Blog Posts by Subject: Metaphysics

My favorite stories are the ones about the ordinary people who, while going about their daily lives, encounter strange and/or inexplicable events. How they behave in the midst of weirdness is more interesting than the phenomenon itself. I've always been a sucker for a well-told vampire tale. (Sorry!) Or an off-center ghost story or strange-baby story... Here, in no particular order, are a few of my favorite, wonderfully odd movies.

Sometimes naked
Sometimes mad
Now the scholar
Now the fool
Thus they appear on earth:
The free men.
— Hindu verse from Avadhoota Gita

Terence McKenna (November 16, 1946 – April 3, 2000), America's most beloved psychonaut, bard, ethnobotanist, folk hero, and freewheeling philosopher, rose to fame in the early 1990s with the publication of several influential books: The Archaic Revival (1992), Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge — A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution (1992), Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, 

Most people have experienced brushes with the Otherworld, that liminal place where dimensions overlap and reality shimmers, shivers, and breaks apart: seeing ghosts, dreaming "true" dreams, meeting that strange and uncannily helpful "person" at just the right moment... These situations are more common than we collectively admit — but attitudes are shifting. According to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, "The paranormal is no longer a fringe subject. Need proof? Only 32 percent of Americans report no paranormal beliefs, and half of the population reports belief in two or more paranormal phenomena." About.com reports that 71 percent of 

Ancient Egypt has long held a fascination for the West. The idea of Egypt was transmitted to Roman culture through Greek accounts, and after Late Antiquity, existed in the European imagination as an exotic and ancient location in the Bible's Old Testament account of the 6th century BCE Hebrew diaspora.

"And she proceeded to burn perfume..." [Gulnare of the sea].
Picture Collection, NYPL. Digital ID: 1704102.From ghost-hunting reality-TV shows to feature films like The Hereafter, the paranormal has gone mainstream. Book publishing, too, has jumped on the paranormal bandwagon.

"All profound life is heavy with the impossible."
                                                  —Georges Bataille

If you're anything like me, you'll be walking down the street thinking about science fiction and think to yourself, "Say, what is the Ur-phenomenon of humanity's Utopian drive(s)?" Let's explore this in the best para-academic fashion possible.