I’ve just posted a new review to the site, of Steven Mithen’s brilliant but flawed account of the origins of music and language, The Singing Neanderthals. I bang on about him not mentioning psychedelics, but what do you expect?
Read more
I recently read Stanislav Grof’s Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. It’s basically a summary of his life’s work: from LSD psychotherapy in Prague during the fallout from World War II, to Holotropic breathwork in the States, taking in psychosomatic traumas, psychedelic mysticism, spontaneous psychic crises, death & dying… all revolving around Grof’s fascination with the information about intra-uterine experience that seems to sprout from all these arenas.
Read more
I’m close to finishing Mary Midgley’s fascinating, though far from faultless, analysis of the “myths and dramas” behind much modern science, Evolution as a Religion. I’ll put together a review once I’m done.
Read more
Read more
I’ve not read Wired for a while. When I read it relatively regularly at the turn of the millennium—before the dot-com crash hit, before the gloomy wake of 9/11, and before I started learning more about the nuts-and-bolts of our energy insecurity situation—I was highly forgiving of its unashamed cheer-leading for high-tech capitalism. These days my anti-shiny-bullshit radar is a little more sensitized.
Read more
Amidst my return to England, and all the flat-hunting and work-hunting that entails, I’m trying to pull together my many thoughts triggered by the May 2006 issue of Wired, with its feature on the “Neo-Greens”.
Read more
So, I’m sat on the quayside at Methana, on the northeast Peloponnese coast, reading Robert Anton Wilson’s ‘Synchronicity and Isomorphism in Finnegans Wake’ (part of his book Coincidance). Every now and then I look up from the book to gaze as the heavy swells of the harbour’s waters, shining from the morning sun and beaten by the strong, chill winds. I ponder the beauty and strangeness of what Terence McKenna calls the “literary quality” to reality, this mesh of references and connections that weave through life in a way that might lead careless minds to reach for the idea of some singular creative personage behind it all, but which finally can only be appreciated through some grasp of the concept of spontaneous, self-generated, self-organizing structures of meaning stretching across space and time.
Read more
Jim asked in a response to a comment I posted on his blog how things were going with my travels, referring my rather patchy (to say the least) posting habits while travelling. Rather than derail the discussion of Einstein and gender-specific pronouns, I thought I’d say something here…
Read more
Sat in a poky internet basement in Brescia, northern Italy. Here’s some snapshots of recent weeks…
Read more
I’ve just posted an email interview with Jason Louv, editor of the recent collection of occult writings by young magicians. It’s certainly the most interesting collection of magical writings thus far in the 21st century, and it’s a great place to get a taste of what’s brewing in the lab these days. Head over there for talk of solar cycles, Columbine, magic in the community and more…
Read more