Recently, I was telling some of my college students about a shift in mass entertainment culture. A few years ago, I told them, I began to feel as if “my time,” and also that of my generation — namely, Generation X — had finally arrived. Somewhere around the turn of millennium, the appearance of things…
Penn State announces new sleep paralysis study
During my Darkness Radio interview last week, I mentioned the culture-wide surge of awareness and interest in sleep paralysis that has occurred during the past few decades, and especially in the past four and five years. From being an experience and phenomenon that was essentially forgotten, or rather suppressed from memory, in Western culture at…
The Occupy movement as global insurrection and revolution
Leave it to Daniel Pinchbeck to provide a predictably excellent statement of what the consciousness movement could or should be doing relative to the worldwide Occupy phenomenon. I heard a few days ago that he was scheduled to address the assembled protesters in New York City. This new and short piece at Reality Sandwich is,…
Shadow people, sleep paralysis, and discarnate dark entities: My guest spot on Darkness Radio
Four days ago, on October 11, I was the featured guest on Darkness Radio, the popular paranormal radio show originating out of Minneapolis on KTLK and hosted by David Schrader (of the Travel Channel’s Paranormal Challenge and Ghost Adventures). The topic was sleep paralysis, shadow people, and discarnate dark entities — all things I’ve talked…
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…
The Tragic Tale of the Rocket Maker
[For best effect, scroll to the bottom, start the YouTube video to playing, turn up your speakers, and then return to the top and read straight through. Then replay the YouTube piece and watch the video.] When the history of the American space program is finally written, no figure will stand out quite like John…
William Peter Blatty on rewriting ‘The Exorcist’ for its 40th anniversary
This month, the second annual installment of The Dark Mirror, the horror film festival that I created in Waco, Texas, will culminate with a screening of The Exorcist. (See the article I published about it just two days ago at the festival’s blog: “‘The Exorcist’ and the modern Western zeitgeist.”) So it’s entirely appropriate that…
Questions about the impact of extraterrestrials on religious belief are not new
A new (Oct. 2) article at Space.com reports that theologians speaking at the DARPA-sponsored 100-Year-Starship Symposium have raised questions about the possible impacts on religion, and especially on Christianity, if the existence of extraterrestrial life is ever confirmed. The symposium itself was a public event held this past weekend (Sept. 30-Oct. 2) in Orlando, Florida,…
Free ebook: A Course in Demonic Creativity
My ebook about daimonic creativity for writers is now available for free download. A Course in Demonic Creativity: A Writer’s Guide to the Inner Genius clocks in at 40,000 words and 174 pages, and is optimized for reading on a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or other ereader. Or you can of course read it on your…
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…