Essayist Tim Parks and philosopher, psychologist, and AI expert Riccardo Manzotti in Aeon, in an excerpt from their new book, Dialogues on Consciousness: Parks: I see what you’re saying: my experience, which is none other than the accumulation of all the objects my body has encountered, eventually determines my actions. But I’m not altogether convinced….
Category: Psychology & Consciousness
COVID-19 and our apocalyptic house of cards
With the advent of the Coronacene, the Way of Apocalypse has apparently chosen all of us at once.
The transformative power of autistic thinking
Poet and essayist Chris Martin works with autistic writers to help them transform their lives through their art. In a positively riveting recent essay at Literary Hub, he reflects on the critical — and rising — value of the autistic perspective at a time when our relationship to “the more-than-human world” has entered an acute…
Autumn Longing: Alan Watts
Yesterday, I came across a passage in a book by Alan Watts that reignited an old passion for what I have referred to in the past as “the autumn longing.” In a kind of “deep cut” vein for this blog, longtime readers — by which I mean really longtime readers, those who have been with…
Teeming Links – August 9, 2019
Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
My spiritual autobiography: A video interview
In 2017 I published an enthusiastic review of Jerry L. Martin’s God: An Autobiography here at The Teeming Brain, and also at Amazon. The book presents Martin’s account of being an atheist who was hit with an unexpected experience of what presented itself as divine communication. Over the course of about a year, he found…
Richard Bach on Remote Viewing with Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff (video)
In a video clip I recently stumbled across, Richard Bach describes his experiences as a subject in Targ and Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments at SRI in the 1970s.
An interview with Gary Lachman on occult politics, nihilism, and the dangerous potentials of the imagination
Just published here at The Teeming Brain: my interview with Gary Lachman on his new book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump. As many Teeming Brain readers are already aware, Gary is a noted writer on occultism and esotericism who contributed to my paranormal encyclopedia a few years ago….
This Is Horror, Episode 193: Jon Padgett and Matt Cardin on “Vastarien” and More
In this just-published episode of the This Is Horror Podcast, Jon Padgett and I talk with hosts Michael David Wilson and Bob Pastorella about our new project Vastarien: A Literary Journal, along with other matters of interest. Click to listen or download. Note that at the time of this writing, our Vastarien Kickstarter campaign, to…
Possession, exorcism, and the daimon: A brief history
The word “daimon” has several possible meanings, but in relation to possession and exorcism it refers to a particular type of autonomous or autonomous-feeling force in the psyche that influences or, in some cases, dominates a person’s thoughts, actions, and feelings.