Damo Mitchell has studied the martial, medical, and spiritual arts of Asia since the age of four. His studies have taken him across the planet in search of authentic masters. He is the technical director of the Lotus Nei Gong School of Daoist Arts and teaches Nei Gong in various locations around the world.
He specializes in uncovering and studying with rare alchemical and spiritual lineages linked to the tradition of Daoism.
Dr. Daniel Brown has been a clinical and forensic psychologist for almost 50 years. He has been at Harvard Medical School for almost 40 years. He has been a student of, translator for, and meditation master in the Indo-Tibetan and Bon meditation tradition for almost 50 years. He has the only Western neuroscience study identifying the brain changes in the shift from ordinary mind to awakened mind.
Whether enlightenment is correlated with ethical behavior. Enlightenment is a holistic development, where all lines of development have flourished.
An explanation of the four clouds of the Heart Sutra.
Establishing neurophysiological correlates of enlightenment.
What does it mean to see the world as sacred?
Development of multiple bodies serving different functions simultaneously (as a result of enlightenment). Has the Dalai Lama done this?
A baseball player who trained by having tennis balls fired in a batting cage at 200mph. A discussion of the relative speeds of thinking, attention, and awareness.
Is there a personal self or entity which reincarnates?
An enlightened person can choose an incarnation rather than being mandated to a particular life by existing “memory traces”.
Detailed discussion on the rainbow body and relics found in the cremation ashes of enlightened beings who have mastered rainbow bodies.
The potential pitfalls of silent retreats.
Not mistaking preliminary stages for more advanced stages.
The only true test of realization is conduct, how you live your life, and how you treat other people.
Witnessing
The difference between ordinary and awakened awareness. Integrating awakened awareness into all other activity.
Stages in the development of concentration.
The process of releasing memory traces.
What practices are good for a beginner? Eligibility requirements for different stages of instruction.
Discussion of the Padmasambhava quote, “Although my awareness is as vast as the sky, my attention to karma is as fine as a grain of barley flour.” The importance of continuing vigilance after enlightenment.
Do enlightened people all experience a universal, ultimate reality in the same way, or do different spiritual paths and personal tendencies result in enlightenment being different for different people?
Can you do anything to get to non-doing?
Conspiracies and cult mentality. The importance of cultivating discernment on the spiritual path.
The importance of enlightened leaders. Can they be effective without an enlightened populace?
In this conversation, we discuss whether consciousness fundamental or an epiphenomenon of brain functioning. If it is fundamental (our view), how can this become the accepted paradigm? If it did so, how would this change the world?
Topics covered include:
Does the brain produce consciousness or do the brain and everything else emerge from consciousness? What does the research say?
How do NDEs help answer this question?
If consciousness is a fundamental field, is it intelligent – a ‘transcendental universal mind’?
How did the scientific assumption that consciousness arises from matter become predominant?
How did the Church retard scientific progress?
The Galileo Commission – so named because just as Galileo’s critics refused to look through his telescope, modern scientists refuse to look at evidence suggesting that consciousness is fundamental.
Scientists are often unaware of the broader assumptions underpinning their work.
Historical tension between religious mystics and administrators.
If the primacy of consciousness were widely understood and experienced, we would realize our essential oneness. This would transform politics and all other fields of human endeavor. Lacking this knowledge and experience, people, corporations, and politics tend to be ‘excessively individualistic’ – placing self-interest before the good of the whole. This includes short-sightedness, denying or ignoring slow-moving catastrophes such as climate change.
Quantum physics undermined materialism a century ago, but other sciences such as biology have maintained it.
Mind and matter emerge from a deeper reality – a coherent field that can be accessed through mystical experience.
Discussion on the importance of experiential understanding of consciousness in education and opposition from religious fundamentalists.
In most cases, paradigm shifts start with a creative minority (5%) and gradually grow to become the norm.
Humanity is now too clever to survive without wisdom.
Damo Mitchell has studied the martial, medical, and spiritual arts of Asia since the age of four. His studies have taken him across the planet in search of authentic masters. He is the technical director of the Lotus Nei Gong School of Daoist Arts and teaches Nei Gong in various locations around the world.
. His new book of essays, A Quest for Wisdom comes out in March 2021.
