The MindThatEgo Podcast

Nisha Gupta PhD is a tenured psychology professor at the University of West Georgia, a trauma-informed relationship psychotherapist, phenomenological researcher, and artist. I discovered Nisha through her recent paper: Can Psychology Be An Art? A Journey from theHuman Sciences to the Psychological Humanities.Nisha explores what a more beautiful psychology might offer a wounded world. We discuss psychology’s origin as “the study of the soul”, beauty’s life-saving role in suicide prevention and offering hope amidst violence and injustice, and redemption amidst guilt and remorse.We look at artificial intelligence as a reckoning for humanity, reverence, grief, and rage as portals to God’s love, art’s role in transmuting both the sacred and the shadow, and why the anima, aesthetic sensibility, and divine feminine should sit on the throne of psychology’s future.

Eirini K. Argyri is a researcher at the University of Exeter's Psychedelic Interdisciplinary Centre (EPIC) and research Associate with the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. Her thesis developed the Ontologically Diversifying Experiences (ODE) framework, which examines pathways towards prosocial and holistic integration. We explore psychedelics’ developmental potential, their disruption to assumptions about selfhood, relationships, and reality, groundlessness and existential distress, boundlessness and experiences of unity, and the importance of trust architecture and access to educational resources.We also look at what contributes to healing communities, power dynamics and the risk of abuse, open-mindedness, agency, and cognitive liberty, and alternative modes of meaning-making, including the intuitive, the embodied, and the mythopoetic.

Resources:
Eirni's thesis.

Sabina Wantoch PhD is a researcher, facilitator, consultant, artist and animist. They are an Honorary Associate Professor at the Centre for Multidisciplinary & Intercultural Inquiry at University College London, a consultant in peer support for mental health with Imroc, and co-founder of The Mad Psychedelics Collaboratory. Their work centres around madness and its porous intersections with varieties of altered states, as well as entanglements between paradigms and conceptual structures. Our conversation covers intersubjectivity and shared perception, reducing the fear of madness, the reciprocal nature of mythos, the varieties of meaning and sense-making, and the importance of equanimity.Sabina then shares three symbols they’ve created; the Net, the Bog, and the Crossroads. Inspired by tarot, these accompany their PhD thesis and form part of Sabina’s upcoming deck that represents the mad experience.Link to Sabina's research.

Jasper Feyaerts is a philosopher and associate professor in clinical psychology at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He is co-founder of the Too Mad to be True conference, alongside previous guest, Wouter Kusters.
Jasper’s research specialises phenomenology, self-disorders, psychosis, and delusions. Our conversation enquires into the elusive, difficult-to-define nature of selfhood. We begin comparing conventional psychiatric models of pathology with direct enquiry into the subjective experience.
We look at the risks and the value of objectifying and conceptualising experience, interaction and knowledge as crucial to self-understanding, the self as it relates to so-called disorder, the view of Eastern spiritual traditions, such as Buddhist no-self, the illusion and necessity of control, flow and immersion versus self-reflection, primordial shame and ontological paranoia, the fear and joy of spontaneity, and what changes Jasper would like to see in the field of psychiatry.

This episode features my talk from the 2024 edition of Too Mad to be True on the theme of The Paradoxes of Madness. In exploring Transrationality and the Paradox of Divine Madness, I use philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games to demonstrate how the models of reality directly influence how sanity and insanity is framed.
If we change our model from conventional materialism to non-duality or pure consciousness, what changes?
I explore the metaphor of “The Light,” that surfaces in all religious traditions and in the phrase en-light-en-ment; the pathologising of spiritual experiences; non-duality as the ultimate paradox; what we can learn from Zen koans and no-mind, the three forms of spiritual blindness; the need to synthesise multiple perspectives; and the role of trans-rationality in human development.