What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like? … [When counseling graduating students who ask for career advice,] I always ask the question, “What would you do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?” … If you say that getting the…
Recommended Reading 29
This week, we bring you a roundup of readings spanning a rainbow of trends and topics, from the collapsing economy to the destruction of modern sociopolitical and cultural myths to the imaginal realm of shamanism, creativity, and mythic descents to the underworld. More specifically, we have: a report on the U.S. Army’s stated criteria for…
Deep Shadows and Numinous Horror: Introducing “Echoes from Hades”
The question of whether I found Horror or Horror found me is a longstanding one, and despite much contemplation, Iâm no closer to a definitive answer. Perhaps there isnât one to be had. Either way, Horror unquestionably crept into my world early, and with indelible power. My name is Richard Gavin. I am a Canadian…
The Avengers: Clothes Make the Iron Man (Men in Tights, Part 3)
The other big superhero film this year was The Avengers, or Avengers Assemble, as it was known in the UK. The reason for the name change was to avoid confusion with the old TV series, but that still didn’t stop thousands of people all across the Internet thinking it was funny and saying, “The Avengers?…
A neurosurgeon on consciousness beyond the body: “The materialist picture is doomed”
Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who has spoken at (for example) the Rhine Research Center, writes in the current issue of Newsweek about his personal discovery and conviction that consciousness exists beyond the body. His argument is especially intriguing because, although it is based on his own personal experience, it goes beyond the limp and lame argument…
Humility and Silence: Where True Science and True Spirituality Meet
It is said that we live in an age of light, but it would be truer to say that we are living in an age of twilight; here and there a luminous ray pierces through the mists of darkness, but does not light to full clearness either our reason or our hearts. Men are not…
Anthropology and anomalies: A brief history of explaining (away) the supernatural
Jack Hunter, editor of Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal, has just published a fascinating article at Reality Sandwich about the history of anthropological approaches to making sense of anomalous and seemingly supernatural experiences. In addition to tracing the long legacy of strategic decisions by various scholars and thinkers that led to the…
Recommended Reading 28
This week: posthumously offered words of warning and encouragement to an America in decline from Ernest Callenbach, author of the 1975 classic Ecotopia; insightful meditations on the intrinsic value of the humanities and their inherent resistance to being explained (as in, explained away) by quantitative scientific methodologies and approaches; a 1908 essay by a French…
Addicted to screens: What cinema has done to us
In his new book The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies, film historian David Thomson seriously poses the question of whether our collective and alienating addiction to the multitude of screens (televisions, phones, tablet computers, etc.) that increasingly keep us buffered from the existential reality of the world and people around us may not…
Awake inside the American Nightmare
The responsibility for being a real person instead of an economic zombie-drone whose raison d’ĂȘtre is employment by and for the system and its goal of indefinite self-perpetuation lies entirely on you. Only you can wake up. The organs of the American Nightmare can’t and won’t do it for you, and this includes the colleges, including, increasingly, the liberal arts ones.