. It features the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music alongside of the early Romantic pieces de Hartmann composed at the age of 16.

Elan Sicroff’s mission is simple: to bring the fruits of an extraordinary, century-old collaboration – perhaps the first example ever of truly “global music” – to a much wider listening audience. By doing so, he illuminates and even incarnates the startling originality, versatility, humanity and mysticism of Thomas de Hartmann.

Topics

History of the Thomas de Hartmann Project; Gert Jan Blom; Katharina Paul; Thomas De Hartmann Violin Sonata Op. 51; Amstel Saxophone Quartet; Pablo Casals; An excerpt from the Violin Sonata Op. 51; Anton Arensky; bi-tonality; the musical third; the emotional colours of Hartmann’s music; Wassily Kandinsky; The Yellow Sound; Thomas De Hartmann Project personnel: Robert Fripp (Director), Gert Jan Blom (Producer); Guido Tichermann (Engineer); Steffan Maier (Advisor); Efron Marter; Will Czal and John Gerdebeke; Elan Sicroff (Directing Musician); crowd-funding with kickstarter; the 2nd phase of the Thomas de Hartmann project; getting out of the sandbox; three lines of work; conscience; personal growth as a musician; application of the enneagram to the project; ways of getting involved with the De Hartmann Project.

Links

contact tdhp@sicroff.com

Thomas De Hartmann Project on facebook

Thomas de Hartmann: A Composer’s Life, By John Mangan

YouTube

 

 

 

[audio:http://idiotplayers.org/blog/audio/ip-podcast-2013-05-24-jon-rappoport.mp3|titles=the idiotplayers podcast 15: Jon Rappoport]

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The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Biography

Jon Rappoport has worked as a free-lance investigative reporter for over 30 years.

He has written articles on politics, health, media, culture and art for LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, Village Voice, Nexus, CBS Healthwatch, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe.

In 1982, the LA Weekly submitted his name for a Pulitzer prize, for his interview with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus.

Jon has hosted, produced, and written radio programs and segments in Los Angeles and Las Vegas (KPFK, KLAV). He has appeared as a guest on over 200 radio and television programs, including ABC’s Nightline, Tony Brown’s Journal (PBS), and Hard Copy.

In 1994, Jon ran for a seat in the US Congress from the 29th district in Los Angeles. After six months of campaigning, on a very small budget, he garnered 20 percent of the vote running against an incumbent who had occupied his seat for 20 years.

In 1996, Jon started The Great Boycott, against eight corporate chemical giants: Monsanto, Dow, Du Pont, Bayer, Hoechst, Rhone-Poulenc, Imperial Chemical Industries, and Ciba-Geigy. The Boycott continues to operate today.

Jon has lectured extensively all over the US on the question: Who runs the world and what can we do about it?

For the last ten years, Jon has operated largely away from the mainstream because, as he puts it, “My research was not friendly to the conventional media.”

Over the last 30 years, Jon’s independent research has encompassed such areas as: deep politics, conspiracies, alternative health, the potential of the human imagination, mind control, the medical cartel, symbology, and solutions to the takeover of the planet by hidden elites.

A painter, Jon’s work has been shown in galleries in Los Angeles and New York. His poetry has been published by The Massachusetts Review.

He is a graduate of Amherst College (BA, Philosophy), and lives with his wife, Dr. Laura Thompson, in San Diego.

Website: http://www.nomorefakenews.com/

Email: qjrpress@gmail.com

Topics

Working as a writer in the alternative and mainstream press; the scope of mind control, political and personal; it’s not just the information that people get, but it’s also who is the narrator; television anchors; why do we impose a ceiling on our own creative capacity?; consciousness club; being in the classroom with young people; creativity and imagination; doing nothing as a creative invite; Exit from the Matrix — visualization exercises; inner practices of ancient Tibet; John Blofeld; Alexandra David Neale; where the teachers of Tibet came from; buried sources of human power; practical teachers versus the academy; Gurdjieff, Tibet and the Sufis; the formula of the secret society and the tradition of imagination; 1999 book “The Secret Behind Secret Societies”; manufacturing reality; de-centralization and waking up; Dun Huang caves; creativity and paranormal experience; being a law unto one’s self; path of imagination; noncreativity; painting in New York; Jim Marr’s “Rule by Secrecy”; what is happening in the world; the thing that you create can trap you; John Pungente’s 8 Key Concepts of Media; the media construct reality; the leader/follower paradigm; Walter Lippman; building empire; media as a psy-op; Jack True; hypnosis; the nuts and bolts of the media trance; you can’t put people under hypnosis in order to wake them up; the story of the river; having a choice; don’t dawdle; do you want to be artist of your own reality or not?; “The Matrix Revealed” and “Exit the Matrix” available from Jon’s website.

Music

intro music: urgent carnival by the idiotplayers

outro music: advice to the drunk at heart by the idiotplayers

[audio:http://idiotplayers.org/blog/audio/ip-podcast-2012-11-10-winnie-givot.mp3|titles=the idiotplayers podcast 14: Winnie Givot]

download (right-click and Save as…)

The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Biography

Winnie Givot lives in a straw bale house on a small ridge overlooking the Three Sisters and the Cascade Mountains. Her studio in the barn is welcoming to students and collectors and those who simply want to share the beauty and peace there.

She teaches weekly watercolor classes during the school year in her Barn Studio near Sisters and workshops in the summer. She is currently planning to teach watercolor journaling workshops in Portland, Philadelphia, and Sicily as well as classes in her studio in Sisters, Oregon.

In 2000, she presented a painting to the Chilean Congress (for which she received a Congressional Medal), and in 2002 she took 24 paintings to Washington DC which were presented to Congressmen and women as inspiration – that instead of basing decisions on greed and fear, they will work to find new responses and solutions for making decisions honoring the highest in ourselves and all others.

More than 700 of her paintings are in collections internationally, a few of which are those of Pres. & Mrs. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Deepak Chopra, Senator Ron Wyden, United Parcel Service, Colorado College, Dan Fouts, Harley Brown, Gov. & Mrs. John Kitzhaber and The Congress of Chile.

Winnie Givot has been included in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World. She belongs to Northwest Watercolor Society, National Watercolor Society, Watercolor West, Watercolor Society of Oregon, Western Federation of Watercolor Societies, and Plein Air Painters of Oregon. Her paintings have been included in numerous solo shows and national and international juried exhibitions.

To visit Winnie Givot’s Barn Studio and Gallery near Sisters to see her work or for information about classes, workshops or the Sicily Painting Retreat, contact her at winniegivot@gmail.com or 541-548-5440. See also http://www.winniegivot.com/

Topics

Why watercolour?; The painting Red Shoes; Mary Oliver; Deepak Chopra; Maurice Nicoll; Two Rivers Farm; David Kherdian & Nonny Hogrogian; Mrs. Staveley; The consent to become a watercolourist; Getting light into a painting; Learning to see; Painting energy; Differences in light; Jude Siegel; Courses in Italy; The Metanoia Society; Two Rivers Farm; Importance of the Work; 36 years working with the ideas and practices of inner work; The connectedness of everything; Making the ideas of the Work real; “Little steps for little feet”; The Sacred Images workshop; Painting from a sacred space from within ourselves; Breath; Painting presented to the Chilean Congress; Thomas Moran; Putting clear intention into the painting; the gentle steam of humiliation; desire and perseverance; The tremendous tools offerred by the Work; Gurdieff laid a foundation that many others have built on; He re-introduced the esoteric dimension to Western life; Paul Rockman; the power of questioning; being a woman in the Work; paintings given to the United States Congress; what is Objective Art?.

[audio:http://idiotplayers.org/blog/audio/ip-podcast-2012-09-06-trevor-stewart.mp3|titles=the idiotplayers podcast 13: Trevor Stewart]

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The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

 Biography

Trevor Stewart is a former Zen practitioner and current participant at the Two Rivers Farm in Aurora, Oregon. He has spent the last 7 years since encountering Gurdjieff’s magnum opus at the age of 18 “tunneling” Beelzebub’s Tales. At first it was the result of inherent curiosity, later, it was solely due to its author’s hypnotic influence, and finally, it was a personal attempt to save its otherwise rarified and “impenetrable” message from becoming part of the dusty purgatorial corners of the lower bookshelf of a former Fourth Way “fanatic.” The personal key was an entirely new approach produced in light of new and ongoing research and development in “Beelzebub Studies” that aims to bring this major and important work into a range of application more or less useful for sincere modern seekers in various fields of study and investigation in and even out of the “Work”. A long-time and therefore culpable student of books by and about Gurdjieff, Trevor humbly takes full credit or full blame, as the case may be, for the “sacrilegious” and hopefully “Hasnamussian” views and opinions he presents, developed solely by him through much work and sincere questioning with Beelzebub’s Tales.  He appreciates feedback and can be contacted at ClearSkySolidEarth@Hotmail.com.

The Paper

Trevor’s paper: A perspective on Chapter 12: The First “Growl”

Topics

The challenge of writing about rich ideas; Young people in the Work; Mohammad Tamdgidi: Gurdjieff and Hypnosis A Hermeneutic Study; Suggestibility; Social Programming; Being anathematized; The process of reading the Tales; The “fear” of thinking about the Tales and the supposed “subconscious” reward of simply reading it; Word Yoga; A reading of Chapter 12: The First “Growl”; The surface level of the chapter; Some inexactitudes in the chapter; Correlations with Gurdjieff as the contemporary Gospel writer; Recurring motifs in the Tales; A certain type of awareness that arises from reading the book; The force of attention; A many-sided totality.

[audio:http://idiotplayers.org/blog/audio/ip-podcast-2012-08-09-anthony-blake.mp3|titles=the idiotplayers podcast 12: Anthony Blake]

download (right-click and Save as…)

The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Biography

Anthony Blake (born 1939) studied Physics at Bristol University with David Bohm(see Bohm-Bennett Correspondence 1962-4) and the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge with Gerd Buchdahl. He collaborated with engineer Edward Matchett on Creative Design (numerous papers) and worked with John Allen and the original team that built Biosphere 2 (see Biosphere 2 – the Human Experiment, edited by Blake). With the philosopher-technologist John Bennett, a leading student of the ‘fourth way’ teacher Gurdjieff, and his team he worked on the development of methods of structural thinking called systematics that led to ‘Structural Communication’ (see Kieran Egan, Structural Communication) and ‘LogoVisual Technology’ (LVT for short , see entry in Wikipedia). In 1998 he co-founded the non-profit organisation DuVersity (in the USA) centred on dialogue for which he is Director of Studies (see www.duversity.org). He has authored several books, including the most recent, A Gymnasium of Beliefs in Higher Intelligence. He has worked with leading practitioners of Group Analysis, specifically Patrick de Mare inventor of the ‘Median Group’ and Gordon Lawrence discoverer of the Social Dreaming Matrix, conducting and filming video-conversations with them and others in the field. He has conducted transpersonal psychological seminars in the USA, Europe, Mexico and China as well as conducting training in LVT in the UK, USA, Italy and China. He extended from physics into publishing and from philosophy into psychology but his core interests are dramatic process and dialogue, following the idea of the ‘dramatic universe’ he was introduced to by his main teacher, John Bennett; seeking spirituality in life’s uncertainties.

Index of Topics

Why make the audio recordings of Gurdjieff’s All and Everything?; Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing by René Daumal; The physical act of reading such difficult work; Gesturing while reading; Effects of reading the works; The performer as listener; The enigma of doing and getting out of the way; Self observation only occurs when one’s resources are already fully engaged; The form of containment is part of the great art; The hermetic vessel; Respect for the device; The microphone is higher than you; The triad of evolution: 2–1–3; Gurdjieff’s renunciation of powers; Buddhist logic: A, not A, A and not A, neither A nor not A;  The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Krauss; Anthony’s work as a beautiful medallion of options; The progression of Gurdjieff’s writings 1st Series, 2nd Series and 3rd Series; Anthony confronting himself through the reading; The suffering depicted in the 2nd Series, Meetings With Remarkable Men; The aburdist nature of the books; The 2nd Series depicts a number of fruitless journeys, but they are journeys none the less; The nature of hazard and the encounter of the unexpected; Gurdjieff’s infuriating denunciation of Western civilization; All and Everything as great works of literature; Gurdjieff gave a copy of the 3rd series to Bennett and asked him to “sort it out”; Valentin Anastasieff’s unpublished preface for the 3rd Series; Gurdjieff’s attitude toward women; “I am, but I cannot remember myself”; Negotiating your way through the darkness; Life itself gives shocks; Life is the teacher; The Thousand and One Nights; Word Yoga; Anthony’s sense of humiliation when reading the books; “Gurdjieff speaks human.”; Man is a three-centered being; Turn up; There is an action in reading the books; Hidden Meanings and Picture Language in the Writings of G.I. Gurdjieff by John Henderson; Plato’s Cave; Visualization; The Cinema; The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; The instinctive center and the subconsciousness; The brain works to minimize free energy, hence the abundance of reactivity; We don’t do the work, we suffer to allow the higher energies to enter into us; Reading from Isaiah in the cathedral; The faerie by my cot; “Remember who are and go home”; Sohbet.

Links

Information about the recordings on Anthony’s personal web page.

[audio:http://idiotplayers.org/blog/audio/ip-podcast-2012-07-07-steve-mitchell.mp3|titles=the idiotplayers podcast 11: Steve Mitchell]

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The idiotplayers podcast is a caravanserai of conversations with important thinkers, be-ers and doers. The idiotplayers podcast aims to explore art, creativity and expression.  If there is an elephant standing in the dark, as the Sufi story goes, we want to do more than grope and theorize. We invite conversations with people who aim from the heart to make practical, the far-reaching.

Bio

Steve Mitchell has published fiction in The Southeast Review, Contrary, The North Carolina Literary Review and The Adirondack Review, among others. His short story collection, The Naming of Ghosts, is available from Press 53. He is currently completing on a novel, Body of Trust. He has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize and his short story, Above the Rooftop, and was a 2011 storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Story winner. Steve has a deep belief in the primacy of doubt and an abiding conviction that great wisdom informs very bad movies. He is open twenty four hours a day at http://www.thisisstevemitchell.com

Show Music

Salesman by Bruce Peninsula.

Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra – How Slow the Wind by Osvaldo Golijov with Dawn Upshaw (Soprano).

Topics

the importance of doubt; seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey an important turning point; the act of making something beautiful changes the world — not just in a metaphorical sense; reading Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson; the power of witnessing; what is memory? — the intrigue of recurring, living, vital memories; experience of time, different kinds of time; the shape and flow of awareness; what does it mean to be intimate?; the wonderous music of language; strengthening awareness of awareness; The Naming of Ghosts; first person and the present tense; Southern writer?; Steve reads, “Flare” from The Naming of Ghosts; breath; the importance of precision; writing and re-writing; influences that have shaped Steve’s craft; the grammar of film; Herman Melville; Joan Didion; Marguerite Duras; Philip K. Dick; Raymond Chandler; Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Anthony Blake; Claymont Society; John Wilkinson; sound environments; trialogue; Gurdjieff and Bennett; making your own work; the sense of irony; Christof Koch; the wholeness of seeing; holding contradictions.