Maybe it’s the rise of “positive psychology,” “happiness studies,” “happiness economics,” and other attempts to quantify human happiness and gain a “scientific understanding” of it that has gotten under my skin. Maybe it’s the veritable tsunami of poll results and policy recommendations flooding through the collective consciousness during the current American presidential campaign season, all…
Category: Psychology & Consciousness
Near-death experiences, the “life review,” and — Desperate Housewives?
My wife is a Desperate Housewives fan, and we just finished watching last night’s (March 11) episode, and I’m here to report that I was fairly thunderstruck by the final scene. This is the episode that ends with the beloved character of Mike Delfino being murdered (a development that was revealed/leaked to the public ahead…
Jung, the numinosum, and holy dread
Recently on Twitter I had a conversation with David Metcalfe and jadkr — worthy conversationalists indeed — about the ultimate outcome of the dread-filled confrontation between the individual self and the shimmering emptiness of the infinite, the void, the Godhead. The spur for this was my tweeting of a link to an interview with Nancy…
Is this psychedelic substance a real-world version of the Matrix’s “red pill”?
I first heard of ibogaine from Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, even though he had previously written about it in Breaking Open the Head, which is still in my reading queue. He also talked about it in a 2003 Guardian article titled “Ten years of therapy in one night,” whose teaser reads: “Could…
Ideas are alive. We are their hosts.
I’ve long thought the Marxist view of ideas — which says, in a nutshell, that ideas are basically fake, that they don’t have any real impact or influence, that any ideology (system of ideas) is actually just a mask for the true moving powers of society, which are purely material and economic — is ridiculous,…
The other mind-body connection: Food and psychological health
For the past several decades, the term mind-body connection has been used to refer to the idea, familiar in both the world of alternative health care and the world of “positive thinking,” that our thoughts and emotions can exert a powerful effect on our physical health. I’ve personally verified and validated this to an extent…
International Consciousness Research Labs: “Strengthening the foundations of science by reclaiming its spiritual heritage”
The world continues to get more fascinating as our global economic calamities, political instabilities, societal disruptions, and cultural meltdowns are paralleled in lockstep by philosophical, scientific, and technological developments of a profoundly exciting and forward-looking nature. Case in point: The International Consciousness Research Laboratories, or ICRL, “an international, interdisciplinary, and inter-generational consortium of some 75…
The muse and the pineal gland
For over a month I’ve been pounding away at the third installment in my “Theology, Psychology, Neurology” series of articles over at Demon Muse. It will look at the third element in the series title by considering several possible biological locations of the muse experience. The section on the pineal gland proved unexpectedly slippery to…
H.P. Lovecraft, DMT, and the mysteries of the pineal gland
Does Rick Strassman’s DMT research provide a kind of real-world verification of Lovecraft’s fictional hypothesis in “From Beyond”?
The 1960s Redux: In our new age of apocalypse, is the consciousness revolution back on?
For the past few years, I’ve had a mounting sense that the abortive consciousness revolution of the 1960s and early 70s may have come back from the dead, riding on the wave of apocalyptic sentiment that’s been washing over us all since the late 1990s. Sometimes a new datum, or something that I interpret as…