What’s another word for melting pot? Cauldron.
Category: Essays
Colin Wilson and “The Robot”
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.
Gonjasufi’s “Vinaigrette” & The Dark Night of the Soul
I saw the freedom of the open streets in the early morning and the romance of the street lamps curled with the eerie silence of the city’s expanse. What you call “an isolated figure” makes a left turn into a horizon of pillowy clouds and endures some kind of ecstasy while being alone in a motel room. The film feels alive, present.
Alone and Behold: A Review of Werner Herzog’s Latest Film
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….
A Mind Altogether Stranger
What if consciousness actually is something akin to the way it is experienced?
Sam I AM: Green Eggs and Ham as Secret Mystical Revelation
I came to see in Green Eggs and Ham a very sophisticated theology of incarnational nondual spirituality.
After Facebook
What comes after Facebook? How can we reimagine our social networks for a planetary digital democracy of the future?
Our Spiritual Evolution: A Response to Chris Dierkes on St. Paul’s Ode to Love
“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.”
How to Live in the Future (Part 1)
When I attempt to visualize “the future” as I learned to think of it in childhood, I see the image of a silvery, metallic, shifting sphere…
Notes on Wallace Stevens and Animism
There is no interiority whatsoever. Belief in interiority, in private unextended subjectivity, is a modern conceit.
Keeping Faerie Close: Folk Belief as Collective Memory
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.
Oh, I’ll Be Free: Bluebird and the Soul in David Bowie’s Lazarus
This is a long title for such a little footnote I’ve made in my re-read of the mid-century book, Ever-Present Origin, a cultural philosophical tome by Jean Gebser. Gebser was a poet, and studied poetry. It was through his careful reading of R …
The Ecstasy of a Book Club
“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” —JC There is the possibility of ecstasy in a book club—this I aver. It’s a religious thing—or should be—the intercourse among “people of the book” (or rather, “ …
Integral and Me: A Brief (Partial, but True) History of My Years as a Meta-Revolutionary
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.
The Metapolitics of the Noosphere
For me, the cultural shift from an identity that is based upon a nation or a territory to one based upon a state of consciousness—indeed even a seizure of consciousness—expresses the transition from politics to metapolitics.
Consciousness in the Aesthetic Imagination
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?
Love is Patient, Love is Kind: St. Paul’s Advice For Contemporary Esoteric Spirituality
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.
Constellating Acts of Starry Night
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.
Neon Tribes: Ecstatic Highs, Techno-Trance & Digital Gnostics
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.