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Tangentially Speaking

336 – The Reverend Duncan Trussell, MD PhD

By August 23, 2018June 7th, 20227 Comments

Duncan is qualified to receive your reverence. He deserves it, too. You could live many lifetimes without meeting anyone who combines as much humor, wisdom, and sincerity as this guy. I’m always happy when we find some time to hang out, and especially when we’re both living such pivotal moments in our lives. Check out The Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast.

Music: “Suffer Well,” by Simon van Gend.

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7 Comments

  • omar ibrahim says:

    thank you for this chris and duncan, much appreciated, whats the name of the closing song?

  • Ian says:

    Duncan is such a beautiful dude. So many great epiphanies from this podcast. I was able to gain a lot of compassion thru this one, in many different aspects. Thank you guys

  • Bill says:

    @43:30, "How’d you kill the dog?" It’s all about timing.

  • Eric Louthain says:

    https://open.spotify.com/album/6XnO4f89GqgNSRXM0n2WYH?si=QvkVID_vTwSuVq8200LbGw

    play this album throughout this podcast and thank me later.

  • My condolences to Duncan. His two podcasts he recorded with his dying mom are among the most beautiful audio files one could ever listen to. Such a generous thing to share that with the world.

    That NDE researcher he mentioned was Raymond Moody. Another term for that phenomenon of dying patients suddenly ‘waking up’ and being able to recognize their family members after being struck with dementia and such is ‘terminal lucidity.’ It’s so common most hospice nurses use it as a sign that a patient’s time is close at hand –but of course, we can’t talk about THAT in the open, because BRAIN=MIND and all of that…

    But people in the older days knew about it. That’s why back then, when people were allowed to die in their own bed –such a LUXURY today, isn’t it?– relatives and friends didn’t just visit to say their good-byes; they knew the dying person was ‘crossing to the other side’ and thus (for a little while) they could function as a ‘bridge between worlds’. They could offer insights and pass along messages from dead people that were invisible to others, but were clear as day to the dying person.

    Which is why it’s so interesting how now, with the advent of ‘extended withering’ we see in modern medical facilities, we now have a lot of people who DO die and come back from it with accounts which seem to suggest something of us manages to survive physical death. It’s almost like a ‘ spiritual immune reaction’ from this modern infection brought by our mechanization of death.

    You talk a lot –on other episodes– about how LSD was originally viewed as a sort of ‘psychotomimetic’ compound, intended to be utilized by therapists so they could experience what their schizophrenic patients were going through. I think we should view DMT as a "thanatomimetic" compound, and I propose ALL physicians should take it at some point of their training, so they could understand how their mission shouldn’t be to beat death at all costs, because there IS beauty in surrendering to Death. It’s a conquering defeat.

    PS: That idea about how "the soul can be sexy" was somewhat synchronistic, because I’m in the middle of reading The Super Natural, by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal, and Kripal –a scholar of religious studies– ellaborates a lot about "the Sexuality of Soul." It’s something we’re not used to (or even comfortable with) here in the West, but in other cultures the link between sexual drive and mystical states was well known, and honored.

    • Christopher Ryan says:

      It’s always a treat when you post a comment. "Terminal lucidity" is a phrase I hope I’ll remember for a long time (but will likely forget tonight). It suggests that maybe what brings death is that final understanding. Maybe there’s a danger in figuring it out too deeply. Game over. You "won." We have to do a podcast, dude. When are you coming to the Land of the Free again?

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