The Masculine Road

An extraordinary visit with one of America's leading poets provides a unique exploration of the mystery of maleness. Bly uses fairy tales to illuminate the dark recesses of the psyche, and the result is a powerful intimation of the male experience and potential. From the soft, feminine male persona to the deeply buried wildman, Bly takes us on a journey through unmapped territory of the masculine. For men and women this is a conversation not to be missed.

Leaving naivete behind may open up the wilder regions of maleness, where men can wrestle with their demons and, in time, reach maturity and balance, according to Bly, poet and men's workshop facilitator. This is a fascinating dialogue which explores the mystery of maleness and includes Bly's storytelling mastery and poetry.

Robert Bly - one of the most compelling mythologists and storytellers of our time - captures the imagination in two live recordings. In The Human Shadow, Bly takes us on a thought provoking and entertaining journey exploring our "shadow" through poetry, music, and storytelling. What Stories Do We Need? reminds us that the mythology we have inherited is often defective. Just as the church refused to accept the reality Galileo saw in his telescope, literalists have removed the dark soul images that nourished our ancestors from mythology.

In this discussion, Bly talks of four sources of shame, including shame inherited from parents, grandparents, and ancestors, and shame over our bodily and creative instincts. It opens with a Russian fairy story on the Frog Princess and the shame we feel over our interior "Frog Bride." Bly and host Michael Toms discuss the new work in America on shame, most of it done during the last ten years.

"As a man is, so he sees." These words of mystical poet and artist William Blake are just as relevant now as they were when they were written in 1802 - perhaps more so. Throughout his life, Blake undertook a voyage beyond rationality and materialism to an interior, visionary realm where "all things appear as they are - infinite." Yet all human beings, he believed, are capable of opening their eyes to a fuller experience of life.

These broadcast quality archival recordings have been edited down into an amazing journey led by Robert Bly, one of America's greatest and entertaining thinkers. This audio explores the poetry of Yeats and goes deep into the author's biography to help bring to light the inspirations of Yeat's great works.

Acknowledged as one of the greatest religious teachers of this or any other age, the late J. Krishnamurti was a visionary whose ideas are still ahead of his time. New Dimensions host Michael Toms was fortunate to capture this philosopher's penetrating wisdom in 1983, just a few years before his death at the age of 90.

Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness - be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases.

In 1957, four years before his death, Carl Gustav Jung, psychiatrist and psychologist, began writing his life story. But what started as an exercise in autobiography soon morphed into an altogether more profound undertaking.

Since its release in 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces has influenced millions of readers by combining the insights of modern psychology with Joseph Campbell's revolutionary understanding of comparative mythology. In this book, Campbell outlines the Hero's Journey, a universal motif of adventure and transformation that runs through virtually all of the world's mythic traditions. He also explores the Cosmogonic Cycle, the mythic pattern of world creation and destruction.

On Nonviolent Communication, this renowned peacemaker presents his complete system for speaking our deepest truths, addressing our unrecognized needs and emotions, and honoring those same concerns in others. With this adaptation of the best-selling book of the same title, Marshall Rosenberg teaches in his own words.

This dialogue reviews Sheldrake's theory of "morphic resonance," which challenges some fundamental assumptions of established science. Sheldrake offers a revolutionary alternative to the mechanistic worldview, and points toward a new understanding of the nature of life, matter and mind. One of the more profound implications of Sheldrake's account here is his suggestion that the brain may be more like a tuning system than a recording device.

More than a mere overview, the book offers listeners a strong grounding in the basic principles of Jung's analytical psychology in addition to illuminating insights.

Over a span of 12 years (1975 to 1987), New Dimensions Radio host Michael Toms recorded conversations between the late Joseph Campbell (author of The Power of Myth) and himself, during which time they developed a close friendship. In these stimulating conversations, central questions in the search for understanding and knowledge of the spiritual universe in which we live are explored.

In this modern spiritual classic, the Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa highlights the commonest pitfall to which every aspirant on the spiritual path falls prey: what he calls spiritual materialism. The universal tendency, he shows, is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement - the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty. "The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use," he said, "even spirituality."