Category: Longform/Essays

The more deeply I’ve looked into heavy metal music and its use of imagery from the Book of Revelation, the more I discovered a very remarkable thing—that heavy metal music is doing the Book of Revelation. In its style, in its values, in its ethos, heavy metal is doing the Book of Revelation in musical form.

We were lost. Daddy sucked on a fat cigar, leaned across the steering wheel, stared at the dark road up ahead and let out a stream of four letter words, which my mother told me never to repeat. She snapped off the radio, got real quiet. The car filled with smoke, my eyeballs burned. I rolled down the window, gulped the night wind, and squinted at the crescent moon...

In Western culture what is “feminine” has become associated over time with what is evil or immoral... This frightening view of the collective, akin to the archetype of the Terrible Mother, is what drives a lot of the global political and social narrative.

It seemed unthinkable. A narcissistic reality show star with an authoritarian personality and a highly volatile temperament was elected to the highest office in the land on a platform of bigotry, xenophobia, and bullying. He was quite possibly the least qualified man to ever make it to the general election, let alone win the election. Yet against all expectations, here we are.

If new myths are born, re-tethered to something sacred, they must be brutally immediate, possessing unavoidable gravity, poignant, fragile, they must be anything but contrived, planned, and developed with the intention of bringing us the sacred. (She does not come to us on a platter. More likely, the platter will have your beating heart on it.)

Most of us have, in some form or another, if not a philosophy of time, at least a mythos of time.

"It would be hard to communicate to someone growing up today just how widespread was the fallout from the threat of the Atomic Bomb. From July 16th, 1945, when the first bomb was tested over the Jornada del Muerto Desert, its occult light had continued to throw shadows from each object. The danger was not abstract; it was imminent, and it changed our whole way of looking at the world."

The power of imagination, "vis imaginativa," provides the link between a philosophy of magic and psychoanalysis.

Dunbar proposed the limit of meaningful friendships is "150"—a far cry from our Facebook and Instagram network connections—but maybe it's more complicated than that.

But the dark truth conveyed in the character of Barb finds its counterbalance in the incredible creative power that Stranger Things attributes to the Cosmic Child, a power which is also present in each of us.

Beneath the conceptual overlay, reality remains what it is: not an orderly network of humanly comestible ideas, but a turbid, ever-changing, symphonic, indefinable process of becoming that is accountable to neither the predilections of reason nor the strictures of logical grammar.

The show remains open, ambiguous to the end, and it is this quality that raises it above the normal run of generic entertainment to make of it something that defies genre, something genuinely weird.

Welcome to our first Metapsychosis mixtape! This mix is all about the acclaimed Netflix series Stranger Things, and features J.F. Martel's essay REALITY IS ANALOG, plus the inaugural episode of Jeremy Johnson's Electric Symposium podcast. Enjoy!

This notion about our origins is the essential idea with which psychoanalysis grapples. Thought of in this way, psychoanalysis is nothing other than the meta-theorization of occult ideas.

We are the robots. Or rather, we are like people who allow their servants to do everything for them, and subsequently feel they have lost touch with life, but don’t know exactly why.

I felt it fitting to choose to stay at home alone and “rent” the movie right away. As the pixels on my laptop flickered with Herzog’s visions, I reveled in the juxtaposition of my solitude while consuming this film whose subtitle espouses connection....

I came to see in Green Eggs and Ham a very sophisticated theology of incarnational nondual spirituality.

What comes after Facebook? How can we reimagine our social networks for a planetary digital democracy of the future?

"The purpose of this essay in response to Dierkes is this: I would like to add the element of human evolution—a Human Evolution that is also participated in by the Divine, and led and guided by the Divine—to the instruction and guidance that Dierkes has given us."

Understanding the folk beliefs of Faeries can give us insight into how humans understand our own liminal state between the animal and the angel, which, in essence, is what a Faerie is.

On the one year anniversary of the Fourth International Integral Theory Conference, I reflect on what "integral" means to me now—and what I think lies beyond integral, meta and otherwise.

What can art tell us about the nature of consciousness? Or maybe the question is better framed in McLuhanian terms: What is the message of the medium of art with regard to the nature of consciousness?

On second glance I find it very odd indeed that we should have this reading at so many weddings when after all this passage is about esoteric paranormal phenomenon.

We believe culture is consciousness, and consciousness is world, and so to participate as a media platform, we see ourselves as agents of enactive culture-making. Social poetics.

The neon tribes of the digital age are seeking alternative spiritual streams, and yet the search for ecstatic highs within the inner landscape are fraught with frauds and superficial vendors. The marketplace has never been as full as it is now, nor as diverse and tantalizing.

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon when I found myself walking through the main street of a busy business district and noticed a large billboard ahead of me featuring a woman in a glittering black bikini and a sign that read: Non-stop adult entertainmen ...