The Sacred Speaks

Simon Yugler has spent time inside traditions ranging from Aboriginal Australia to the Shipibo lineage in Peru. Most of us will only ever read about experiences like that. I admire the ground he's stood on, and what it has done to his worldview.

Simon is a depth psychotherapist, psychedelic facilitator, educator, and the author of Psychedelics and the Soul: A Mythic Guide to Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, and Cultural Repair — and his central conviction is that psychedelics are not primarily a mental health intervention. They are initiatory and speak to the soul.

At twenty, he traveled to an Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land, Australia, and was changed by what he encountered there. He went on to apprentice within the Shipibo ayahuasca tradition in the Peruvian Amazon, spending six weeks inside a lineage that didn't reconstruct its transmission from texts. He completed his master's at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where his thesis explored the loss of male initiation rites in Western culture and what the medicine might restore. Today he trains facilitators, runs men's groups, and continues his healing work with individual.

In this conversation, Simon walks inside what he calls mythopoetics — the practice of helping people find the mythic story inside their experience and carry it home. We get into what myth actually means, what archetypes are doing inside psychedelic experience, and why Jungian depth psychology sees what the neuroscience frameworks are blind to.

We also talk about what the medicine gets right. Simon offers a moving case study: a man who, during a psilocybin retreat, rediscovered his own goodness and a genuine encounter with soul.

And we hold the critique. A six-month facilitator training is not a substitute for years of depth work. The medicalization box is too small — and, as Simon puts it, the alien always gets out.

In this conversation:

Mythopoetics and what myth actually is
What living Indigenous traditions carry that Western therapy lost and can't get back from books
The male initiation crisis and the loneliness epidemic
What the medicine reveals that slow depth work cannot reach
A case study in rediscovering one's own goodness
Why the initiatory can't be regulated and why it never will be

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and Show Intro
00:47 Housekeeping and Links
02:57 Meet Simon
05:57 Mythopoetic Approach Explained
07:32 What Myth Really Means
10:20 Archetypes and Psyche
14:16 Simon's Origin Story
16:57 Australia and Indigenous Reality
23:23 Apprenticeship and Lineage
26:16 Western vs. Psychedelic Training
30:32 Why Psychedelics
36:44 Roots and Calling to Heal
38:41 Therapy Spark Moment
39:33 Choosing Pacifica
41:17 Lineage and Early Openings
43:14 Men's Work Thesis Roots
45:07 Why Men Need Gathering
48:40 Loneliness, Grief, and Soul
53:15 Psychedelic Healing Story
58:41 What Psychedelic Work Gets Right
1:04:32 Critique: The Medicalization Box
1:06:41 The Alien Always Gets Out
1:08:22 Closing: Book and Where to Find Simon
Find Simon:
simonyugler.com
simonyugler.substack.com

The Sacred Speaks:
www.drjohnwprice.com
youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg
instagram.com/thesacredspeaks
facebook.com/thesacredspeaks

Theme music: Modern Nations — modernnationsmusic.com

Robert Forte has been at every major inflection point of the psychedelic movement for half a century, and he is skeptical of where it is going. That skepticism, coming from someone who knew Wasson, Hofmann, Grof, and Eliade personally.

Forte brings a rare formation to this conversation: graduate training in religious studies at the University of Chicago under Mircea Eliade, decades of work with the foundational figures in psychedelic scholarship, phenomenological site work in Greece, and the republication of The Road to Eleusis — the thesis that seeded the most popular book in the current psychedelic renaissance. He is a historian of religion who has lived inside the territory he studies.

This conversation opens with a Sufi tale about "changed waters" — a story about what happens when an entire culture shifts its baseline of perception and the one person who held onto the old water eventually drinks the new, because the loneliness of being different became unbearable. Forte has used this story to frame his entire body of work.

From there we move through his formation: a childhood mystical experience by a stream, a turning point in a Columbia lecture hall when a professor wrote R. Gordon Wasson on the chalkboard, and the life that followed. We explore the mystery traditions and what secrecy actually protected, the difference between psychedelics as cultural healing and psychedelics as weapon, and the documented record — MKUltra, media promotion, Huxley's dark warnings, and an account linking JFK's alleged psilocybin experience to his 1963 peace speech. We close on what Forte considers the essential question for this moment: how do we cultivate virtue and discernment when the sacred is being commercialized faster than it can be integrated?

In this conversation:

The Sufi tale of the changed waters — and what it names about modern spiritual confusion
The mystery traditions: what secrecy was protecting, and what its loss costs
Forte's formation — Wasson, Hofmann, Eliade, Grof, and what it means to have received a living transmission
The phenomenology of Eleusis: site work, The Road to Eleusis, and the Mysteries as lived encounter
Psychedelics as both healing and weapon: MKUltra, media, and the politics of altered states
JFK, psilocybin, and the 1963 peace speech
Huxley's warning — and whether we are watching it come true
What virtue and discernment look like when the sacred meets the market

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
05:54 Greek Mysteries and Lineage
09:41 Sufi Tale: When the Waters Change
12:00 Amnesia and the Extremes of Religion
16:23 Childhood: The Mystical Stream
22:15 LSD, Democracy, and TM
26:00 Soma, Wasson, and the Calling
30:31 Psychedelic History: Light and Shadow
34:34 Mystery Schools: Secrecy and Stages
43:50 Jung, the Road to Eleusis
50:10 Why Cultures Need Initiation
52:37 From Weapon to Sacrament
53:59 Kennedy's Psychedelic Turn
56:13 The Peace Speech and Its Fallout
1:00:58 MKUltra and the Acid Hype
1:08:18 Huxley's Dark Warning
1:16:26 Eleusis and Power
1:35:58 Virtue and Discernment
1:38:46 Where to Find Robert

Find Robert:
www.alteredstatesofamerica.net
alteredstatesofamerica.substack.com

The Sacred Speaks:
www.drjohnwprice.com
youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg
instagram.com/thesacredspeaks
facebook.com/thesacredspeaks

Brought to you by The Center for Healing Arts and Sciences — thecenterforhas.com

Theme music: Modern Nations — modernnationsmusic.com

In this In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price sits down with Dr. Susan Schwartz, Jungian analyst and author, for a searching conversation about one of the most underaddressed wounds in contemporary psychology: the absent father.
Susan is the author of The Absent Father Effect on Daughters and the forthcoming Absent Fathers, Yearning Sons. Her clinical work draws on decades of practice and deep immersion in Jungian theory, and what she brings to this conversation is not just scholarly precision but the kind of knowledge that only comes from sitting with this material in the consulting room across a lifetime. Father absence, she argues, is routinely minimized in both psychoanalytic literature and popular culture.
John and Susan move through the specific ways absence shapes identity, relatedness, sexuality, and the gaze. They explore what it means when a father's eyes are never there to confirm a daughter's body, her mind, her worth, and how fathers model partnering, love, and respect for soul. Susan brings two clinical dreams into the conversation: one involving Vladimir Putin as a figure for the negative father complex, and one about cleaning a closet that opens into something unexpected and alive. These are not illustrations. They are the unconscious at work, showing what the personal father could not provide and what the psyche has done with that absence in the meantime.
The conversation moves into territory that will matter to men as much as women: the relationship between absent fathers and male brutality, the failure of initiation when the father is not present to initiate, the ancestral and communal dimensions of the wound, and whether fathers can actually change. Susan's answer to that last question is honest and worth hearing slowly. The episode closes with the questions she believes everyone should be asking, and almost no one does.

Connect with Dr. Susan Schwartz
Website: susanschwartzphd.com
Instagram: instagram.com/susanschwartzphd
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susanschwartzphd
Academia: independent.academia.edu/susanschwartz1
Jung Studies: jungstudies.net/author/seschwartz/

Website for John
drjohnwprice.com
WATCH:
YouTube for The Sacred Speaks
youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg
Instagram:
instagram.com/thesacredspeaks
@thesacredspeaks
Facebook:
facebook.com/thesacredspeaks
Brought to you by:
thecenterforhas.com
Theme music provided by:
modernnationsmusic.com

In this episode of The Sacred Speaks, Dr. John W. Price returns to a conversation with Dr. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, professor at the University of Amsterdam and one of the foremost scholars of Western esotericism. Their first conversation opened into the history of Hermetic spirituality. This one goes further. Hanegraaff's new book, Esotericism in Western Culture: Counter-Normativity and Rejected Knowledge, reframes the entire question: esotericism is not a tradition to be catalogued. It is what the West threw out.

Hanegraaff has spent decades mapping the archive of what official Western culture could not contain, magic, alchemy, gnosis, visionary experience, and asking what those exclusions reveal about the culture that made them. The conversation opens, perhaps unexpectedly, with music. Hanegraaff describes how early encounters with sound became his first experience of altered states and shaped his life's work. The scholarly and the experiential are not separate for him. They never were.
The episode builds toward his concept of the "Greater West," a geographical, cultural, and historical frame encompassing the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and North Africa, and the global expansion that followed 1492. At the center of this history is the anti-idolatry polemic. The monotheistic prohibition against images did not remain a theological dispute. It became a template: a way of naming, marginalizing, and eventually exterminating whatever could be labeled pagan, superstitious, or primitive. What began inside Europe was later exported to every culture the colonial project reached. The logic that condemned the idol condemned the person holding it.
The episode closes with Rilke. What Hanegraaff calls "counter-normative" experience, the visionary, the numinous, the strange encounter that doesn't resolve into explanation, is not a curiosity at the margins of Western thought. It is the part that was deliberately buried. This conversation is an act of recovery.

Key Takeaways:
Esotericism is defined by exclusion rather than content. It is what Western culture rejected, not a unified tradition or school of thought.
The "Greater West" expands the map of Western culture to include Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and North African roots, and the global reach of colonialism after 1492.
Anti-idolatry polemics produced a reusable template for cultural rejection later applied to the spiritual traditions of indigenous peoples during colonial expansion.
The Reformation and Enlightenment did not end the purge of magic and superstition but accelerated it, removing even the possibility of enchantment from the official picture of reality.
Counter-normative experiences, altered states, synchronicities, visions, deserve serious intellectual engagement rather than dismissal. The West forgot them deliberately. Remembering them is a scholarly and a moral act.

00:00 Welcome and Episode Setup
04:11 Guest and Book Spotlight
07:48 Remembering the Rejected West
08:35 Music as Gnosis Gateway
20:58 Alitheia and Unconcealing Reality
24:32 Defining theGreater West
39:05 Paganism and Christianity’s Roots
42:31 Christian Shadow Projection
44:15 Pagan Roots in Islam
47:02 Idolatry and Monotheism
52:26 Magic as Demon Worship
54:03 Reformation to Enlightenment Purge
59:54 Colonial Template Exported
01:04:06Racism and Extermination Logic
01:09:07 Reconstructing the West
01:15:37 Counter Normality and Weirdness
01:19:09 Rilke Quote and Closing

Website for John
http://www.drjohnwprice.com
WATCH:
YouTube for The Sacred Speaks
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/
@thesacredspeaks
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/
Brought to you by:
https://www.thecenterforhas.com
Theme music provided by:
http://www.modernnationsmusic.com

Does consciousness survive death? Investigative journalist Leslie Kean has spent two decades following the evidence, from Pentagon UFO reports to physical mediums in the UK. In this episode, she and John Price explore what happens when rigorous investigation meets phenomena that refuse to fit inside a materialist frame.

Kean describes her path from Zen practice and investigative journalism through the pivotal 1999 French UFO report, to the landmark 2017 New York Times Pentagon UFO story (with Ralph Blumenthal and Helene Cooper). She explains her evidence-based approach in Surviving Death: near-death experiences, children's verifiable past-life memories, and physical mediumship, including her experiences with UK medium Stewart Alexander.

The conversation moves through non-local consciousness, ontological shock, the reduction of fear that comes with encountering this material directly, shifts in modern journalism, and open questions connecting UFO phenomena to afterlife research.

About Leslie Kean
Investigative journalist. Author of Surviving Death and UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. Her 2017 NYT Pentagon UFO investigation was one of the most-read articles in Times history. Zen practitioner for over 30 years.

Key Takeaways
Kean describes an evidence-first approach to phenomena dismissed by mainstream science, grounding investigation in verifiable cases rather than belief.
Non-local consciousness is framed as a working hypothesis supported by NDEs, past-life memories, and mediumship research.
The 2017 NYT Pentagon UFO story catalyzed a cultural shift, connecting investigative journalism to ontological disruption.
Ontological shock surfaces as lived experience: the moment when the worldview cracks, and what integration looks like after.
Kean's encounters with physical medium Stewart Alexander raise questions that challenge even sympathetic investigators.

Timestamps
(00:00) Welcome and Guest Intro
(01:15) Housekeeping and Links
(02:27) Workshops and Community
(04:02) Does Consciousness Survive Death?
(06:22) Non-Local Consciousness
(10:22) How a French UFO Report Changed Leslie's Career
(13:06) The Pentagon UFO Story in the New York Times
(20:56) Handling Ridicule and Maintaining Rigor
(26:15) Ectoplasm and Physical Mediums: Stewart Alexander
(30:03) Evidence Before Transformation
(32:30) Children's Past Life Memories
(34:25) Writing as Investigation
(36:28) Reincarnation and NDE Research
(38:04) The Shoe on the Ledge: A Famous NDE Case
(40:07) Explaining the Unexplainable
(45:15) Journalism and Evidence Standards
(49:54) Why Podcasts Reach Where Print Cannot
(55:12) Integration and the Non-Local Mind
(01:01:00) Ontological Shock: When Your Worldview Breaks
(01:06:33) Being Touched by a Physical Medium
(01:11:14) Evidence Versus Direct Experience
(01:11:55) Why We Survive Death
(01:14:19) How This Evidence Transforms Belief
(01:16:52) Humility Over Certainty
(01:20:29) Beyond Religion Through Evidence
(01:22:55) UFOs and Afterlife Research: Connected?
(01:26:36) Meaningful Work and Gratitude
(01:28:54) Documenting the Impossible
(01:33:42) Closing Reflections

Explore more at Alethia, John's Substack: https://drjohnwprice.substack.com

Connect with Leslie Kean: lesliekean.com

Website: http://www.drjohnwprice.com
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOAuksnpfht1udHWUVEO7Rg
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesacredspeaks/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesacredspeaks/
Brought to you by: https://www.thecenterforhas.com
Theme music: http://www.modernnationsmusic.com