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The Sun Interview
From Conflict To Intimacy
An Interview With Danaan Parry
You and I and every human being I have met in any culture — we have all been conditioned to put a barrier between ourselves and other people, to stay safe. And it is that safety that creates most of the conflicts in the world. It’s that crazy paradoxical situation whereby if I stay safe from you in that way, I can make you the enemy, and we can go to war and kill one another. That kind of safety has to end — especially in this nuclear age. We have to make ourselves unsafe to one another personally and psychologically so that our planet can be safe.
June 1988Practical Enlightenment
An Interview With Charles T. Tart
It takes courage to realize, for instance, that you may have been living a life mostly programmed by other people — a life that has nothing to do with your real needs.
May 1988Altered States
An Interview On Shamanism With Leslie Gray
I teach shamanic techniques which enable clients to have access to parts of their consciousness that they ordinarily can’t reach, and that’s what does the healing. I show them how to journey, and how to find a power animal or guardian spirit so that they can develop a relationship with these entities to empower themselves. Then they can do whatever they want to do: lose weight, work on a stuck relationship, heal their dispiritedness or negativity.
March 1988On The Poverty Of Affluence
An Interview With Paul Wachtel
When I look back on the Sixties, I realize it would have been absolutely and utterly inconceivable to me then that the world would be the way it is: that Ronald Reagan would be President, that our society would be so increasingly acquisitive, that the growth of the underclass would have proceeded the way it has. I really thought twenty years ago that today we would look back on the kind of race relations we had in the Sixties as a remnant of some dark age — like slavery and the era of Jim Crow — and that full integration and equality would have been achieved. Obviously, I was extremely wrong, which can be grounds for pessimism. But I do think that something radical and powerful and extraordinary happened in the Sixties. We just didn’t know how to consolidate it, to keep it going.
February 1988On The Virtues Of Distrust
An Interview With Andrei Codrescu
I wouldn’t call it [my world view] cynical, I would go beyond that. I would call it a total distrust of all the cherished notions we have of progress and history — and that’s a Balkan characteristic. We can’t believe that things are going to get better, because we know from our history that they never do.
October 1987The Universe Is Made Of Stories
An Interview With Eaglefeather
One of my hopes is that by telling stories from different cultures, I’m weaving closed some tears in the social fabric of a society that values the white, Christian, male perspective, and shuns and suppresses other ways of seeing. By telling stories from different parts of the world to children all over the world, I hope I’m uniting people by expanding their awareness of each other.
August 1987Acts Of Courage
An Interview With David Schiffman
Time changes a lot of things. And certain struggles develop and then subside if you’re only willing to sit back and not be too eager to correct them. There is a value in not being so interested in striving, but rather in developing a more intrinsic feeling of appreciation for the flow of events. I’ve spent a lot of time cultivating that because it’s clear to me I’ve done a lot of unnecessary suffering, been too interested in the shadings of my own pain.
May 1987Dreams Without End
An Interview With Robert Anton Wilson
When you look at history, you find that we’ve become a lot more merciful as individuals. There’s a paradox in that governments are becoming a lot more destructive, but ordinary individuals nowadays are much more compassionate than they were even a century ago. We have developed more delicate, more ethical sensibilities.
April 1987Making War Obsolete
An Interview With Gene Sharp
Our aim is to blow the top off nonviolent struggle and show people that it’s much more powerful than they believe.
March 1987The Heart Of Compassion
An Interview With Ram Dass
So there’s a part of me that’s perfectly allowing of suffering. And then there’s the human heart that hurts like hell. And it’s that balancing that’s such a beautiful art form. The deepest line I work with, personally and in my lectures, is, “Out of emptiness arises compassion.” That’s the one. Getting to the place where you do what you do. And you’re not milking it for righteousness, and you’re not trying to change the world.
February 1987
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