My guest this week is Dr. Steve Taylor. We talked about his latest book, The Clear Light: Spiritual Reflections and Meditations (affiliate link). I had a great time talking with Steve about some pretty fascinating topics, from mind-bending spiritual concepts to very practical ways to be gentle with our minds and to find moments of quiet. We talked about how he met Eckhart Tolle, who wrote the foreword for Steve’s book, as well as ways to reclaim our shared humanity, which seems awfully timely given all that’s happening in the world. Steve also reads some of the poems from his book.

Topics we touched on in this episode include:

• The damage that comes from ego-driven action
• Eckhart Tolle’s books The Power of Now and A New Earth (affiliate links)
• How big ideas seem to occur sometimes to different people at the same time
• The notion that ideas are never lost
• Ideas that might be ready to emerge in the near future
• Openness to non-materialist perspectives, e.g., regarding the brain and consciousness
• Sam Harris’s Waking Up meditation app
• The relationship between spirit and consciousness
• The concepts of pan-psychism and pan-spiritism
• My rudimentary understanding of the Higgs field
• The common quality in spiritual experiences of feeling connected to everything
• How to reclaim our shared humanity
• Readings of poems from Steve’s book
• Forming a bond of empathy with others
• Ego as an identity based on concepts and attachments
• What led Steve to a sense of spiritual awakening
• The feeling of being overwhelmed by our spiritual experiences
• What it means to be gentle with our minds
• How my guest finds moments of quiet, which is where he finds creativity
• Our lost moments of daydreaming and absentmindedness
• What my guest and I think happens when we die
• The intense power of near-death experiences (see episodes 56 with Dr. Raymond Moody and 54 with Dr. Eben Alexander)
• Steve’s affinity for the sea
• The wisdom in trees

Steven M. Taylor, PhD, is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, and the author of several bestselling books on psychology and spirituality.

He’s the current Chair of the Transpersonal Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.

In addition to The Clear Light, Steve’s books include The Leap and The Calm Center. His books have been published in twenty languages, and his articles and essays have been published in over 50 academic journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Scientific American and Psychology Today.

For the past ten years he’s appeared in Watkins’ Mind Body Spirit magazine’s list of “the world’s 100 most spiritually influential living people.” He lives with his wife and three children in Manchester, England.

Find Steve online at his website and on Twitter and Facebook.