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A paean to Albert Murray and his hybrid memoir/literary criticism masterpiece of 1971, South to a Very Old Place.

“Think outside the box,” they say. What if your box is doing the thinking? Where does your thinking end and your box begin? How many boxes does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer may surprise you.

From my very childhood, I’ve always been curious, interested, in a quest to find out what actually life is. What, in fact, is death? Where do we humans come from, and where do we go after death? Or, why we humans are on earth at all, and then die?

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”

There are moments when the world comes suddenly to a stop, when the ground withdraws its support, when a schism opens, into which one may or may not fall. The world then employs its archaic sleight-of-hand to remove whatever faith you may have placed in this event. The structure of projection has barely missed a beat, but the schism in your psyche has not actually been sealed…

What does Space mean to you? Do you have enough of it? Too little, too much? How do you make space… for Space? This piece was composed for an evening of Poetic Alchemy held in Boulder, Colorado, in the spring of 2019.

What if you could slow down time? In a distant, not-so-far-off future, humanity has gained the power to alter the localized flow of time at will, enabling new ways of experiencing the universe and operating in extreme environments. Here is an account of the scientific speculation that went into the concept of tempo control in my upcoming novel Plenum: The First Book of Deo.

Metapsychosis editor Mary Thaler interviewed Deniz Ozan-George, an artist based in Boston, Massachussetts. Though she’s recently completed one portrait, Deniz considers herself first and foremost an abstract painter, lyrical, and expressionist.

Susan Evans’s poem “Lucy” appeared on Metapsychosis website in Autumn 2020. During the following winter, we exchanged emails in which Susan told me about her creative process, her sources of inspiration, and what her hopes for the coming year.

Projecting human capability and knowledge into the far future, provided we learn to manage our own planet, it seems possible that humans might learn how to modify stars in ways suited to their future needs. Why might one modify stars? I can think of a …

An artist is actually creating a world rather than just a stationary object. The artist is sailing through universal winds and transmitting truth. It really depends on the artist as to how this truth manifests and is revealed.

Reminiscent of the work William Blake, Max Beckmann, and Hieronymus Bosch—to say nothing of the latter’s medieval predecessors, Antoniou’s images find their singularity in the exploration of the imaginal encounter, the sacred drama.

It starts like this, the intercom buzzes. Nick, the reluctant pet cat, is faking obliviousness, turning around, padding over to the kitchen for a snack. His tail, way up in the air, offers me a clear view of his hypoallergenic pink behind—shorthand for open scorn. “Guess I’m getting it then,” I say, pushing back with my own attitude.

Seconds — those appointed to negotiate and if necessary fill in for the principal fighters in duels conducted by pilots of the Polarin Aerial Fleet — were allowed only one kind of interference: to try and talk combatants out of their folly, or to watch as time ran out and they went to their deaths. This was thought to be a way of reducing the number of frivolous challenges. It had had virtually no effect.

Going inward / I see my grey sleek wolf’s belly / moving forward on long legs striding / free, clear, unassuming / my natural strength carrying me / into the clear space ahead.

The game gives us a satisfaction that life denies us.—Emanuel Lasker ∞ “Tea or coffee, Sir?” “Coffee. Black. No sugar.” I’m on the phone with a market researcher. I try to picture a pretty girl at the other end of the line, but it isn’t working. All I …

I looked at him through the camera. “You have a secret.” His eyes widened. I continued. “It’s not something…bad…but you think it is…. Something about a confrontation with your father. And it has to do with…a female.”

Medb is a novel that draws the reader incrementally toward the mysteries of the human psyche, on its way touching on gender roles, the power of the occult, and the pathologization of difference. It’s a winding, inward journey that begins, fittingly, at …

but i often underestimate my husband / for he pointed out that i actually said schizophrigid / i had a kitchen dresser which contained crockery i never used / over- solicitude is display mothering /

Now is when you are alone, when you have nowhere to be, when promises to the world no longer apply. Nobody knows what happens now except you. This is your own personal history.

I walk casually through the kitchen, preparing a cup of tea, as my gaze is drawn to two photographs placed side by side. I am struck by the resemblance between my young son and deceased father…

What happened, Miss Hooker asked–she meant my shock–so I said, Well, please turn around and take a look at Jesus there and tell me what you see.

Forms point upward or sideways from a centrifugal base, hunting and seeking. Tides of observation and transmission approach and recede, leaving visual patterns in their wake. Ancient symbols make their way across pathways of energy, co-existing with forms of nature; earth, sky and all types of elemental forms are born of essential vibration.

The shrunken fighters, cheeks sunken and eyes Gibbous as praying mantis, like a god kept captive By some sick forest cult That provides sacrifice seasonally…

The Spiritual Barber had opened his salon a year earlier and it had been an instant success. Open Mondays to Saturdays, it attracted an ever-growing number of customers, who thought nothing of waiting several hours until it was their turn to be served. …

“Lucy the nun with the green socks / saw me hugging the oak tree / that summer I / hibernated in Spartanburg.”

“St Barbara, a poor white gloved icy ingénue, / Has long been a dusty piece of Black Forest wood // That grew out of the ashes of Sibylline books”

“Sex and God or sex and death.” I repeated his phrase, feeling a slight slur in my speech brought on by the beer on an empty stomach. “Is that all there is?”

​I was jealous of Pedro’s imaginary lovers and of his vaster sexual experience. Short poems, long poems, quirky poems, I read them in secret when he was out. I didn’t understand them. Poem after poem, sounding much alike, revealed the charms of some new image of his desire, even as he prayed for some kind of deliverance from his too, too solid flesh…

I felt that many kinds of patterns, of ancient origins, had been stamped onto our writhing, wrestling, male flesh, and that we had entered this forbidden zone many times before…

they call it soul retrieval | when your essence | core | beingness | the skeletal|hole|body|brain that lives in your gut|liver|kidney|body| self|shatters | breaks its own skull|heart|body in its crumpled raisin|brain as the result of small t | BIG T | sOmE TyPe of tRaUmA

Whether I chose to feel my emotions fully, or experience the depth of them — that wasn’t up to me. That was up to God, or Satan, or whatever it was that controlled me.

Has the Shadow become more user-friendly? No. Whether now or 2,000 or 10,000 years ago, the shared identity of the Shadow and the Guide has always presented itself in the form of an ultimatum, which we must torture our minds and bodies to interpret.

That our world has already ended, of this we may be certain. But is it the end of “a world” or of “the world”? It is reassuring that the prophets of world destruction have proven almost 100% wrong—and yet…

So, what does it mean for the Apocalypse to take place in the present moment, and, somewhat paradoxically, to be always just about to occur?

“I’ve found a techno relationship cuts right into the core, the soul, brings out an almost more real version of yourself, makes you see yourself differently, your own potential to be better. It can achieve a level of emotional perfection. That’s also the problem…”

That room is gone. Or rather, the room is still there, but what’s in it now is so different from what was in it before that the room itself seems transformed. It holds a vast model of the world we live in, built to scale and rendered in exquisite detail…

Following him into the darkest places taught me to never be afraid of the dark. / It’s full of unimaginable euphoric surprises…

The movie proves to be, rather than glitchy and fragmentary, a deliberate and careful unfolding of the more perplexing and realistic struggle ensnaring us in the contemporary world.

What was Harold Bloom? I don’t know, but here is my answer for now.

“I must return love and life to those who offered me death / Gestating with hundreds and thousands of babies in me: / Progeny of my intercourse with the rock.”

An introduction to Brigid’s new podcast CHTHONIA with a discussion of the relevance of dark feminine mythology for modern times.

Jeremy Johnson, current president of the International Jean Gebser Society, long-time Gebser student, and accomplished expositor, presents a thoughtful look at a key – and difficult – idea, the nature of the integral structure of consciousness.

Note: The following takes place between October 2018 and January 2019. I’m not in control. I’m trusting the currents to guide my ship to safe ports, trusting the process, letting go. I’m learning along the way. The biggest lesson so far has been how to …

I look for my White Lily, but it’s gone. When I look up again, the girl, too, is gone. I’m on my own again. I wonder if I imagined her. Or maybe she imagined me, and I’m the one who’s gone.

Metapsychosis #OnlyPoetry channel presents: A guided reading and discussion of Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab’s poem, “The Rain Song,” with Jordan-based author Dona Abbadi. Dona guides us through a reading of one of the most belov …

It is about the trials and tribulations of lovers who are set in a dismal, bleak universe—much like our current reality in NYC one could even argue. They are challenged to come to terms with each other and deal with various issues such as ego, conflicting decisions, and insecurities.

Maybe in the future she’d embody the pure-feminine-ideal or something, but right now Suraj had to explain just who Judy was and why she killed herself…

“Mothers should explain this to their daughters when they are too young…instead of folding church bulletins to make fans…”

the biggest secret: REPTILIANS! United States lizard government / help. Bloodlines). people think they know

When I remember Sue Castigliano, I think of almost naked dancers vaulting above the gold-tipped horns of Cretan bulls, to the sound of waves breaking in the distance. Wandering with the ghosts of an exploded island empire, I enter the doors of a library that I first thought was an octopus. When I think of her, I see wheat bound in sheaves…

blackbirds rise like a word from a hot hovel / satis house and her letter / and her first wedding gown / fires blank and face clocks / my hands / their spell / swelling the mouth of a match / the stone thrown into the sea and circulatio /

“It is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Luckily, the teacher may also choose to appear when the student is not at all ready. She drags him, if need be kicking and screaming, into a new, more direct, but also more paradoxical relationship with the self…”

Are we meant to have certain experiences, or to connect with certain people rather than with others? The more romantic among us are used to thinking that there may be one true soul-mate for each person. It is less common to imagine that friends or teachers may also play their parts in this apparent drama of predestination.

I’m lost in space. Lost. As it turns out the poets were right, you can’t go back home again. The Venezuela that raised me doesn’t exist anymore, that much everybody knows, but the situation got so unendurable that I’m finally aware of my limits. As it turns out I’m not an indestructible machine but a leaf floating in the wind, directionless and at the mercy of the gods.

Hands of the dead here in my living hands / as I split stony squash with a crack of the blade, / scoop seeds, oil flesh for the fire—hands / of women and men in my hands, generations / repeating these gestures, the old pleasure…

Meet Sidney (aka the Sacred Scribe)—a PhD candidate in Physics with a problem in the paradoxical human realm of love. What does a love triangle look like in the fourth dimension? Quantum indeterminacy rules, as Sidney and her friends explore a bold new cosmology uniting Science and Spirituality, and Sidney’s “wave function” must decide between the primal magnetism of Bruno, her friendship with Alyzia, and the life of her mind and creative soul.

He was but a breath, a simple creation of some greater existence. Nothing implied, nothing necessary, nothing required. Just a breath. As was the face. And is the face. And always will be the face.

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 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…

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 …

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

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!

“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.

“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.”

“Microdoses” is our latest addition to Metapsychosis, featuring short creative pieces, multimedia art, literary fragments, micro-rants, tiny manifestos, etc.

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

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 …