Adventures in Awareness

If you ever feel that you’ve had to adapt your life to expectations from family and society, then don’t worry - James Hollis (a world-leading Jungian) says this is necessary and natural.


At least when we’re young!

But after decades of adapting ourselves to fit in, something goes numb. We lose touch with our own inner voice, “with our own truth and we live separated from our own souls.”


He sees many people living lives they would not choose, and don’t know what to do about it.

“More people suffer from a disconnect from meaning than any other cause” but it is not in diagnostic manuals, not recognised as a disorder.
He thinks this is the problem of our times.

Meanwhile, Bernardo Kastrup believes that idealism "though excruciatingly difficult sometimes… offers the potential for breakthroughs that will fill you with meaning and contentment to the point of bursting."


So I’m happy to be hosting a dialogue between them on this topic in 3 hours.
If it sounds interesting, you can join here! (also recorded and sent to everyone registered.

dandelion.events/e/h77lv

1 month ago | [YT] | 22

Adventures in Awareness

Does idealism reduce suffering at the cost of a meaningful life?

I was first introduced to nonduality as a path to fundamental wellbeing. If, like a dream, we recognise that reality is made of consciousness, then worry, regret and anxiety all fade to insignificance.

But this orientation teeters precariously close to nihilism. In some, it might lead to a detachment from life. A numbing out rather than a waking up.

So I was encouraged to discover that world-leading Jungian James Hollis, who famously declared that the goal of life is meaning, not happiness, has great admiration for idealist Bernardo Kastrup.

Many people feel a tension between a spiritual life and an engaged one. Teachings that exhort surrender and ego-transcendence imply a rejection of our pleasures and purpose. But if the goal of life is to merge back to oneness, why would the one go to the trouble of appearing as many?

For Bernardo, a Western approach to idealism does not entail an escape from the richness and rigour. "Though excruciatingly difficult sometimes,” he says, "it offers the potential for breakthroughs that will fill you with meaning and contentment to the point of bursting."

This is relevant to James Hollis, who believes that lack of meaning is the problem of our time. “More people suffer from a disconnect from meaning than any other cause.” Yet it doesn’t show up in psychiatric manuals and it's not categorised as a disorder.

The tragedy is that, whilst there is an inherent hunger “for meaning and purpose”, many people have no idea what to do about it. When asked, they say “I just don’t know what interests me. I don’t know what I want from my life.”


For many, the decades of needing to fit in with family and society makes something goes numb. We become separated from our inner voice, “lose contact with our own truth and we live separated from our own souls”.

In the face of this suffering, some may turn to meditation. But the danger is this could merely replace the numbing effects of adaptation with a deliberate dissociation from its consequences.

What if some forms of suffering are a call from deep within, away from distraction? A call towards a unique flowering that life wants to live through you. Perhaps, as James says, the goal of life is meaning, not happiness.

Through depth psychology, James helps people reconnect with their inner knowing. (You can find many inspiring interviews with him online, and I especially enjoyed this one:
open.spotify.com/episode/4G8he0GUJ9WMAk8wQaaYlt?si…

BUT WHAT HAS THIS GOT TO DO WITH IDEALISM?

This coming Monday, Bernardo and James will dialogue on this exact question.
Perhaps idealism can be a framework for both transcendence and depth, purpose and peace.


We’ll ask how idealism could transform our approach to meaning and our life’s work.
(After all, “vocation” comes from the Latin “vocatio”, meaning “a call.”) This is never about making money or being important, but rather something far more personal, private and unique.

We'll ask how Jung’s insights on archetypes, shadow and individuation might bridge idealism into the texture of an actual human life.

Maybe seeing the world not as dead matter, but as living mind can imbue our relationships with meaning, our path with purpose, and help us better hear the call to be who we are.

Dialogue with Bernardo Kastrup, James Hollis, Monday 8th 2025,
3pm - 5pm UK time / 4pm - 6pm Central European Time / 10am - 12pm EST
dandelion.events/e/h77lv

1 month ago | [YT] | 27

Adventures in Awareness

Never mind AI - what if we are already surrounded by intelligent minds that we didn't have the intelligence to notice?

Harvard biologist Michael Levin is one of the most brilliant thinkers I've had the privilege to interact with, and last month answered my most pressing questions about how he investigates this very question.

He points out how the rules of mathematics don't depend on physics, but do affect things in the physical world. In other words, there are things that are true that aren't in the physical world, yet play a role on the physical world. For Michael, this means physicalism (the notion that reality is material and everything in it can be explained by physical things) is “dead on arrival.”

His work in biology, philosophy and computer engineering is asking questions that no one thought to ask before, discovering patterns in nature that would be recognised as signs of life by any behavioural scientist. The implication is that minds are to be found everywhere, not just biology, and he proposes techniques to demonstrate this empirically.

If minds are everywhere, where are their boundaries?

This idea that mind is fundamental to reality is shared by Bernardo Kastrup. But there is still room for debate! Discerning where one mind ends and another begins is no easy task, philosophically or experimentally. Michael and Bernardo engaged in a riveting debate on the topic last month, which I summarised here www.withrealityinmind.com/recording-michael-levin-…

and which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3xtR...

You can watch the hour long interview with Michael on youtube here:

https://youtu.be/N0_nUt-UpV4

And join the Q&A with Michel Levin tomorrow, 18th Nov, be registering here: dandelion.events/e/a9l98

1 month ago | [YT] | 4

Adventures in Awareness

I sat down last weekend with Shamil Chandaria to hear his plans for an upcoming day retreat.



Because it was intended just for my own use, it’s not a professional recording. But I found it so powerful and inspiring that Shamil agreed for me to share it. As a private conversation, it's perhaps more spontaneous and revealing than formal presentations tend to be.



As Shamil describes his vision of awakening, his warmth and enthusiasm are infectious, and the content is like a guided meditation.



I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did!



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr1jE...

2 months ago | [YT] | 11

Adventures in Awareness

we're online with Michael Levin and Bernardo Kastrup in 3 hours 🙂
You can join here: dandelion.events/e/w32nr

3 months ago | [YT] | 2

Adventures in Awareness

Rupert Sheldrake has said that Michael Levin is "one of the most creative biologists working today" and Bernardo Kastrup that he is “perhaps the most important person alive.”

So I'm beyond excited to have him returning for a dialogue with Bernardo to question and inspire each other's ideas on how intelligence and consciousness may pervade reality.

Michael Levin's pioneering research has already challenged mainstream assumptions about life. His work at Harvard and Tufts University shows how even a single cell can display memory and problem-solving abilities once thought exclusive to brains.

He contends that intelligence is a fundamental property of living systems, and that your body is a hierarchy of intelligent entities nested within each other, from your organs down to your cells, molecules and maybe even subatomic particles.

Michael aims to empirically demonstrate how these systems cooperate and combine, and his experiments with flatworms and tadpoles indicate that bioelectric fields may play a role. These could explain how a planaria can regenerate its dissected brain and rebuild the memories things it had learnt. Or how the cells on the back of a tadpole can be directed to spontaneously form a working eye.

Check out this short here for a taster:
www.youtube.com/shorts/UgbdKp...


Wednesday 24th September 2025
6-8pm UK time / 7-9pm CET / 1-3pm EST

And you can join the event here:
dandelion.events/e/w32nr

3 months ago | [YT] | 42

Adventures in Awareness

Online in 10 minutes with Andrew Holecek: discussing a Tibetan Buddhist response to the Bernardo Kastrup | Jay Garfield debate - is consciousness primary or empty?

You can join live here!

dandelion.events/e/w0dr9

4 months ago | [YT] | 3

Adventures in Awareness

What if myths and legends could awaken a deeper relationship with the creative forces of reality?

Our last conversation with Patrick Harpur transformed how I engage with fairy-tales I have known my whole life, and revived a deeper respect for Western traditions. You can see this previous dialogue here:

https://youtu.be/r4hEOJQpbiw

Bernardo Kastrup considers Patrick amongst the top 3 authors worthy of far more exposure, so I'm excited to have them in dialogue this coming Tues. They will discuss Bernardo's new book and the importance of moving past a literal understanding of imagination.

Zoom link for all our September meetings with Bernardo Kastrup is here:

www.withrealityinmind.com/special-guest-patrick-ha…

4 months ago | [YT] | 9

Adventures in Awareness

Is meditation enough to stop the abuse that happens in spiritual communities?

If you're on this channel, you're probably already aware of how powerful and transformative meditation can be, and equally aware of how many gurus and communities are rife with abuse and scandal.

How can we reconcile these two facts?

Perhaps meditation is not enough.

In this 3 minute clip Andrew Holecek recounts his personal perspective, based on several decades studying and teaching around the world:

https://youtu.be/BSxkyh6nswk

In this short video, he also points you that you can't think or therapy your way to awakening - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUrZ9...

What do you all think?

4 months ago | [YT] | 6

Adventures in Awareness

In 2012, Bernardo Kastrup released Meaning in Absurdity, a book on bizarre phenomena such as UFOs, entities and visitations and what they might imply about the nature of reality.

When we discussed this last year, my first question was 'what the hell do UFOs have to do with Idealism?' The ensuing conversation was fascinating and unique, and you can see it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=optOk...

We're doing a Q&A with Bernardo on this topic this coming Tues, and you can join here:
www.withrealityinmind.com/meaning-in-absurdity/

"The idea developed in the book is, in my opinion, one of my key contributions, for not only does it shed light on the absurd in an unexpected but intriguing manner, it also bears direct relevance to our entire view of the nature of reality."

Like the book, these sessions will "ask you to have an open mind and enough mental flexibility to navigate through seas that will drag you out of your comfort zone, wherever it may lie.

If you are at home with the wacky, the weird, and the absurd – but can keep yourself engaged when structured thinking is called for – you may find a new world of insights when we explore quantum entanglement, Gödel’s theorems, intuitionistic logic, and the history of science.

If, instead, you are comfortable with science and formal philosophy – but can balance your skepticism and cynicism – you may find a breath of fresh air when we explore the serious aspects of UFOs, the Otherworld, and the inner landscapes of the unconscious"
A rare opportunity

Because there is so much unreliable information on this topic, Bernardo no longer engages on it publicly. So it is a rare chance for a private conversation on the 12th and 19th of August at our regular time:  6-8pm UK time / 7-9pm CET / 1-3pm EST

On the 19th of August, we're also joined by special guest Jeffrey Kripal.

Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) and high strangeness field has seen remarkable developments in recent years:

In 2017, The New York Times published a groundbreaking article revealing a secret Pentagon program dedicated to studying UAPs - the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Then, in 2020, the Department of Defense formally released videos confirming sightings by military personnel, followed by a 2021 report from National Intelligence stating that 143 out of 144 UAP of these encounters reported since 2004 remained unexplained.

In 2022 the U.S. government established an office (AARO) to investigate, before the 2023 whistleblower testimony to Congress which claimed the retrieval of non-human craft and biologics, pushing the conversation into mainstream awareness.

Additionally, academic initiatives like Harvard’s Galileo Project and NASA’s UAP study team are taking a rigorous, transparent scientific approach to these mysteries, moving the conversation from ridicule to serious inquiry.

Bernardo will provide an update on his most recent thoughts on these phenomena and their public perception, and as always, your comments and questions are welcome below, and will help shape the discussion.

5 months ago | [YT] | 22