Rev. Saina Fernandez interviewed Shawn Nevins who is an author, advocate, and filmmaker, for the June Satsang.
Shawn began his spiritual path in college with the Self Knowledge Symposium, which led to Richard Rose, an enlightened teacher in rural West Virginia. He spent four years on Rose’s farm, meditating, reading, experimenting with celibacy, hypnosis, fasting, dream work, and many other practices, until hitting a dead end. He spent another three years delving into intuition—particularly through writing poetry. Along the way, Douglas Harding‘s suggestion to look at the space he was looking out from challenged everything he thought he knew. Finally, in a moment of complete honesty, he experienced something beyond experience—a place which is no place, where there is no flip side to the coin.
His books include Subtraction: The Simple Math of Enlightenment, The Celibate Seeker: An Exploration of Celibacy as a Modern Spiritual Practice, The Resurrection of John Davis: A Screenplay, and Adventures in Caving: Kentucky and Indiana. He is co-author of the poetry collections Images of Essence (with Bob Fergeson) and Hydroglyphics: Reflections on the Sacred (with Phaedra Greenwood), as well as the forthcoming Passages: An Introduction and Commentary on Richard Rose’s Albigen System (2022).
Shawn’s documentary film work under Poetry in Motion Films includes Closer Than Close, which caught the attention of Bruce Joel Rubin (academy award-winning screenwriter of Ghost and Jacob’s Ladder), Meetings with Remarkable Women, Traveling Lighter with Paul Hedderman, and Mountain High: Touching the Void with Bob Fergeson.
A frequent speaker and workshop leader at TAT Foundation events, Shawn has also spoken at San Diego State University’s “Consciousness Hacking” course (2017), the Perfectly Okay online group (2021), Pittsburg Self-Inquiry Group (2022), and been featured on Conscious.tv (2018). His other endeavors include creating and curating an extensive collection of interviews and reviews of spiritual teachers and other resources at SpiritualTeachers.org.
