Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio.

All right, it's been a while, I think, since we've done a quote-unquote spiritual episode,

an episode about inter-transformation, spiritual practices, deepening, transc transcending ego identification, etc.

And so it's, you know, it's time to do it again.

It's one of the core pillars of Rev Left, I think,

is that we make genuine forays into broadly conceived religious territory.

We see it as a terrain of struggle in many cases,

and we have always argued.

I've always argued.

I do so in my upcoming book and throughout the nine plus years on Rave left, that these sort of serious contemplative practices of deep inner transformation and deepening are part and parcel of an underlying evolution of our species

that has an outward objective revolutionary political social development as well as an inward

psychological existential experiential component and those things are dialectically connected

and that you can't separate the inside from the

outside the subjective from the objective the inward from the outward and if we're really interested

in transformation genuine deep transformation then that transformation occurs at every level

including the level of the individual including the level of consciousness and psychology.

And so with that in mind, I have on, honestly, a great friend of mine, you'll hear in this conversation that Susan and I met through, you know, in the wake of Michael Brooks's passing.

We reached, she reached out, I believe, and we've had a

relationship ever since then. And she's, you know, as a sort of spiritual teacher and a mentor has

helped me greatly during incredibly difficult periods of my life with the loss of my father,

the suffering of a miscarriage and other deep, impactful moments of grief in my life. Susan has been

there. She arose in my life at a crucial time when I clearly needed, you know, her presence. And so

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