Category: Featured

Did I dream it all? I guess I did. But then I see the card on the table. I pick it up. It feels real. TAKE THE ELEVATOR, it says. Did I?

These people in the church with him today have heard all those words over and over, they can’t really hear them any more. He remembers other words: If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.

A series of writing and conversations exploring the many layers, folds, complexities, and intensities of director Darren Aronofsky’s disturbing tale of home invasion: mother!

Packed with archetypal, mythological, and religious symbolism, Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’ baffled audiences with its disturbing tale of home invasion…and world destruction. This essay unpacks some of the deeper layers of the film from the perspectives of religion and psychology, western esotericism, and comparative mythology.

The subject was discovered on a routine gravimetric exploration approximately one mile beneath the Earth’s surface in a small cavern rich in copper. Dwelling in complete darkness and surrounded by approximately 3500 urns of various shapes and sizes, the age of the subject remains indeterminate. Subsequent testing revealed the age of the urns to be approximately 500,000 years old.

What can films tell us about reality? In a deep-ranging dialogue drawing on the philosophical ideas of Martin Heidegger and looking at works by Terrence Malick, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick, and other celebrated auteurs, two contemporary aesthetic thinkers reflect on the ways in which cinema brings us into a deeper, stranger relationship with the world, and our being in it.

Global transparency offers an unspoken invitation for us all to forge a new paradigm of personal integrity. The Internet, our own collective mirror, stands as a challenge for us to face ourselves for the first time fully in all our humanness.

We warmly welcome Darrell Hester (Mythos Collective) and Zachary Feder to Metapsychosis. Zachary, a writer and interlocutor on our forum at Infinite Conversations, contacted Darrell after seeing one of YouTube videos. In this talk, they cover everything from the cultural and psychological significance of the film to the esoteric meaning of vibranium. This is their first talk—with more to come, we hope!

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.

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…

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.

“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.

This mix is all about the acclaimed Netflix series Stranger Things, and features J.F. Martel’s essay REALITY IS ANALOG, Phip plus the inaugural episode of Jeremy Johnson’s Electric Symposium podcast. Enjoy!