Jeremy David Engels: Living Namaste, An Ancient Practice for Modern Living

Summary

Professor Jeremy David Engels of Penn State discusses his book 'Living Namaste,' which asks what it would mean to carry the yoga greeting 'I bow to the divine in you' into everyday life rather than just ending a class with it. The conversation covers yoga as union of body, mind, and spirit, mindfulness as the practice of remembering, and how technology, AI, and outrage-driven algorithms are eroding human connection and community. In his opening monologue, host Cliff Dunning also floats his theory that the ancient Maya may have used some form of optics or telescope to produce the Venus calculations in the Dresden Codex.

Key takeaways

• 1Host Cliff Dunning theorizes, with the late engineer Jim O'Connor, that the Maya observatory El Caracol ('The Snail') at Chichen Itza may have used optical devices to create the Venus tables in the Dresden Codex.
• 2Dunning cites an ancient ground lens he attributes to the Sumerians, roughly 6,000 years old, as evidence that early optics existed.
• 3Dunning references Richard Hansen's LiDAR work at El Mirador and a Guatemala LiDAR survey that revealed about 60,000 previously unknown structures.
• 4Engels says the Sanskrit word 'yoga' has over 80 dictionary definitions, with 'union' as the consistent core meaning.
• 5Engels cites Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (roughly 1,600 to 2,000 years old) as teaching that yoga moves us beyond the opposites, such as desire and aversion.
• 6The Sanskrit and Pali words for mindfulness, 'smriti' and 'sati,' also mean 'to remember.'
• 7Engels references Robert Putnam's book 'Bowling Alone' on the decline of American community, and his own book 'On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend the Fractured World.'
• 8Engels names Thich Nhat Hanh and Jack Kornfield as his Buddhist teachers.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

Welcome to Destiny. Now here's your host, Cliff Dunning. Hey, how you doing. Welcome to Destiny. This is Cliff, your host of the program. Hey, I am working right now on a cosmology section of this book. And I have discovered, and it's been known by a certain type of archaeologist or a Mayanist, that the Maya we're very fixated on various planets. And we know about the Dresden Codex because it has this vnix chart in it, but there's also the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, the Maya Codex of Mexico, and the Pupla Voo and the Books of Chilima all have something to say about the importance of cosmology in the A Maya world. And you know, when you bring them all together, it's curious because the study of the Venus document by itself, how the Maya were able to chart these various seasonal changes in the planet Venus are beyond comprehension. And what that means is that we're the thinking is that the Maya were skywatchers. They would stand on pyramids, they'd stand on observatories, and they observe. They would observe the various planets, most notably Venus. But what's becoming very very clear is that it's very hard to watch a planet just with the naked eye, and you can see the movements because they're you know, rotating around the Sun with the other planets, and you can see it come and go seasonally. But what I'm beginning to understand, and this is the comparative study that AI is helping with artificial intelligence, is that when you study current documentation and observe observing the planet with high power telescopes, this is the only way you can make these calculations. ...

Excerpt from Earth Ancients, Aug 19, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.