{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Co-Presence: The Legacy of RD Laing \u2013 Part 2","description":"Dear Listeners, Welcome to this podcast, which is part 2 of Co-Presence: The Legacy of R.D. Laing. Again, our group of distinguished guests includes Nita Gage, Michael Thompson, Fritjof Capra, and Jeff Fortuna. If you\u2019ve been fortunate to already hear part 1, you know you\u2019re in for another feast of the mind and heart. I had the good fortune to meet \u201cRonnie\u201d Laing in 1987, while he was in Boulder as a guest lecturer at Naropa University. Though he was obviously brilliant, I didn\u2019t really understand Laing\u2019s impact on the field of western psychology until meeting Michael Thompson in 2015, when he invited us to the conference that he, Nita, and Fritjof had organized at the Esalen Institute\u2014titled Laing in the 21st Century. My immediate and unmistakable experience of that gathering was that I\u2019d just walked into a group of people that felt like a family I was meeting for the first time. I also had to laugh to myself, wondering where I was when the brains got passed out. While just scratching the surface of his profundity, the atmosphere that Nita, Michael, and Fritjof created was an actual transmission of Laing\u2019s mind and work: the spirit of open inquiry, passionate interest in ideas, high-octane intellectual discourse, a wide bandwidth that runs the gamut from ancient Greek thought to cutting-edge work with psychedelics, all moving fluidly from in-the-moment personal experience to societal and large system perspectives. Capping it all off, this conference was held at Esalen, which meanders along the beautiful Pacific cliffs at Big Sur. Now having become a yearly event, these conferences embody the atmosphere Laing attempted to create in his therapeutic work\u2014according to those who knew him well\u2014including never missing the point that having fun is part of expanding our understanding of mind and how the world works. A core element in the Laing Conference atmosphere is the acceptance of how we all, maybe especially Laing himself, naturally experience sanity and neurosis; it\u2019s simply an aspect of being human. As part of that last point, \u201cothering\u201d someone for having extreme state experience is not just failing to understand mind and confused mental states, but it\u2019s actually a deeply violent act. Beyond that, our family structures, society, and world politics are at least as confused and violent, but it\u2019s what we\u2019ve become familiar with, thus being \u201cnormal.\u201d Being well ahead of his time, Laing was at times quite tortured with his insights. Even so, he always remained passionately interested in shaking the world out of its sleepy acceptance of \u201cinsanity and violence as normal.\u201d Though not always easy to tolerate for those around him, raising awareness\u2014attempting to wake the world up\u2014was Laing\u2019s way of expressing love and compassion for the world.  Listening to this podcast conversation will offer a small glimpse into the legacy of R.D. Laing. I hope you follow your curiosity further into the individual work of Nita, Michael, Fritjof, and Jeff\u2014all available on their websites. And if you really want to treat yourself, I highly encourage attending one of their conferences at Esalen. May it have as much of a transformative effect on you as it\u2019s had on me. Thanks for tuning in, and happy listening. ","author_name":"Windhorse Journal Podcast","author_url":"https:\/\/windhorsecommunityservices.com\/journal\/","html":"