Channel: Features

“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

These two scholars collaborated for eight years constructing their unfunded, paradigm-shifting work. Their efforts are stunningly transdisciplinary. They involve theoretical and empirical findings in quantum physics, mathematical logic, philosophy, biology, psychology and consciousness research, often requiring leaps into the unknown.

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.

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!

“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….”

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 must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.

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….

“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.”

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.

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.”

Surrender the Life • Terra • Second Skin

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.

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 …

“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, “ …