This week a colleague, having read some of my essays involving esoteric and weird religious and philosophical matters — which will appear in my forthcoming essay collection (title reveal: What the Daemon Said) — remarked that he wondered why those who vaunt Eastern or other perspectives don’t realize that these may be just as time-…
Category: Religion & Philosophy
Horror Movies, Transcendence, and a Symbiosis between the Demonic and the Divine
Here’s Will H. Rockett, in his book Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, saying things that affected and influenced me deeply in the 1990s when I was first divining the nexus of responsiveness that I had recognized within myself to intimations of religious transcendence both divine and demonic, beatific and horrifying,…
Everything Is More Beautiful Because We’re Doomed
The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi has become something of a fashionable rage in America during the past few years, partly as an attitudinal accompaniment to the cultural influx of Kondo-style decluttering (Marie Kondo has said she’s partly inspired by wabi-sabi) and its interaction with the trendy rise of a minimalist aesthetic. Wabi-sabi refers to…
Our Fruitless Conspiracy to Forget the Furies
William Barrett concluded his masterful 1958 study and interpretation of existentialist philosophy, Irrational Man, with words that still give me a shiver of recognition whenever I revisit them. What he says marked me as deeply when I first read it in the early/mid-1990s as the discovery of Ligotti’s fiction did a couple of years later….
Steven Pressfield: God Designed the World with Monsters. Your Daimon Is One of Them.
Steve Pressfield, in his book The Artist’s Journey: The human race lost something, I believe, when it passed from the ancient world to the modern. The ancients understood the monstrous. They were not appalled by it, as we are. The legends of the ancient world are packed with monsters — Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur. Even…
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Philosophy of a Cosmos of Ideas
Fascinating stuff from philosophy and literature professor Peter Cheyne, writing for Aeon magazine: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stands tall in the cultural pantheon for his poetry. It’s less well known that in his own lifetime, and in the decades following his death, this canonical poet had an equal reputation as a philosopher. . . ….
The Hidden Horrors of Meditation
David Kortava in Harper’s Magazine: At the time [she signed up for a meditation retreat in rural Delaware], Megan’s life was in flux—she had just gone through a breakup and decided to move to Utah, where she planned to work on an organic farm. Ten days of meditation sounded restorative, a way of turning the…
Michio Kaku on the “terrible idea” of alien contact and the Buddhist Christianity of string theory
Two interesting excerpts from a recent Guardian interview with the famed Dr. Kaku in connection with his book The God Equation. On the prospect of meeting alien life: Soon we’ll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and we’ll have thousands of planets to look at, and that’s why I think the chances are quite…
Is Deepened Spirituality Incompatible with Writing?
In her sublime A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes an inner dilemma that she experienced during her experiments with silence and solitude. It’s a dilemma that has become highly personal for me as well: Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence,…
Podcast interview: “The Fine Line between Horror and Religion”
The Monster Complex podcast has just published a new interview with me: The Fine Line between Horror and Religion In addition to the item named in the title, the conversation encompasses a number of related topics and tangents, including my thoughts on why there may never be a totally successful film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s…