Dr. James Fadiman Just published and now available here at The Teeming Brain: my interview/conversation with Dr. James Fadiman, one of the pioneers of transpersonal psychology and modern research into the spiritual and therapeutic applications of psychedelics. This has been a long time in coming, for reasons that I explain in the interview’s introduction. The…
Category: Psychology & Consciousness
“Let mystery have its place in you”: Cultivating the artist’s sense of interior privacy
Virginia Woolf at age 20 Inspired by a reading of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Joshua Rothman, writing for The New Yorker, offers some rather enchanting reflections on a profoundly important meaning of privacy that cuts much deeper than the word’s contemporary framing in purely political terms: These days, when we use the word “privacy,” it…
The perils of literary shamanism and the gothic horror of ‘Melmoth’
In a fascinating article from 2008 at The Daily Grail, Aeolas Kephas (a.k.a. Jason Horsely) reflects at some length on the roles of Whitley Strieber and Carlos Castaneda as literary shamans whose dedication to sharing their paranormal experiences, encounters, visions, and insights brought them much trouble: Both Castaneda and Strieber were apparently singled out by…
Chris Hedges: Only the power of sacred imagination can save us
I’m always struck by the passion and power of Chris Hedges’ words whenever he mingles his signature brand of journalistic-prophetic doomsaying with reflections on spiritual and artistic issues. (No surprise that he’s quite lucid in the latter area, by the way; he does have a Master of Divinity from Harvard, after all.) Current case in…
High weirdness: Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Chapel Perilous
Here’s Erik Davis, in a recent interview conducted by Jeremy Johnson, briefly discussing the similarities between the respective realms of high weirdness exemplified by Philip K. Dick’s VALIS and Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger. Erik and Jeremy also make some interesting observations about the way the reading of these types of texts can often kick…
Eckhart Tolle on enlightenment, ego, and apocalyptic collapse
Eckhart Tolle I have sometimes wondered about the reactions of my readers whenever I mention the writings of Eckhart Tolle with approval, as I have done several times. Tolle is a best-selling writer whose books occupy the same general “mind/body/spirit” publishing niche as those of Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, etc. He’s a speaker who has…
The bias of scientific materialism and the reality of paranormal experience
In my recent post about Jeff Kripal’s article “Visions of the Impossible,” I mentioned that biologist and hardcore skeptical materialist Jerry Coyne published a scathing response to Jeff’s argument soon after it appeared. For those who would like to keep up with the conversation, here’s the heart of Coyne’s response (which, in its full version,…
Is the unconscious the door through which the divine speaks?
From an engaging discussion of Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind theory by writer and philosophy commentator Jules Evans, at his website Philosophy for Life: I’m particularly interested in the link between voice-hearing, dissociation and creativity, and in the incidence of voice-hearing among creative individuals like novelists Marilynne Robinson (who occasionally hears a voice inspiring her novels),…
Otherworld initiation: Aliens, daimons, and the rational ego
Recently I’ve been in contact with Patrick Harpur, author of, among other excellent books, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld (which long-time readers of The Teeming Brain, and also readers of my A Course in Daemonic Creativity, will recognize as a canonical title around here). For reasons that I’ll probably explain at some…
Marilynne Robinson on writing, scientism, and trusting “the peripheral vision of the mind”
Here’s Marilynne Robinson being interviewed last June for Vice magazine by a writer who was fresh from having studied under her in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. As usual, Ms. Robinson’s displays considerable insight and elegance as she talks about the inner life of the writer and the outer life of a surrounding society that is…