The Mindstream

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.

“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.”

What comes after Facebook? How can we reimagine our social networks for a planetary digital democracy of the future?

“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.”

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….

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

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.

“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…”

As a fledgeling writer and editor, as well as an (almost-retired) scientist, I am feeling my way into the business of editing, critiquing, choosing. I have eclectic tastes. I read just about anything, and voraciously. I review everything I read—you can …

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.

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 …

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.

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.

“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.”

What comes after Facebook? How can we reimagine our social networks for a planetary digital democracy of the future?

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 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.”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.)

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.

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.

“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.

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, minorities are being senselessly attacked, discrimination is being legalized, dissent criminalized, and corruption institutionalized. The very fabric of society is becoming undone before our eyes, and tyranny is rearing its ugly head.

Music and lyrics by Paul Maylone. “You will turn me into fire, / You will turn me into war, / I will give my life as openly as so many before….”

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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….

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.”

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.

disparate minds meet to discuss Darren Aronfsky’s feature film, mother! with: jf martel, caroline savery, john davis, geoffrey edwards, and marco v morelli

disparate minds meet to discuss Darren Aronfsky’s feature film, mother! with: brigid burke, mark jabbour, marco v morelli, natalia anthony

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.

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

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.

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 …

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

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.

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 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…

​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…

“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?”

A Call for Submissions & Invitation to Collaborate. Until August 25th, 2020, the editors of Metapsychosis are accepting submissions towards our next publishing cycle. Share your creative work and get involved…

As a fledgeling writer and editor, as well as an (almost-retired) scientist, I am feeling my way into the business of editing, critiquing, choosing. I have eclectic tastes. I read just about anything, and voraciously. I review everything I read—you can …

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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

Surrender the Life • Terra • Second Skin

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.

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.

“On rooftops and deserted roadways, she would, in times of chemical storms, spread her legs across the sky to take in the pieces….”

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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…

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.

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

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

on differences that make a difference, or aesthetics

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 …

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

A Call for Submissions & Invitation to Collaborate. Until August 25th, 2020, the editors of Metapsychosis are accepting submissions towards our next publishing cycle. Share your creative work and get involved…

As a fledgeling writer and editor, as well as an (almost-retired) scientist, I am feeling my way into the business of editing, critiquing, choosing. I have eclectic tastes. I read just about anything, and voraciously. I review everything I read—you can …

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.

“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.

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?

“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.”

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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….

The power of imagination, “vis imaginativa,” provides the link between a philosophy of magic and psychoanalysis.

Most of us have, in some form or another, if not a philosophy of time, at least a mythos of time.

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.)

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

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

#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.

#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

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.

#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