Take an Online Seminar with Occult Philosopher Gary Lachman
Recover the lost knowledge of the imagination, a 3 part online seminar with occult philosopher and esoteric scholar Gary Lachman. Live Zoom calls, assigned readings, and community discussion. It all starts Saturday, November 17th with Nura Learning.
Austin: Here We Are LIVE w/ Shane Mauss + Michael Garfield (Life Lessons From Mass Extinctions)
Each week stand-up comedian Shane Mauss travels to find the top scientists to explore the meanings of life in a funny, fascinating, and accessible way. This Monday, we visit Austin to speak with paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield about “exciting times.”
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 […]
Keeping The Portal Open: Erik Davis on TechGnosis and the Blurring “Real” & “Virtual”
Over a glitchy Google Hangout, Erik and I discussed our culture’s highest hopes and darkest dreams for our collective future, and how they’ve both become more complicated since the turn of the millennium.
The Reality Nervous System
We do not need to postulate a whole material universe outside of consciousness anymore. Empirical reality is merely the outside image – the external aspect – of the mental activity of a cosmic consciousness.
Pluto and the Death of God
Pluto appeared as the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Great Depression and the world marched toward Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Already in 1930, those who cared (or dared) to scry the forces at work behind the scenes could feel the rising heat.
Philosophy and Psychedelic Phenomenology
Due to the general legal prohibition and modern cultural taboo against psychoactive chemicals, the academic discipline of Philosophy has left a potentially bounteous field of enquiry virtually unharvested.
The Demonization and Deification of Cannabis: Sex, Drugs and Enantiadromia
The demonization and deification of cannabis are two sides of the same coin. You can always tell which people live on a polarized coin because whichever side of it they inhabit they share a bond of absolutism. Cannabis is either the “devil’s weed” or a divine plant goddess that is a cure for everything.
The Formless Speaks
We are incessantly, relentlessly, tirelessly telling ourselves stories; constantly attempting to categorize and match everything we experience against some (coherent) storyline playing out in our minds. That is why certain forms of meditation prove so challenging
The Night Sky, Part One
The 2014 revised edition of The Night Sky completes a nine-book project that began without a blueprint and ran for about thirty-six years while I investigated four main topics—medicine, cosmology, embryology, and consciousness—each from a combination of scientific, anthropological, historical, and esoteric viewpoints. My premise is that science is telling us half or less of what it is doing.