2016, Planetary Mythologies and the Crisis of the Serpent
2016 isn’t the culprit. The mythologies we’ve used as a global culture are collapsing around us. Where do we look to find new ones?
Consciousness Wars
The following is an excerpt from my new book, The Secret Teachers of the Western World. In it I look at the history of the western esoteric or ‘inner’ tradition through the lens of the work of two important thinkers, the German-Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser, and the contemporary neuroscientist and English scholar Iain McGilchrist. My […]
The Mariner’s Rule
One of the things my readers ask me most often, in response to the ongoing decline and impending fall of modern industrial civilization, is what I suggest people ought to do about it all. It’s a valid question, and it deserves a serious answer.
Pantheistic Insights: Vegetarianism in Psychedelic Culture
From the historical perspective, vegetarianism has been a persistent theme in psychedelic culture related to the ethical and spiritual insights that the psychedelic experience may lead to.
Apocalypse NO
Rather than defining humanity as the destroyer of nature, the Anthropocene casts people in an affirmative, long-term role. It is neither about facing an ecological apocalypse, nor harking back to “the good old days.” It is about answering the question of what impact today’s population is having on the Earth in the years 2050, or 2500 or 25000.
The End of War
In a more and more obviously interconnected age, the habit of war is becoming harder to sustain. Whether in politics, medicine, or our relationship to nature, the program of overcoming an enemy is less and less useful.
Randall Carlson of Sacred Geometry International [Midwest Real Podcast]
Rewriting History, Avoiding Catastrophe and the Bridging the Gap Between Science and Religion. An epic two-part podcast with Randall Carlson.
William Irwin Thompson on the Horizons of Planetary Culture
My second rap with poet-philosopher William Irwin Thompson, on the transformations of self and society in an age of collapse and emergence – of cyborgs, surveillance, and psychedelics, paranoid apocalypticism and inspired new visions for our species…
The Second Psychedelic Revolution, Part Five: A Short Psychedelic History of Humanity
Psychedelic revolutions in various societies —psychedelic “transformations” might be a better term—have been somewhat common throughout mankind’s history, and may prove to have been essential to the development of culture.
The Second Psychedelic Revolution Part Two: Alexander ‘Sasha’ Shulgin, The Psychedelic Godfather
In a Psychedelic Hall of Fame, the section on chemists would be small; there have only really been two giants in this field — Albert Hoffman, who first synthesized LSD-25 and psilocybin, and Alexander Shulgin, who seems to have invented nearly everything else.
