Category: Featured

This conversation series is concerned with how the monstrous, epic drama of our present-day reality is animated by subtle winds of power. We will explore creative strategies and discuss critical issues relating to developing our embodied consciousness as individuals/collectives—while cultivating more effectual ways to wield our often invisible yet immanent power.

This essay series aims to penetrate to the roots of power and the shaping of material conditions through memes and through minds. I also discuss what is happening to us on individual and collective psychological levels, as we are forced to confront and grapple with certain popular myths about ourselves, our nation, and our global civilization.

We are always living in a story, always present in a myth. The key is to possess mindfulness towards worldviews and their presence in the awakened self—they are analytical frameworks of the mind that first allow the universe to be experienced in a specific manner and then formulated into pure, specific “understandings” about the nature of that universe.

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.

Music and lyrics by Paul Maylone. “You will turn me into fire, / You will turn me into war, / I will give my life as openly as so many before….”

Floating from time period to time period amid spiritual and religious observances and contemporary soundscapes the drone remains consistently omnipresent, like the angel of death, hovering just out of reach yet connecting all things living and dead…

Kapuscinski’s intentions are early implied, to match Dawkins bite for bite and (as honestly) to demonstrate the irreconcilable gulf between intellectual reductionism and emotional religious dogmatism, each flailing towards fundamentalism in trying to flatten one another.

He stood upon an old skull, and he crushed it under his dark heel. A snake was inside it, and its blood seeped into the ground. He stood in the crater where Gods went to die, the valley without light where a bloated Leviathan would rest upon the ground, and spears piercing its belly beneath dark clouds, the sun would turn away in time for it to rot and die. In its carcass, in its open bones a new God would form, a new rotten Beast to occupy the holy Throne….

“Saturn is for dense souls with shallow histories.” We will build our grave here on earth. Is it grave? Our bodies reduced to the skeleton of gluttony and the like. Or a marker where our former bondage and body lies? This is a result of the flesh we build in action, substance and sustenance.

Chess is two wills locked not only in combat but also in cooperation. Players must together create the conditions allowing one to emerge triumphant—or not.

Since the end of the Paleolithic Era, it is possible that we have been riding a long curve of descent, in which all things once transparent have become more and more opaque.

In his near-century of life, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American—that out of many, we are one.

The global political landscape today reads like something straight out of Revelations. On a daily basis, we read shocking stories of the cruelties imposed by those in power. Education and healthcare are being gutted, families are being broken apart, mi …

Join the Readers Underground for a group reading of Gregory David Roberts’ novel Shantaram, hosted by David Gaian and Marco V Morelli, starting April 17, 2017.

“We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie. They know we know they lie. They don’t care. We say we care but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes.” BBC documentary by Adam Curtis.

I am, I am slightly ashamed to admit, a little paranoid at the moment. Some of it is genetic. My family have a history of “nerves.” My lovely cousin, who shares a big batch of genetics with me along with a childhood of school holidays spent together indulging our creative whimsy

He’s a big barreled suave broad caster (he casts broads) who smokes a cigar, the phallus broadcasted on his exclusive speaker. His voice is pinched with a husky drawl, ever sure, and he declares whatever he wants and you appease. The Brute: Step right …

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.

Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them.

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!

“In their re-imagination of the Ellison/Baraka opposition, direct challenges alternate with playful taunts. These exchanges have the energy of a competition but the warmth and generosity of a collaboration.”

“On rooftops and deserted roadways, she would, in times of chemical storms, spread her legs across the sky to take in the pieces….”