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.
Category: Featured
Come Out of Babylon: Heavy Metal Music and the Book of Revelation
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.
Sustain/Decay: A Philosophical Investigation of Drone Music and Mysticism (Review)
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…
Saturn in Scorpio in the First House
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, we build with substance, where our former bondage and body lies? The villains, if you will, have their will, they were here b …
At Play: A Personal Odyssey in Chess
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.
The Long Curve of Descent
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.
Reading Albert Murray in the Age of Trump
In his near-century of life, Murray confronted race by re-constructing American identity as omni-American—that out of many, we are one.
HyperNormalisation (Review)
“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.
Prose for the Paranoid
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
Songs of Sodom
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…
The “Other” Globalization and Fear of the Feminine: a Mythological View
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.
The Global Abyss
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.
Is Myth Dead?
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.)
The Fall and the Eschaton
Most of us have, in some form or another, if not a philosophy of time, at least a mythos of time.
Autumnal Fallout
“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.”
Vis Imaginativa: The Power of Imagination in the Theory of Magic and its Relationship to The Jungian Collective Unconscious
The power of imagination, “vis imaginativa,” provides the link between a philosophy of magic and psychoanalysis.
Is Friendship Limited? An Inquiry into Dunbar’s Number
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.
Letter from the Editor – Intensification
Intensification implies a new way of seeing—not at objects but through them.
Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger ThingsReality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things / Part One
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.
Stranger Things Mixtape
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!
Antagonistic Cooperation as Mind Jazz: Ralph Ellison vs. Amiri Baraka (as Reimagined by Greg Thomas and Greg Tate)
“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.”
There is a Hydrogen Bomb on Your Raspberry Eyelid
“On rooftops and deserted roadways, she would, in times of chemical storms, spread her legs across the sky to take in the pieces….”
Psychoanalysis, Art and the Occult: Cutting Up a New Conversation
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.
The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part Two
We must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.
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.
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….
The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part One
“In a comment on my essay “The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution,” Okantomi wrote, “I often feel like I can see what is happening in the world, as well as what is just about to happen, and what will almost certainly happen later on, and it’s like no one else sees what I am seeing. It’s eerie, shocking, and finally depressing.”
On the Borderlands between Philosophy and Esotericism: An Interview with Gary Lachman
When Gary contacted me about my biographical work on the German poet and Kulturphilosoph, Jean Gebser, I naturally took the opportunity to explore his work.
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?