Features

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.

#5 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Ch. 7

Our reading group on Gao Xingjian’s novel Soul Mountain begins a with a preliminary talk about his Nobel Prize acceptance essay, “The Case for Literature.”

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!

#4 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Chs. 5-6 — Readers Underground

I am a spiritual care provider in a hospice setting, and just as everything in life seems to be upended these days, given new urgency compelled by nausea, so is my thinking and feeling about my role…

#3 of 6 conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES. Chs. 3 – 4

#2 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Chs. 1-2

#1 of 6 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s GLOBES: Prologue, Introduction, and other preliminary texts

It is time to face facts. Capitalism is the root of all our problems, and yet the path out of capital is more uncertain than it has ever been. The dream of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, of a globalized online consciousness unifying the mental sphere into a higher state of being, has been rendered excessively naive….

We are powerful enough to burst through the artificial narrative-bubble of projections of power-over, and step together into the brisk air of the real world in all its complexity—painful, wonderful, multiplicitous. If, in that fine first inhalation of fresh air, we take in a deep moment of peace, we may hear the aspirations of all living things…

We need mass subversion—simple non-cooperation and defection to favorable alternatives. This can look like “opting in” to visions of humanity that you do prefer, the futures you would like to inhabit, by investing your diverse capital in alternative ways.

Perhaps there is a common ground for humankind that runs deeper than the machinations of a “power-over” mythology. Let us envision a more optimal design that meets more needs through respecting life’s innate capacity for intelligence and beauty.

Our human desires and emotions are oftentimes the “hooks” that memes use to attach to us. Once a meme has colonized us, it can profoundly guide our actions in the world. Therefore, we need to develop discernment to parse the beneficial memes from the malicious ones.

The power Trump commands is given by us—our attention, our deference, our minds, hearts, lives. In little ways, we can retake control of how and to what purposes we deploy our minds and spirits.

The common myths and meaning on which the U.S. was founded are breaking down, strained by the gnashing confrontation of incompatible, co-occurring narratives. This is long overdue and much needed. Yet powerful interests are trying to seize this shaky moment by trumpeting archaic, toxic narratives that reinforce and advance oppressive agendas in society.

Readers Underground group for Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview page

To continue a policy of escape, retreat and regression is mutually assured destruction. We need to face, and learn from, our difficulties.

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.

This metanarrative that has been constructed to explore a possible Platonic worldview is enough of the whole to make a holographic, fractal revival of Plato himself inside his mythopoetic mind.

The strength and sincerity at which each of the Greeks in the Symposium pursues his or her own experiences towards a lived philosophy of love is inspirational for a culture of Self, some of the original self-believers.

From the first creation event of Timaeus that heralds a universe (the one and only) into the perceptible in giving a reality, this perfection persists into Plato’s Republic, a world of its own that deals with society and its paradigms in the social creature called humanity and its just longings.

From [this] indivisible awareness, the mystic sage is fully able to tap into the eternal mind of god, something that would smooth out a translation in terms of human consciousness—and that would give the creative impetus to imagine a text like Timaeus.

The entire purpose of this work will not so much argue but re-imagine and challenge Plato, such that it breathes the warmest breath of reconsideration, rereading, and re-admiration into the Platonic dialogues.

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.

#9 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 8, “Closer to Me Than I Am Myself – A Theological Preparation for the Theory of the Shared Inside,” Excursus 10: Matris in gremio – A Mariological Cricket,” and “Transition: On Ecstatic Immanence,” pps. 539–632.

#8 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 7, “The Siren Stage – On the First Sonsospheric Alliance,” as well as Excursus 8, “Illiterate Truths – A Note on Oral Fundamentalisms” and Excursus 9, “Where Lacan Starts to Go Wrong,” pps. 477–538.

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…

#7 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 6: “Soul Partitions – Angels—Twins—Doubles,” as well as Excursus 6: “Spheric Mourning – On Nobject Loss and the Difficulty of Saying What Is Missing” and Excursus 7: “On the Difference Between and Idiot and an Angel,” pps. 413-476.

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.

#6 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 5, “The Primal Companion – Requiem for Discarded Organ” as well as “Excursus 5: The Black Plantation – A Note on Trees of Life and Enlivement Machines,” pages 343–412

#5 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 4, “The Retreat Within the Mother: Groundwork for a Negative Gynecology,” along with the following Excursi, pps. 269–342

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.

#4 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 3, “Humans in the Magic Circle: On the Intellectual History of the Fascination with Closeness,” and Excursus 1, “Thought Transmission,” pps. 207–268. — Readers Underground

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.

#3 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Ch. 2, “Between Faces: On the Appearance of the Interfacial Intimate Sphere,” pps. 139–206. — Readers Underground

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.

A selection of poems from John David Ebert’s new collection, These Things We No Longer Are, including Descent of the Angel, Peter, Dead Men, Five Skulls, and The Angel of Death

#2 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Preliminary Reflections and ch. 1, “Heart Operation; Or, On the Eucharistic Excess,” pps. 83–138.

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

#1 of 9 live conversations on Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles. Topics: Preliminary Note and Introduction, pps. 9–81.

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 …

Readers Underground group for Bubbles, by Peter Sloterdijk – Welcome & Overview page

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.

A 20-minute “unguided meditation,” this audio journey combines music, conversational fragments, and field phenomena to produce a contemplative response to current events, specifically the United States presidential election of 2016. As an immersive mindscape, the sound collage invites you to engage the world as meditation, and meditation as art.

There was a time once when poets Sitting on cracked marble urns Invoked the muses; Or when the angel whispered Into Matthew’s ear The tale of a man Who came to earth as a god….

But the dark truth conveyed in the character of Barb finds its counterbalance in the incredible creative power that Stranger Things attributes to the Cosmic Child, a power which is also present in each of us.

Beneath the conceptual overlay, reality remains what it is: not an orderly network of humanly comestible ideas, but a turbid, ever-changing, symphonic, indefinable process of becoming that is accountable to neither the predilections of reason nor the strictures of logical grammar.

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.

In this hangout on July 28, 2016, we explore ideas from both the novel and one another’s personal experiences. It’s a LIVE Freak out!

“Co-creating the world with the symbols laid out in front of us: What could be a better description of what is needed right now? We need to see what’s before us, learn to read it, internalize it, and then create it by combining it with our individuality.”

A searing story of love, sex, longing, spiritual vision, and the paranormal—an intimate look at race, class, consciousness, and sexuality—and a star-crossed marriage of the cosmic and the carnal in one man’s heart.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Fuselage • Perplexing order • Hesitation • Jurisdiction lies in zoology • Caliber

A group reading of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, July 25 – September 1, 2016.

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.

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.

The universe is crawling with unseen life: angels and djinn and spiritual guides. Like the excess in a stagnant pond, this abscess of the Absolute is obscenely corpulent in every nook and cranny, armpit and crotch of the Great Mother of dark energy and …

I’m sitting downwind from the raging fires that are viciously swallowing up whatever still remains of the material manifestation of a once breathing, living body. The skin on the face peels back to reveal features which do not distinguish one from the …

It was a sunny Saturday afternoon when I found myself walking through the main street of a busy business district and noticed a large billboard ahead of me featuring a woman in a glittering black bikini and a sign that read: Non-stop adult entertainmen …

We’re live. After many months of preparation, design, planning and team assembling, Metapsychosis: Journal of Consciousness, Culture and Planetary Thought has flickered into existence from the digital protosphere. Our wish is for this publication to fl …

In this hangout we discuss (primarily) “The Thief” vignette, meaning and symbolism in the The Saddlebag, consciousness studies, Henry Corbin and the Illuminationist school (think: angels), Zoroastrianism, Babism, and The Bahai Faith.

Here we are at the end of WoO. Spring is upon us, and our “Spring to Origins” poetic revelry event was, I think, a great success. Books have beginnings and endings but they are never finished. Re-reading a book forces us to work with a book over time, to disclose its nature slowly to us. They invite returning, like the seasons; their imperative merely to read and re-read, corso e ricorso. New interpretations glimmer up from occlusion, hidden treasures discovered in neglected passages.

Our fifteenth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, covering Part 2, Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 and the Postscript (pg. 528-547).

Recording of our fourteenth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, covering Part 2, Chapter 8.

Recording of our thirteenth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, covering Part 2, Chapter 7, “Manifestations of the Aperspectival World” (III): The Social Sciences.

Recording of our twelfth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, covering Part 2, Chapters 5 and 6.

Recording of our eleventh hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, discussing Part 2, Chapters 2–4.

Archive recording of our tenth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser, discussing Part 2, Chapters 1–4.

Our ninth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser. For this hangout, we’re excited to announce that author, integral philosopher, and founder of the Alderlore Insight Center Bonnitta Roy will be joining us. This may segue into our discussion of Part 2 of the book, including Chapter 1: The Irruption of Time.

Our eighth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser. For this hangout, we will be focusing on Part 1 – Chapter 7: On the History of the Phenomena of Soul and Spirit and Chapter 8: The Foundations of the Aperspectival World. Please be prepared to discuss pp. 248-274, along with broader themes relating to this portion of the text.

Our seventh hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser. For this hangout, we will be focusing on Chapter 6: On the History of the Phenomena of Soul and Spirit. Please be prepared to discuss pp. 188-247, along with broader themes relating to this portion of the text.

Our sixth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser. For this hangout, we will be focusing on Chapter 5: The Space-Time Constitution of the Structures. Please be prepared to discuss pp. 162-187, along with broader themes relating to this portion of the text.

Our fifth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser. For this hangout, we will be focusing on MUTATIONS AS AN INTEGRAL PHENOMENON (Chapter 4). Please be prepared to discuss pp. 116–155, along with any broader themes relating to this portion of the text.

Our fourth hangout discussing The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser. For this hangout, we will be focusing on the MENTAL structure, as Gebser discusses it in Chapter 3. Please be prepared to discuss pp. 73-102, along with any broader themes relating to this portion of the text.

Our third Winter of Origins Hangout.

By this point in our schedule, we’ve read to page 73 (Chapter 3, just before the subsection on the Mental Structure). But there’s plenty to dig into from Chapters 1 and 2 and more broadly (or priorly), as well.

The first Google Hangout, kicking off our collaborative reading of Jean Gebser’s magnum opus, The Ever-Present Origin.

Our second and final hangout discussing Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is now available for replay.

#litgeeks book club and The International Jean Gebser Society present Winter of Origins, a collaborative reading of Jean Gebser’s The Ever-Present Origin.

#LITGEEKS first hangout, discussing chapters 1-3 of The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and other matters.