Deep Transformation Podcast: Self - Society - Spirit

11/02/2025

Governor Jerry Brown: "...Two big things we need, which we don't have anywhere near enough of. One of them is a sense of wanting to work together, a shared sense of common danger, common fate, which we don't have."

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🎙️ Governor Jerry Brown on Life, Power, and the Future of Humanity (Part 1 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/governor-jerry-brown-life-power-future-of-humanity-1/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

Two big things we need, which we don't have anywhere near enough of. One of them is a sense of wanting to work together, a shared sense of common danger, common fate, which we don't have. If you think of Xi Jinping and Trump or Putin, they talk like one could win. Maybe one might, under certain circumstances, but there's a great danger that we all lose if we don't control climate, if we don't find ways to minimize pandemics, if we don't find a way to reduce some of the inequalities that will foster terrorism. And terrorism plus artificial intelligence linked to genetic engineering could result in man-made pandemics of a horrible character. And that's why the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists puts out this doomsday clock.

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11/01/2025

“We should not sleep in the delusion that things are better than they are.”

🎙️ Episode 206
Governor Jerry Brown on Life, Power, and the Future of Humanity (Part 1 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/governor-jerry-brown-life-power-futur

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

In this extraordinary, compelling conversation, visionary, activist, and long-time politician, former Governor of California Jerry Brown gets right to the heart of the things that matter most. From truth seeking on an individual level (the importance of inquiring into the depths of our reality), to the challenge of our democracy (getting a consensus in a population that has no coherence), to the problem of leadership (now it’s all about winning, which works on the football field but not for international relations), the fear and greed that drive the arms race (we’re not talking about the arms issue, and to not talk about it is to be complicit), and the existential danger of nuclear war (as important as it is underreported), Jerry nails the essence of our most pressing issues.

Jerry’s deep concern about the existential threats we face today, such as nuclear war and climate change, is matched by his enthusiasm for life and excitement over the fact that the future is unknowable. “We have to turn,” he says, “and everyone can contribute to amplifying the turn.” We discover some of the key formative events that shaped Jerry’s keenly discerning character, so evident throughout his career and still today in his eighties, and why co-host Roger Walsh describes him as a “force of nature.” This conversation is thoroughly enjoyable, inspirational, eye opening, and disturbing too. “We are on the brink, but no one wants to hear it,” Jerry says. “How do you speak the truth in a way it can be heard?” Recorded August 7, 2025.

10/31/2025

An Hour Long Guided Meditation with Deep Transformation podcast co-host Dr. Roger Walsh

This hour long meditation with Lama Roger Walsh offers guidance through a sequence of several practices, primarily Buddhist, that can be used separately or in various combinations for rich meditation sessions and ongoing practice.

It begins with a reflection and cultivation of gratitude as a way of opening the heart and appreciating our interconnection, invites setting an intention or aspiration for our lives, and then offers two meditations for cultivating the qualities and capacities of heart and mind to empower these aspirations.

It next offers guidance for becoming aware of thoughts, images, and other mental phenomenon as they arise, and before they hypnotize us, thus enabling us to catch them rather than them catch us. This is a very important skill for meditation.

In the final phase, it offers guidance for the more advanced Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen practice of resting in pure awareness, able to calmly witness all experiences, without being controlled by any of them. Recorded on October 26, 2025.

Watch the full session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYwktnR53Uo

Free weekly meditation town Hall with Lama Surya Das. Lama's guest host this week is his dear friend and dharma brother Lama Roger Walsh. He is a cohost of t...

10/30/2025

“To be in the nonconceptual state, i.e. in sitting meditation, is half of it, but to actualize it is the other half.”

🎙️ A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

📺 The FULL video of this conversation is now available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyRsWqoeQ30

Some of the topics discussed in this episode:
• The nonconceptual dimension: beyond knowing, only perception
• Our foundational dichotomies: being/nonbeing, being/doing, good/bad, and more
• Deconstructing our concept of ourselves as “doer”
• How do we develop continual nonconceptual awareness?
• Even beyond knowing, goodness & compassion are inherent

A. H. Almaas (Hameed Ali): “To be in the nonconceptual state, i.e. in sitting meditation, is half of it, but to actualize it is the other half.”🎙️ A. H. Alm...

10/29/2025

A. H. Almaas (Hameed Ali): "...Many people begin their spiritual journey because their life feels meaningless and they're looking for the meaning of life. What is the meaning of my life?"

🎙️ A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14, Part 2 of 2) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

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📺 Watch the FULL video conversations or 🎧 listen to the FULL audio only interviews of the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series:

https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series/

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

Many people begin their spiritual journey because their life feels meaningless and they're looking for the meaning of life. What is the meaning of my life? And you cannot find it in the external world. You find it in the inner journey, you know, spiritual realization until you recognize your true nature, your essential nature and that becomes—so the meaning is not a concept. It is actually the beingness itself. It is the presence itself. When we feel that, the sense of looking for being disappears. That becomes the true meaning. That's why I think the Sufis, when they refer to presence, they call it meaning.

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10/25/2025

A. H. Almaas (Hameed Ali): "The dichotomies are important for the development of the human being. You need the good and bad, you need being and non-being, you need doing and non-doing to function in the ego level which is a necessary stage..."

🎙️ A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14, Part 2 of 2) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

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📺 Watch the FULL video conversations or 🎧 listen to the FULL audio only interviews of the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series:

https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series/

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

The dichotomies are important for the development of the human being. You need the good and bad, you need being and non-being, you need doing and non-doing to function in the ego level which is a necessary stage. One of the dichotomies, for instance, we talked about being and doing, good and bad, being and non-being, but all are conceptual dichotomies. The important thing I wanted to say here is that when we begin to have hints of this dimension, those conceptual dichotomies arise as the obstacles, and that's why we need to see them as conceptual dichotomies that are not fundamental. They're not absolutely fundamental. So they arise because the whole edifice of knowledge and self are based on them.

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10/23/2025

“Conceptual dichotomies are important for the functioning of the human being, they are our building blocks… We need to recognize their usefulness—and also be able to be without them.”

🎙️ Episode 205
A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14, Part 2 of 2) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series-14-2-waking-up-to-pure-awareness/

In the fourteenth dialogue in the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series, Hameed Ali explores the nonconceptual nature of the dimension of pure awareness, guiding us into the realm that lies beyond conceptual dichotomies such as being/nonbeing, being/doing, duality/nonduality, good/bad, and meaningful/meaningless. Beyond knowing, this dimension exposes and challenges conceptual polarities, and when we arrive at this level of realization we are able to trust letting go of knowingness and wake up to pure awareness. People fear annihilation at the prospect of going beyond concepts, Hameed explains, and it does lead to a death: the death of mind, the death of the doer. But even here beyond knowing, Hameed continues, the nonconceptual always operates from compassion and love. Recorded August 14, 2025.

10/22/2025

A. H. Almaas (Hameed Ali): "...well, how can you walk without knowing you're walking? How will you know where to go? Pure awareness knows through its own wisdom..."

🎙️ A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14, Part 1 of 2) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

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📺 Watch the FULL video conversations or 🎧 listen to the FULL audio only interviews of the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series:

https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series/

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

In the pure awareness, you don't even know you're walking, because walking is a concept. This is interesting how that is possible. Because most of us will think, well, how can you walk without knowing you're walking? How will you know where to go? Pure awareness knows through its own wisdom, and because your knowing is implicit in it, but it's not appearing as mind. It has been integrated into being. So usually I mean that's—somewhat the masters sometime talk that way. Everything just happens, you know.

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10/21/2025

A. H. Almaas (Hameed Ali): "The doer is one manifestation of the self. To be free from the doer is not easy..."

🎙️ A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14, Part 1 of 2) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

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📺 Watch the FULL video conversations or 🎧 listen to the FULL audio only interviews of the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series:

https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series/

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

The doer is one manifestation of the self. To be free from the doer is not easy. But most people don't know how to operate, how to function from any one of those deep dimension, and non-conceptual is one of the most difficult. Like how do you live your life when life has many things, and specific categories, and stuff. So, that's why I usually think in sitting meditation or any practice, to be in the state, is half of the realization. The other half is actualization. Actualization is to actualize it in life, in living, functioning, doing. That's the other half. But it means deconstructing the doer, and even having the notion that the doer can be deconstructed.

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10/18/2025

“To be in the nonconceptual state, i.e. in sitting meditation, is half of it, but to actualize it is the other half.”

🎙️ Episode 204
A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series (Dialogue 14, Part 1 of 2) – Waking Up to Pure Awareness: Transcending Your Mind

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/a-h-almaas-wisdom-series-14-1-waking-up-to-pure-awareness/

In the fourteenth dialogue in the A. H. Almaas Wisdom Series, Hameed Ali explores the nonconceptual nature of the dimension of pure awareness, guiding us into the realm that lies beyond conceptual dichotomies such as being/nonbeing, being/doing, duality/nonduality, good/bad, and meaningful/meaningless. Beyond knowing, this dimension exposes and challenges conceptual polarities, and when we arrive at this level of realization we are able to trust letting go of knowingness and wake up to pure awareness. People fear annihilation at the prospect of going beyond concepts, Hameed explains, and it does lead to a death: the death of mind, the death of the doer. But even here beyond knowing, Hameed continues, the nonconceptual always operates from compassion and love.

How do we develop a continuity of nonconceptual awareness? Roger and John wonder. One way is when knowing is integrated into being, Hameed answers. Then everything just happens; the doing is funneled through the individual. And there is another way, through developing the “pearl beyond price,” the individual, Hameed adds, but this way is rare. As co-host Roger Walsh says, this is an especially nourishing, stimulating, and intriguing discussion, with Hameed doing a beautiful job of relating how our concepts form the basis of our existence and what it means to transcend them, let go of our mind, deconstruct our perception of ourselves as the “doer,” and wake up to pure awareness. Recorded August 14, 2025.

A. H. Almaas relates how we can get beyond concepts, beyond our mind, and awaken to the dimension of pure awareness.

10/16/2025

“No secular, material, and empirical path is going to satisfy the longing we have for a transcendent purpose, for meaning, for existential belonging, in the ways that a healthy spirituality can.”

🎙️ The Way of Spiritual Discernment: Attuning to Inner Guidance to Serve Oneself & the World with Fr. David McCallum SJ

📺 The FULL video of this conversation is now available on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0B2IRHe4GY

Some of the topics discussed in this episode:
• What is spiritual discernment?
• Getting back to direct experience of God; becoming an instrument of the divine
• The rise of secularism; also burgeoning fundamentalism
• Pope Francis’ call for action on behalf of the earth
• In the U.S. today, what shape should religiously motivated resistance take?
• The Church’s relationship with A.I.

“No secular, material, and empirical path is going to satisfy the longing we have for a transcendent purpose, for meaning, for existential belonging, in the ...

10/14/2025

Fr. David McCallum, SJ: "...in that encyclical, Francis mentions the misinterpretations of Genesis where God offers creation to humanity and says, 'Have dominion over it.' And Francis, having been informed, I think very well, by various indigenous thinkers over the years, knew that it was necessary to challenge this separateness and this lordship that is a kind of domination of the earth..."

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🎙️ The Way of Spiritual Discernment: Attuning to Inner Guidance to Serve Oneself & the World with Fr. David McCallum, SJ (Part 2 of 2)

🎧 https://deeptransformation.io/spiritual-discernment-attuning-to-inner-guidance-fr-david-mccallum-sj-2/

Visit the episode page for a summary, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned.

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❤️ Our podcast is a labor of love funded solely by co-hosts Roger and John. If you enjoyed this episode, please help us keep these meaningful conversations alive by supporting us through: https://deeptransformation.io/donate/

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Trailer Transcript:

I was very grateful that in that encyclical, Francis mentions the misinterpretations of Genesis where God offers creation to humanity and says, "Have dominion over it." And Francis having been informed, I think, very well by various indigenous thinkers over the years, knew that it was necessary to challenge this separateness and this lordship that is a kind of domination of the earth and rather to have that kind of Franciscan sense of no, we are interdependent. We are completely related in a very profound way, and often hidden ways, to this natural world of which we are an extension. And yeah, he challenged that kind of old and very powerful mindset that somehow the earth is an object to be exploited, but rather really sees it as a sacred entity of which we are a part.

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