In part one of this two-part series, we begin with discussing Jordan Kirk’s spiritual path going from Ayahuasca to finding his teacher, His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist Lama. We explore topics such as what it means to have a teacher or guru, phallic processions, and the value of crazy wisdom.
Excerpts from this episode: "what happened is this I was having a spiritual crisis next to two missile ranges in California, where I had rented the tiniest cabin in the most desolate part of the desert near here, to try to work on a project and I was basically at the end of my rope...and I was just like, haunted by these absurd, just obsessive thoughts of hatred towards someone that I love very, very much. And I just couldn't- I was I was in a weird spiral of obsession and misery. And I went to this little bookstore. And as happens, as you know, this, this book fell off the shelf, which was this book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who you mentioned before, and I was like, okay, if a book falls off the shelf and it's a spiritual book and you're having a spiritual crisis, you got to buy the book.
So I got this book in this little store and, and read it during this writing retreat, not a spiritual retreat, supposedly, you know, everything's a spiritual retreat, even during this horror fest that we're in right now. And I read this book, and I was like, I don't have a clue what this book is about. This book is backwards. This book makes no sense to me. Really, it's so interesting. I'm obsessed with it. And I have no idea what he's talking about. And he must be wrong about it. It just must be wrong. It just it. It's all it's all backwards. That was my experience of reading this book. And then and then a few months later, I was on an Ayahuasca retreat, where I met you at that retreat where we met and I remember he showed up in my Ayahuasca vision. And and he gave me a teaching in the, in the vision I kind of gestural, like, he kind of pointed towards something and showed me something. And was like, you can, you can read my books now."
Links to resources mentioned in this podcast:
Link to Jordan’s teacher, His Eminence Garchen Rinpoche https://garchen.net
Jordan’s book, Medieval Nonsense https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294473/medieval-nonsense/ also on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Nonsense-Signifying-Nothing-Fourteenth-Century/dp/0823294471
About Jordan:
Jordan Kirk is a writer who lives outside of Los Angeles. His first book, Medieval Nonsense: Signifying Nothing in Fourteenth-Century England, will appear from Fordham University Press in 2021. His current research is in the history and theory of metaphor; premodern contacts across Afro-Eurasia; medieval techniques of ecstasy; homeopathic philosophy and materia medica; and Tibetan Buddhism. He was a founding editor of and frequent contributor to Ich bin ein Junge, and his essays and reviews have appeared in Exemplaria, Glossator, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and various edited collections. He studied comparative literature at New York University and Princeton University and teaches medieval literature at Pomona College.
