Explore every episode of the podcast Becoming Human

The Poetry Peddler podcast is a show celebrating living language as an expression of the human spirit. 

The show explores poetry’s crucial role in resisting the global language crisis. Each episode invites listeners into a world where language is a vital force of human spirit, freedom, and creativity, featuring original poems, and conversations on the transformative magic of words. 

This episode features part two of my conversation with Christian Wiman who is the author, editor, or translator of fourteen books, most recently, Zero at the Bone, Fifty Entries Against Despair.  From 2003-2013 he was the editor of Poetry magazine, and he is a former Guggenheim Fellow and the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where I had the privilege of studying with him. 

Support the Peddler! 

https://www.thepoetrypeddler.com

The Poetry Peddler podcast is a call to revive the living power of language through poetry as a way of life. Hosted by poet and editor Alexandra Barylski, this show explores poetry’s crucial role in resisting the global language crisis. Each episode invites listeners into a world where language is a vital force of human spirit, freedom, and creativity, featuring original poems, and conversations on the transformative magic of words. 

This inaugural episode features part one of her conversation with Christian Wiman who is the author, editor, or translator of fourteen books, most recently, Zero at the Bone, Fifty Entries Against Despair.  From 2003-2013 he was the editor of Poetry, and he  is a former Guggenheim Fellow and the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, where she had the privilege of studying with him. 

Why bother becoming human? In difficult times, it's easy to lose hope. After 5 years since launching this show with Becoming Human: Origins, I decided it's time for an update. This episode shares some of the impact of the work, its relevance today, and how you can access Becoming Human Origins right now.  

Who is the Poetry Peddler, and why is poetry so important today?

Alexandra Barylski is an award winning poet, editor, and entrepreneur, and longtime producer for the Becoming Human Project. She is launching the Poetry Peddler Podcast, journal, and press, and sat down with me to discuss why editing is a critical skill today, how poetry touches the uncanny dimension of existence, how poetry and philosophy connect, and how practicing poetry as a way of life deepens our receptivity and openness to Living Language, the spiritual wellspring of consolation and joy.

Join the Peddler! 

https://www.gofundme.com/f/for-women-for-poets-for-a-better-world?utm_campaign=man_sharesheet_dash&utm_content=amp13_t1&utm_medium=customer&utm_source=copy_link&lang=en_US&attribution_id=sl%3Aab048a49-31f8-42f5-8975-baba09377eac&ts=1756509312

This is a fifteen minute excerpt from my live Becoming Human Academy course, "The Sacred World: An introduction to Religion."

In the lecture, I explain why the academic study of religion is important, how it gives us a deep understanding of inclusiveness and ways of interpreting difference that give us compassion, sympathy, and insight. These are some of the great values of the academic study of religion, especially the way it gives us a new scientific approach to context. We need different understandings of the human, particularly of human context and meaning, which is what the scholarly study of religion provides. 

In this excerpt, I give the example of a great scholar of religion, Diana Pasulka, who uses the unique skills of the scholarly study of religion to approach the big issue of technology and religion today, particularly in the case of UFOs. I also discuss how a book by a UFO experiencer, whom Pasulka writes about, gives examples of how the history of religion helps us understand contemporary phenomena in an exciting new way. 

You are welcome to join the "The Sacred World: An introduction to Religion." You can register now, get the Zoom link, and you will have access to all the past lectures. 

https://www.samuelloncar.com/courses/p/the-sacred-world-an-introduction-to-religion

What are rituals, and what makes something sacred? Mircea Eliade was a historian of religion, philosopher, and author widely regarded as one of the most influential scholars of religion in the 20th century.

His book, The Sacred and the Profane, is a classic introduction to religion that answers these questions. Eliade is known for his scholarly work on Yoga, comparative religion, initiation rituals, hierophanies (sacred appearences), and the sacred logic manifest in our experience of space and time.

In this Explorations episode, I explain how we can make time sacred by introducing Eliade's ideas and discussing my new Becoming Human Academy course (www.samuelloncar.com/shop), and share my understanding of sacred time, which is the divine time of creation, experienced through rituals that connect us to the origin of the world itself. 

How did the most famous philosopher of his time, a darling of the Parisian salons and an internationally renowned philosopher of science, disappear from memory?

Dr. Emily Herring, author of Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, explains the brilliant insights and legacy of Bergson in this wide-ranging Becoming Human Conversation with Samuel Loncar.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote brilliantly about the brain, biology, memory, time, and creativity, exploring the relationship of science, philosophy, and mysticism, yet he has been largely neglected and forgotten. As Herring explores why this is happened, and how much we have to learn from Bergson today, she opens a path to a new, more creative and hopeful vision of philosophy and science. 

Rabbi Adam Yitzchak Polinovskiy is a well-established coach, specializing in the art of personal and professional transformation. His expertise spans a wide range of areas, including mindset mastery, Kabbalistic wisdom, alignment strategies, and leadership development.

In our conversation, we discuss the Kabbalistic background to the modern self-help and personal coaching movement, including figures like Tony Robbins, Reb Adam's personal journey of spiritual transformation, and how to overcome blocks in your business and personal life. 

Learn more about Reb Adam and join the latest Tree of Life cohort at rebadam.com

According to Rabbi Simon Jacobson of The Meaningful Life Center, technology is catalyzing a spiritual awakening, making spiritual knowledge the “key commodity of the future.”

Rabbi Jacobson is a best-selling author of Towards a More Meaningful Life and reaches hundreds of thousands daily through his YouTube channel.

In this far-reaching Becoming Human Conversation, we explore anxiety and “healthy angst,” why religion is declining and spirituality is growing, what the spirit is, why the “messianic age” is about the elevation of human consciousness, and how he would respond if he was representing humanity to a delegation of ethically advanced aliens, and they asked, “What is the matter with humanity?”

Support the Becoming Human Project Conversations by becoming a Project member, subscribing to the Becoming Human Project’s Substack, and supporting on Patreon.

MISSION ➤https://www.samuelloncar.com/mission

MEMBERSHIPS ➤ https://www.samuelloncar.com/memberships

🎧 LISTEN to BECOMING HUMAN ORIGINS Ep. 1-2 for FREE How Philosophy Remade Science and Religion

➤https://www.samuelloncar.com/podcast Becoming Human: Origins tells the story of how an atheistic revolution in philosophy, beginning with Socrates and Jesus, remade religion and science, and set the stage for our post-human age. It argues that the dominant story of reason, science, and religion is a modern myth, and must be replaced if we are to make real progress.

BIO

Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is a philosopher of science and religion, poet, and Editor of the Marginalia Review of Books. ➤ MRB https://marginaliareviewofbooks.com 

Has AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) already arrived?

As the race for Superintelligent machines changes the world, how can humans prepare to thrive? Ancient spiritual traditions reveal surprising insights into how philosophy as a spiritual technology can teach us where AI is heading, and what to do about it. 

Instructor: Dr. Samuel Loncar | Yale University 

How do we reimagine education for a world of AI? What skills do people need, and why? How can philosophy as a way of life create a shared vision of human flourishing? 

Instructor: Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. | Yale University 

Fate is the power of the unchosen to determine your life. It is real and we all know it, or we would never be frustrated. The key question is: can we overcome our fate? Is fate compatible with freedom? An existential strategy is the only way to overcome the power of fate and avoid being a pawn of your environment and history. To conquer fate, we must pursue a scientific understanding of reality, and overcome our limitations. The result is a life ready for immortality.

Long-term planning in short-sighted Western corporations is 10 years, 30 at most. China has a 100 year + strategy for its space program. The Vatican, the oldest continuous city-state with the greatest intelligence network and treasury of any modern country, has been around for at least 1600 years. It thinks in terms all of human history. 

AI proponents and transhumanist tell us we may soon live to be 200, or even being as deathless as the Homeric gods. Clearly, we are not ready for such time scales. Most individuals, corporations, and governments lack the most important thing: a strategy for existence itself, the very thing required to “plan for immortality.” This demands a clear vision do what humans truly are and can become, and a vision and plan for living a life beyond current time scales. How do we prepare to live among the stars? We need to know how to exist here on earth. 

Instructor: Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. | Yale University 

What happens when AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, appears and solves all the problems in science? Can we know the future of science? Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chapter 6, suggests we can predict future scientific developments based on a deep understanding of the current anomalies in our ideas. Our philosophical ideas of nature can provide an orientation towards future research, giving us a window into the future. What do we see if we look?

Series: Notes on Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Ep. 7. 

Instructor: Samuel Loncar, Ph.D | Yale University

Three Theses about the Future of Science

1. We are living through the greatest scientific revolution in over two millennia.
   
   
2. 2. A new revolution in biology connects to the AI revolution, and a scientific theory of consciousness may finally be on the horizon as a result.
   
   
3. 3. Real philosophy should be scientific and thus able to make predictions. I make three predictions about the next 10 years of science. 

Together, these point towards a new theory of consciousness that is philosophically profound, scientifically productive, and existentially significant. 

Apocalypse: A Philosophy of Angels, Ep.6 

Instructor: Dr. Samuel Loncar | Yale University

The Tao Te Ching teaches that the Way offers infinite utility, seeming to promise unending energy and life. Is this possible and what, scientifically, might it mean?

Exploring Chapter 4 of the Tao Te Ching, I show how the human senses point towards hidden paths of refinement and mysteriously deep sources of energy and insight, all found within the physical body.

Tao Te Ching, Ep. 4
Instructor: Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. | Yale University

The simulation theory is all around us, putting somehow the meaning of our very existence into question. Do we really exist?

What does it mean that we question our own existence? A true philosophy of existence must answer these questions, and explain why we ask them, guiding us towards a more conscious, free, and scientific way of life. This is the purpose of the Becoming Human Project: to realize human Existence.

Instructor: Dr. Samuel Loncar | Yale University

If you can get one thing you want, what is the one thing that will give you everything else? Is it power, wealth, or wisdom?

Philosophy as a spiritual way of life teaches us how to develop our human potential, leading to a radical vision of human enhancement. The idea of number is the first step to understanding the coded Messengers of spiritual traditions and how they guide us to a more scientific and positive way of life. 

🙏This video is dedicated to Namagiri with gratitude.

Instructor: Dr. Samuel Loncar | Yale University 

We all want to do good, but we rarely think about how we can know what the good is.

In this video, I discuss Verse 8 of the Tao and its highly logical and practical insights into what is good in any situation and how we can know that we are doing what is good for ourselves and others.

SERIES: Tao Te Ching
Instructor: Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. | Yale University Episode 3, Tao Te Ching

Tolkien’s works have sold over 100 Million copies worldwide because they address the deepest questions humans can ask: Why is there evil and death in the world?

Would Immorality be a good thing? Where did the world come from, and where is it going? Tolkien reveals a new and deeper way to engage humanity’s search for meaning and hope. 

SERIES

Apocalypse: A Philosophy of Angels, Ep. 4 

The topic of UAP (UFOs) is important yet difficult to discuss coherently. Why?

Because the topic requires the best tools of science and scholarship but does not agree on what those are or how they should be applied.

My philosophy of science and religion provides clues to navigating profound changes in human’s cosmic understanding, including the UAP phenomenon.

The rise of the concept of agency in biology and AI connect to Carl Jung’s psychological interpretation of the phenomenon as a manifestation of global psychic unrest and a major alteration of human consciousness.

SERIES 
Apocalypse: A Philosophy of Angels Ep. 3

Did you know Hanukkah and Christmas encode deep philosophical ideas about Enlightenment, becoming Superhuman, and the Future of Humanity?

The stars and the gods once governed the night sky and the dreams humans had of themselves.

The Human story was thus told as a mystery of light, the evolution of the universe, and the fate of the stars.

Apocalypse: A Philosophy of Angels, Ep. 2

Can yielding and flowing really be the Way to attain the good?

Bruce Lee thought so. “Be Water,” he famously said, channeling a central insight of the Tao Te Ching, one of great works of Chinese Philosophy. 

The idea of Angels, whether we believe in them or not, reveals secrets about human consciousness and how to transform it.

In this episode, I use the German poet Rilke to connect deep patterns across Judaism, Islam, and Christianity and other traditions, found in their shared understanding of angels as messengers that lead to revolutionary transformations of human consciousness.

Ultimately, we discover that humans across all time, cultures, and traditions all believe in some idea of what angels are, and that idea is connected to accessing inspiration and higher states of consciousness.

Series: Apocalypse: A Philosophy of Angels

What is the Way? The Way, or Tao, is the central mystery of life, according to the Tao Te Ching, one of the greatest works of Chinese philosophy. 

So how do we find the Tao? What does the Way look like? This video answers that question by introducing the Tao Te Ching, and the mystery of Return... Join me at the Becoming Human Project today!

Is life a momentary fragment, a meaningless event? Or Is life an eternal and glorious process and event?

These two different ideas of life—life as intrinsically meaningless or life as intrinsically meaningful—are connected to our emotional reactions and ultimately our idea of time and our world.

Chef Arturo Franco Camacho is the Culinary Director and Executive Chef of three of New Haven’s best restaurants: Geronimo’s Southwestern Kitchen, Shell & Bones Oyster Bar, and Camacho Garage. His restaurants are not only a destination for great food but fantastic atmosphere.

Trained at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA), the world’s premiere culinary college, he has worked as a chef at restaurants in Spain, France, and London, and spent five years as chef aboard the world’s top cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth II. 

In this conversation, Chef Franco talks about his love of cooking with his mom and grandmother in Mexico at an early age, his brief time in dentist’s school, his travels around the world, and how, despite training and working in top kitchens, he was denied work in Hew Haven as a chef, which lead him to create New Haven’s first taco cart on Yale’s campus.

Science is the only tradition that actively admits its own errors, gaining deeper knowledge by overcoming its tendency to orthodoxy. This happens when scientific revolutions shatter existing paradigms. The process begins with anomalies, potential facts that do not fit the paradigm. The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder sees many anomalies in current physics, and argues that physics today has lost its way because physics has followed the wrong rules, rules of beauty rather than rules proper to science. Hossenfelder’s intervention in physics illustrates the profound relevance of Thomas Kuhn’s discussion of rules and facts in science.

Kuhn explores how scientific facts grow and change, how fact and theory are finally inseparable, and how debates about the rules of science emerge in revolutionary periods, like our own. I use Hossenfelder in conversation with Kuhn’s “The Priority of Paradigms” in Ep. 6 of my series to show facts are far more complex than we realize, and this is why today our partisanship manifests as a world of no shared facts. Science shows the way forward.

Episode 6, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: An Introduction

According to Thomas Kuhn, the most mature sciences have only a limited tolerance for novelty. Contrary to the common image of scientific progress as a continuous series of discoveries, Kuhn shows it’s actually the progress of paradigms towards ever greater precision. Progress in normal science thus does not aim at novelty but the enrichment of the depth and concreteness of the theory.

Drawing on the the insights of Edward Witten’s defense of string theory, Episode 5 of Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explores the concept of novelty and discovery in Section IV: “The Nature of Normal Science.”

The longing for a complete science is one of the great dreams of modernity. Is such a complete science possible, and can Kuhn’s idea of a paradigm help us realize it? This episode explores the origins and power of the search for completeness and unity in Western science, and reveals the unexpected spiritual origins of this ideal.

Ep. 4, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: An Introduction

Thomas Kuhn coined the concept of a paradigm to describe the unique achievement of science. Since Kuhn, the terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” have entered into popular culture, but what really is a paradigm? How does it connect to normal science? And can it help us distinguish real science from pseudo-science? All these questions, and more, are explored in this episode of my series on Kuhn.

Episode 3, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: An Introduction

Thomas Kuhn argued that history would change our image of science, causing a revolution we are still unprepared to face. This Kuhnian revolution challenges traditional epistemology by arguing we must look to science itself to understand how knowledge develops, and looking to science demands facing history. This episode of my course on Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explores these issues, and more.

What is Science? What happened in the Scientific Revolution? How does Science progress? Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is the most influential book in the history and philosophy of science, addressing these and other key questions. This public series offers an introduction to this major work and includes a discussion of Kuhn's core ideas: paradigm shifts, normal and revolutionary science, and more.

On Nov. 11, 1855, after an astoundingly rich yet brief life, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard died. He requested his epitaph read simply: “That Individual.” The “single individual” is the soul of Kierkegaard’s work, but what does it mean to become an individual? This final episode of Kierkegaard: The Poet of Existence, explores the mystery of freedom and true individuality, and how they relate to the Eternal.

COURSE RELEASE 8pm EST
10.27.2023

Course Link: www.samuelloncar.com/courses

Course Code: BECOMINGHUMANWITHSK 

Series Description

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and religious thinker, created one of the most consequential bodies of writing in human history. One of the greatest literary writers, he is also widely regarded as the most important philosophers and theologians to create much of the 20th century: movements like existentialism, modern theology, and even forms of modern nihilism can be traced back to the work of Kierkegaard. 

Kierkegaard is known as a delightful and difficult figure; like Socrates, he is ironic and hard to understand. He is also my first great teacher, so to honor his personal and historical influence, I am doing an 8 episode series on Søren Kierkegaard: The Poet of Existence.  

As a philosopher and scholar who writes about Christian-Jewish relations and modern German thought, I offer in this lecture an analysis of antisemitism as a philosophical problem, show its global scope, and explore its historical and existential significance as a threat to any vision of universal human flourishing.

Referenced Materials

Becoming Human: Origins

Christianity's Shadow Founder: Marcion, Anti-Judaism, and The Birth of Protestant Liberalism 

Why Antisemitism is Our Problem

Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and religious thinker, created one of the most consequential bodies of writing in human history. 

One of the greatest literary writers, he is also widely regarded as the most important philosophers and theologians to create much of the 20th century: movements like existentialism, modern theology, and even forms of modern nihilism can be traced back to the work of Kierkegaard. 

Kierkegaard is known as a delightful and difficult figure; like Socrates, he is ironic and hard to understand. He is also my first great teacher, so to honor his personal and historical influence, I am doing an 8 episode series on Soren Kierkegaard: The Poet of Existence. 

Welcome to Episode One: Why Does Kierkegaard Matter?, where I ask why Kierkegaard matters, and explain his historical, philosophical, and spiritual importance today.

Makoto Fujimura is an internationally recognized artist who has developed a unique fusion of traditional Japanese painting, Nihonga, with abstract expressionism. A leading writer, speaker, and thinker on the intersection of art, faith, and culture, Fujimura published Art and Faith: A Theology of Making, with Yale University Press in 2021. In this conversation, Fujimura shares his story and his wisdom on how art is a way of becoming human, how it can help us live with suffering, and even reveal the divine world in everyday life. Topics covered include Miyazaki's vision of a post-atomic Japan, how William Blake's Jerusalem transformed the young Fujimura's life, and why the Western separation of nature and culture is foreign to Japan. 

Harvard Astrophysicist Avi Loeb discusses his book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which lays out his scientific hypothesis that 'Oomuamua, the first interstellar object detected in our solar system, is likely equipment from an Extraterrestrial civilization.

We discuss the state of science, why it has been closed-minded about extraterrestrial life, and what the future of science, and humanity, might be. 

Freedom without choice is an illusion, but choice is not freedom. This episode features the first part of my series on how modernity traps us by increasing meaningless choices while destroying our freedom. Learning why we have so many choices is the first step towards accepting out situation, then transforming it with philosophy as a way of life. 

Since the modern age is over and modernity is a myth, what comes next? This episode offers a history of the current revolution in our greatest knowledge technology: the decline of literary and the rise of a new Aural Age. To respond to the end of reading, we need a new vision of philosophy and education. Welcome to the Becoming Human Project.

No single person has shaped history more than an obscure Jewish teacher who was executed by the Roman empire. Today, we know him as a god, a myth, a savior. In fact, he was the greatest philosopher of his time: Jesus of Nazareth.

Becoming Human: Origins
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale)

Socrates is perhaps our most famous philosopher. But his life and death defy our dominant ideas of reason and religion.  By paying the ultimate price for his philosophy, Socrates became the West's first great religious martyr, changing his world, and ours. 

Becoming Human: Origins
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale)

This episode exposes modern myths about philosophy, religion, and science. To see the truth about ourselves and our culture, we need to recognize Socrates for who he really was: a religious revolutionary.

Becoming Human: Origins
Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale)