Essentia Readings

How Idealism saved Leo Tolstoy’s life

Today’s article sheds light on the personal journey of one of the world’s most renowned authors, and the impact of idealism on his development and growth. It shows us wha

The march towards Eastern idealism

Today’s article dives into the Western world’s history with consciousness and its still evolving relationship with this subject. It goes on to chart a seeming progression

How can you be me? The answer is time

Today’s article explains, in a very elegant manner, how universal consciousness can indeed present as individual alters, simultaneously. With the help of a few real life

Whirlpools in Universal Consciousness

The article I’ll be reading today unpacks what makes a good metaphor, why metaphors are so valuable to our pursuit of Truth, and invites us to appreciate the simple elega

The Copernican Revolution of the human mind

Today’s article calls for a revolution. And like a number of revolutions in history, it is an attempt to dethrone a controversial king; one the author thinks has long out

There is no personal self

Today’s article challenges our currently held notion of self and how we typically define experience, as well as consciousness itself.  It argues that the concept of an is

Dissociation and complexity: A psychiatrist’s perspective

The article I’ll be reading today is a master class on dissociation, from the field of psychiatry. It breaks down the complexity of this phenomenon, and shows us that it

Contact with universal consciousness

Today’s article examines our decidedly limited mental representation of the world, and how it is fundamentally linked to the systems of meaning available to us, to our pe

Is the human brain a model of the universe?

The article I’ll be reading today presents documented similarities between the human brain and the cosmos, and poses the question: can either be modeled after the other?

The Three Minds: A framework beyond biopsychosocial medicine

The article I’ll be reading today shines an important light on the field of medicine, allopathic medicine in particular, and questions the largely biomedical approach und

The ethics of Idealism

Welcome back everyone! Today’s article is a fascinating deep dive into the subject of morality and the neurological mechanics of our joint human condition. It is an eye-o

Re-thinking identity: Children’s experiences of self

In the best episode of 'Essentia Readings' yet, Nadia Hassan reads Dr. Donna Thomas's 'Re-thinking identity: Children’s experiences of self.' Nad

Near-Death Experiences during cardiac arrest

Today’s article delves into a phenomenon that has been largely dismissed. One’s position regarding these events tends to encapsulate a person’s view on the fundamental na

What is consciousness?

Today’s article poses the million-dollar question: “What is consciousness”? A much debated matter among academics, scientists, and thinkers the world over for centuries,

Communicating through the 'collective unconscious'

The article I’ll be presenting today is by an author whose work has been focused, in part, on the psychology of consciousness and psycho-semantics, problems of the uncons

Seeing things: The daimonic nature of reality

Hello and welcome to the Essentia Readings podcast. My name is Nadia and I’ll be bringing you content from a wide range of contributors: scholars, journalists, philosophe