"Thinking as Thanking”: From Original Thinking to Original Love with Glenn Aparicio Parry

The East-West Psychology Podcast

Today, the podcast starts with a prayer from our guest, Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD (Humanities); East-West Psychology MA (both from CIIS), and now adjunct faculty at CIIS. Glenn speaks about his time as a student at CIIS in the 1980’s and shares ideas that have gone into his current EWP course Original Thinking: Land, Language, and Consciousness from East-West and Indigenous Perspectives. We discuss foundational cosmological, psychological and philosophical ideas from Glenn’s trilogy of books Original Thinking, Original Politics, and he reads from his forthcoming book Original Love. Glenn states that western thought places origin in a point in time, as in the temporal event of the Big Bang, while North American Indigenous thought identifies origin as a place, the latter being the eco-psychological basis of Glenn’s work. We discuss Glenn’s idea that “originally all thoughts were prayers” and ask how in contemporary times we can reconnect with the cosmogenesis of our culture as an unfolding spiritual journey of interconnectedness. The conversation goes deep, asking what our collective prayers are in contemporary times, grappling with how to overcome the shadow of modernity and colonialism, and begins to formulate holistic Indigenous and ecological models of how to create new future potentials.

Glenn Aparicio Parry, PhD, of Basque, Aragon Spanish, and Jewish descent, is an educator, ecopsychologist, and two-time Nautilus award winning author of Original Politics: Making America Sacred Again (SelectBooks, 2020) and Original Thinking: A Radical Revisioning of Time, Humanity, and Nature (North Atlantic Press, 2015) and is currently writing Original Love, the third book in the trilogy. The founder and past president of the SEED Institute, Parry is currently an adjunct faculty member of the California Institute of Integral Studies, the president of the think tank: Circle for Original Thinking www.originalthinking.us and the host of the Circle for Original Thinking podcast. Parry organized and participated in the groundbreaking Language of Spirit Conferences from 1999 – 2011 that brought together Native and Western scientists in dialogue, moderated by Leroy Little Bear.

Parry now regularly moderates dialogues for various organizations and has appeared in several documentaries, including SEEDing Change: A Retrospective of the Language of Spirit Dialogues and Journeying to Turtle Island, a biographic film exploring David Peat’s life and participation in the dialogue circles by Spanish filmmaker Miryam Servet. He is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys hiking and fly fishing. He writes from a fairly remote location in northern New Mexico, where he lives amid wild horses, coyote and mountain lion with his wife Tomoko, dog Momo, and cat Cappuccino.

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The EWP Podcast credits

Produced by: Stephen Julich and Jonathan Kay

Introduction music: Mosaic, by Monsoon on the album Mandala

Music at the end of the episode: Compassion, by Kelly Thoma, Marijia Katsouna, on the album Eternal Tides: A Musical Offering to the Oceans, Released on Monsoon-Music Records

Introduction Voiceover: Roche Wadehra

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