I. Lurid Orbitals

If you have lived following your own curiosities, then you have probably noticed that certain topics recur periodically in your awareness — as if asking for your summary review & updates.

This certainly happens in my own case. Every few years, I get get briefly and alternatingly re-immersed in the problems of nonduality, UAPs, governance systems, ancient megaliths, economic reform, permaculture and serial killers.

The latter lurid topic has haunted me since adolescence when I began to grow more culturally bold. Suddenly many of the adult movie posters that terrified me as a child now revealed themselves as either a goofy pastiche (e.g. Nightmare on Elm Street) or potential classics (e.g. the famous Italian proto-slasher sub-genre called Giallos).

Some obscene materials lose their sense of danger and wickedness when your explore them intelligently. Other things just keep revealing further nuances of their abysmal and utterly intolerable nature. Serial killers fall into that last category.

“Lurid” BTW means an uncomfortable pleasurable found in the encounter with shocking, vivid, atrocious, grotesque and deviant material. It is a voyeuristic, salacious, indulgent, and carnivalesque gaze into highly problematic scenarios, images and phrases. I am not alone in my penchant for lurid materials. Men frequently enjoy hearing about violence and warfare. And apparently the most popular content for “regular women” on this planet is murder podcasts and fan fiction featuring bestiality and sadism. A man told me that.

Hell, the so-called new golden age of peak television involved most of the civilized world streaming zombie apocalypses, incestuous dragon violence, murderous meth kingpins and brutal neurotic gangsters. It would be very easy to chastise and dismiss this tendency as a inherent human vice or weird modern weakness, yet not too many years ago decent folks were taking their families to see criminal hangings and hovering over the many grotesque atrocities of the Bible.

This is a fairly ancient and normal proclivity that may have evolved for useful purposes. Our cringing parents & moralizing pseudo-religious busybodies fear the threat of “contamination by exposure” and do not quite appreciate that a lot of folks find this material relaxing, intriguing and morally clarifying.

Personally I have often suspected that I learn more about our common human nature by studying abnormal psychology than by my received impression of average, everyday people. I have been drawn to saints and serial killers, empaths and sociopaths, neurodivergent paradigm-makers and paradigm-breakers. Outliers can help us map the peripheral contours of our situation.

Slowly, I came to understand the moral significance of these investigations. They are based on caring for people who are at risk because of unseen elements of the normal society in which they are embedded. I am highly sensitive to the danger posed by our ordinary intuitions and social habits. Many of the standard “good” qualities that are reinforced by conventional family, church, politics, etc. make us unnecessarily vulnerable to predation by killers, cult leaders, influencers, demagogues, and mobs.

It is in the subject of the killers, however, where this danger becomes most salient.

Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, elicited the confessions of the so-called Green River Killer. She also wrote a book called Dangerous Instincts: How Gut Feelings Betray Us (2011). It is concerned with revealing the irrationality and shockingly low-caliber of our intuitions about safety and danger.

I used to call this “the problem of the serial killer’s neighbor.” That term is based on the caricature of the person who is shocked to discover that someone living near them was actually a horrific monster. They say insipid and preposterous things like, “He was just a nice, normal, quiet guy.”

It is usually a guy. Only about 60% of serial killers’ victims are women but about 95% of the documented predators are men. And apparently they come across as normal and unthreatening because why? Smile. Nod. Wave. Conservative suits or moderate turtleneck sweaters. A ball cap. Charity work. These absolutely minimal and performative social gestures convey a sense of familiarity and legitimacy that our brains translate as safety.

One of the most frustrating features of hearing about serial killers is just how strangely difficult it is for people (and law-enforcement) to take a glaringly obvious monster seriously as a villain. We raise each other this way. The people of Albania were under a centralized form of totalitarian communism for 40 years until the 1980s. When their government changed, the people were immediately tricked and manipulated by capitalist Ponzi schemes to such an extent that the whole population went broke and then broke down into violent civil war.

They had all been raised in favor of trust, conformity, and belief. Some of the very same things that made them into “good citizens” also made them into prey. We are all Albanians. We fall for charming things without noticing that charm is a neutral rather than positive quality. We convert the postures of charm, or the small signifiers of shared social identity, into gut feelings of trust. It is the reciprocal opposite of xenophobia in which we treat signifiers of difference as a reason to be extra suspicious.

Gut feelings can potentially be an amazing (but partial) source of information. However that requires that we train them, exercise them, feed them well, and teach them to distinguish their actual intuitions from our social conformity training and even own self-destructive willingness…

II. Psycho Killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?

“Serial killers” is a contemporary description of an ancient problem. If you watched David Fincher’s quasi-historical Mindhunters, you will remember that sequence killers was an early option.

These killers are different from ordinary murderers (who are divided into a legal scale of villainy in which “thoughtful” is the worst, “emotionally out of control” is the middle, and “pretty much accidental” is the least bad. That’s called manslaughter. Manslaughter is the least bad one.)

Serial killers are also distinct from mass murders. It is a particular pathology which is not the same as that brain-diseas’d, social short circuit that causes some asshole in America to shoot his classmates, or some racist fuck in Australia to shoot a bunch of Jews or Arabs or Gays, or some broken Chinese woman to start stabbing random people on the train. Such fiends kill a few, or a few dozen, but they are not serial killers. It is a more specific diagnosis — compulsive ongoing killing that is almost always mixed with stalking, torture, rape, infantile emotional rage, necrophilia, cannibalism, and taking trophies.

This first caught my attention as a child when I did not watch a mainstream television special in the late 1980s. Right about the same time that the noble Albanians were starting to shrug off their centralized, high-control government.

The TV movie was being watched by adults, but I dared not engage. It was too horrible. According to my dubious memory, it was the true story of a serial murderer who was leaving severed and mutilated baby heads on beaches. In hindsight, I doubt that this was actually the plot of a prime-time, network television show in the 1980s. Probably I did what most children do. I filled in the vague idea of “bad stuff” with the worst stuff that I could imagine.

This show was my first contact.

I grew up in British Columbia, hearing about killers Clifford Olsen and Robert Pickton. I saw the electrocution of Ted Bundy on television. And I saw all those drunk, vainglorious, white “spring break” jerks chanting for Bundy’s death like they were asking girls to take their tops off. It was gross. They were subhuman members of the regular folk. However, I also understood their feelings.

Society should be able to kill extreme and obvious monsters if it is going to kill anyone. And we do kill people all the time. How many innocent Arab wedding-goers were murdered by Obama’s flying killer robots? In principle, I favor the death penalty for repeated, compulsive, and willingly atrocious wickedness. However, in practice I do not trust the government or criminal justice system to correctly adjudicate guilt or to humanely operate an execution.

Anyway, my childish impression of serial killers was not very sophisticated. I saw Manhunter (1986) on cable television and then Silence of the Lambs (1991) at the movie theater. Both of those Hannibal Lecter stories taught me that there might be quite a variety of differences in the motives, psychology, and nuances of compulsive killers.

Will Graham: I know that I am not smarter than you.

Hannibal Lecter: Then how did you catch me?

Will: You had… disadvantages.

Hannibal: What disadvantages?

Will: You’re insane.

It was not until I read Helen Morrison’s My Life Among the Serial Killers (2004) that I began to realize that there was a particular pathology and etiology involved in all this terrible madness. A general profile of the illness and a fairly regular set of unfolding precursors. Nothing so simplistic as the old-fashioned idea that bedwetters and non-Christians were more likely to become broken predators. In fact, many dangerous monsters have fine bladder control and a deep love for Jesus.

Helen’s story wove together her neuropsychological research on compulsive killers along with her own constant marginalization and belittlement in spaces occupied by incurious and frequently misogynist law-enforcement idiots. The first recurring feature that she noticed in doing long-form interviews with these murderers was that they could only behave rationally and sociably for 2-3 hours.

It apparently cost them a lot of cognitive energy and glucose to perform what Dr. Robert Hare called “the mask of sanity.” They enact a cartoonish and ingratiating parody of normal human responses, but it is exhausting. When it slips, their whole presence and even their visual appearance seems to change. Their speech often becomes incoherent raving, infantile nonsense, dangerous boasting, and paranoid ideation.

Repeatedly observing this radically stunted emotional growth, Helen began to suspect fetal and early childhood factors. Probably also a genetic component. Her analysis was not that amazing, but she was the first person I encountered who was trying to map the particular pathology. Also the first female voice I bumped into on this subject. A greater richness of voices, obviously, increases our chances of seeing things more accurately. And so often the first gesture in that direction is to pay more attention to women who are already engaged in the topic.

Amazon Prime’s documentary series Falling for a Killer foregrounds Ted Bundy’s girlfriend, daughter, surviving victims, and the female profilers who were pointlessly marginalized during the manhunt. It does a decent job of decentering him as the magical male predator.

But he was so charming!

Was he?

And even if he was — charm is not a positive indicator. It is neutral.

Helen helped me to see that “serial killer” and “psychopath” (or sociopath, or anti-social personality disorder) were different phenomena. Kevin Dutton’s The Wisdom of Psychopaths (2012) reveals a complex psychopathy spectrum that can be speculatively inspected for its evolutionary utility. It may be very handy in an ancient human village to have some people who are indifferent to empathic social patterns, who experience clarity and relaxation under high-stress or violence, exhibit strong hunting-tracking proclivities, and move thoughtlessly toward physical vulnerabilities and short-term material opportunities.

Perhaps this evolved as useful genetics for long-range hunting or warfare. If so, then today we may inherit variously intense fragments of this dangerous but adaptive human condition. Sociopaths and psychopaths make up an important percentage of our surgeons, soldiers, cops, journalists, therapists, etc. They are not serial killers.

It is hard to imagine any constructive social role for serial killers. They compulsively attack and undermine the living fabric upon which human communities are based.

The pattern of this illness seems to start with a genetic possibility that is often exacerbated by trauma or toxicity. They exhibit an early attraction to death and dismemberment. Such children tend to lie compulsively rather than cunningly and frequently attack other kids — biting, hitting, pulling their pants off, etc. They begin to kill and torture animals in an escalating pattern.

Children, particularly boys, naturally experiment with killing and harming. Aggression is part of nature, and all pathologies are exaggerations of normal symptoms. Hunting and harming is not necessarily a sign of disease. The serial murderer’s sickness evolves uniquely toward private and proprietorial killing and desecration of larger mammals. It also begins to include the stalking of humans accompanied with compulsive fantasies that combine sexuality with capture and torture. Experimental invasions and small attacks finally lead to the first killing which fits them all too well. Regardless of any social, emotional, or survival reasons to avoid killing, they cannot stop. It has an addiction profile.

Some are smart, some are dumb. They seek out a combination of “easy prey” and “whatever turns them on.” These incidents of combined murder, sexuality, sadism, cannibalism, etc. are often accompanied by quasi-blackouts and wild mood shifts. There is no discernible external motive other than a periodic internal urgency that vaguely resembles a foreign personality. When deprived of the opportunity to kill, they resort to memory, detailed descriptions, or any way to relive and virtually enact the same pattern.

These are the serial killers.

III. Toxic Minerals & Other Depraved Killers

In the Summer of 2026, I was living in Northern Ontario and breathing the creosote-flavored airborne ash of hundreds of forest fires. Into the lungs, into the blood, and then into the brain. At the time, I was reading Caroline Fraser’s Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers (2025). It is a poetic and personal tale about the intersection of airborne pollutants and compulsive violence in the Pacific Northwest. It is a playfully written combination of autobiography, deep serial killer research, the history of Washington state, oligarchic American families, and the grave effects of toxic metals. She draws parallels between human serial killers, smoke stacks, wars, and predictably-destructive public infrastructure projects.

Normally we hyper-react to humanly-sourced killings and yet remain oddly unmoved by greater numbers of horrific deaths that come from badly designed roadways, pollution, unsanitary conditions, botched surgeries, inadequate gun laws, earthquakes, etc. We know these are dangerous, but we do not react to them in the same deeply fearful fashion. We even know that a child riding in the automobile of a very safe driver is still at greater statistical risk than they are from pedophiles, terrorists, kidnappers, or home invasions. It just does not feel that way.

Our gut feelings might be wrong.

Speaking of statistics, Fraser’s book tracks a great historical surge in serial killers. This evil illness has been with us for a very long time, but current estimates suggest that there was a radical increase during the second half of the 20th century. In fact, almost all violent crimes began climbing over this period and have slowly decreased since the 1980s when the Albanians began to get their dangerous cultural freedoms.

Many things may have contributed to this historical phenomenon. Our law enforcement tech and savvy are better now. There was also that traumatic World War II. But Fraser focuses on the increased rates of brutal and irrational violence in regions where the unregulated industrial production of proven toxic metals was the major source of economic growth. Lead. Arsenic. Cadmium. Mercury.

Not just in our “leaded gasoline,” but being pumped into the air, dumped into the water, and carried home on the clothing of laborers. Fake corporate scientists said it was not dangerous while devastating amounts of these corrosive materials accumulated in the hair, teeth, and brains of our children.

Developing brains, particularly the male prefrontal cortex, are highly susceptible to damage from these elements. Accumulating toxic conditions do not cause violence or serial killing, but they can significantly increase the likelihood that a pre-existing tendency will be actively expressed.

Tacoma resident Ted Bundy, as a child, never lived more than a few miles from the major smelter and smokestack of the Pacific Northwest. Nor did numerous other crazed killers in that region at that same time. Their fellow resident Frank Herbert used the toxicity of Tacoma as a partial inspiration for the ecologically devastated world of Dune.

IV. An Epidemic of Necromancers

The concept of “evil” started to go out of fashion as human civilization entered a more psychologized and planetary situation. Formerly, in many traditionalist and ethnocentric cultures, there was a strong tendency to demonize ethnic rivals and cultivate a mythological framework for exaggerated righteousness that conflated all disturbances with cosmic villainy.

As modernity dawned, we began to use a more literate public education process that reminded people to hesitate about these feelings. We asked folks, ideally, to critically analyze their own dogmatic and hasty impulses. To think twice before we blame, kill or abhor other human beings. Thinking twice takes more effort, but there cannot be much room for mythic evil in an international, humanist and rationalist system.

And they are correct. You should do far less demonizing than feels natural. You ought to chastise yourself for viewing ideological, cultural and religious alternatives as intolerably wicked. People who oppose you are not evil. Even atheists, Satanists and pagans are not evil.

But that does not mean that there is no evil.

When an event or person is massively and clearly dangerous to human beings, innocent families, and whole ecosystems, then perhaps the vivid intensity of that very old word becomes viable. That which seems to aim at the desecration of long-evolved and accumulated evolutionary values might be well-named as evil. Radically regressive intentions. Real and incomprehensible atrocities. These may ask us to consider whether the imaginal, energetic and extreme symbols of the truly diabolical are important components of our shared sensemaking.

The reconsideration of evil does not mean that we forget the relevance of neurological, environmental and psychocultural contributions to our problems. It asks us to supplement these “gross realm” factors with a poetic or subtle correlate. A being that feeds on desecration. A self-sabotaging mood or entity that disturbs the sensitive living beings by its very nature. That threatens the condition of generalized flourishing as though that was its very purpose. A process that proactively interferes with complex emergent regimes to return their components to a layer of reality that is radically more simplistic. Etc.

To weep before the poignance of a work of art is a very sophisticated and long-evolved capacity. It requires very much history, cellular labor, differentiation and integration to encounter the human epiphanies that we relate to as “deeply good.” A serial killer compulsively sets out to smash that delicately stacked structure and undo those laudable attainments.

Their behavior appears oriented to destroy bodies, wreck sexual integrity, reduce the heart to mere anguish, terrify communities, disrupt families, and convert all of that stuff back into the realm of pre-sentient minerals. The dead, raped, and tortured victim decomposing in a shallow grave or in the riverside muck is having all their higher organization and subtle capacity removed. They are being forcibly regressed to a merely geological form of existence.

These compulsive killers do not bring us DEATH in the way that Death Doulas ask us to allow its organic richness into our hearts. They are not confronting us, like an existentialist might, with the potential authenticity that comes from realizing the Heideggerian “possibility of the end of possibilities.” Instead, they are (as if) worshipping the very principle of harm and degradation.

I call them necromancers.

We could use the term necromancy (death + divination) to describe those people who make contact with the ancestors, honor the dead, teach us the means of a naturally sacred passage, and read the nonlinear ‘tea leaves’ of the unfathomable mortal threshold. That is very beautiful. It is just not how I use the word. I use ‘necromancer’ to describe a class of behavioral death worshippers that includes serial killers.

They do not necessarily prowl about believing that the infliction of death will grant them a supernatural power. However, they do exhibit a bizarre arrogance that is intimately entangled with their addiction to the causes of unwilling death. They operate as though their dark morality and private hopes required specifically the elements of desecration and traumatic regression — the death of the sacredness of life.

Many people who have spoken with them report that they confess feeling a perversely religious dimension to this one particular kind of death. When Ted Bundy offered the FBI his (self-serving but still mostly unheeded) profile of the Green River Killer, he advised authorities to stake out the places where this Riverman had already dumped bodies. He told them the monster would definitely return. He said these places are sacred for him.

There is speculation that the British mass rapist and popstar Jimmy Saville was also committing murders. There is no specific evidence yet, but his notorious evil was accompanied by using his celebrity status to volunteer in the morgues of famous psychiatric facilities. Private access to dead bodies was a priority. Not because he was a Dr. Frankenstein engaged in intellectual experimentation but rather because he emotionally and sexually needed some sanctified power that he found only in the transgression of the dead.

Helen Morrison’s list of common serial killer traits includes their puzzling inability to distinguish between the living and dead. The living seem as insignificant as corpses and the dead might as well be their friends and lovers. This is a neurospiritual collapse of their ability to distinguish higher-order evolutionary value from lower-order value. An inability accompanied by a desire to replace the magic of significant forms of organization (e.g., a person with a bright future) with merely fundamental forms (e.g., a foul and passive heap of material decaying into its basic molecules).

V. The Limbic Fusion Theory

I am perfectly okay with suggesting that evil energies and entities are coupled to particular patterns of degraded neuropsychology, chemistry, genetics and broken social dynamics. Two faces and a vase. A hybrid shape that, from one side, looks like the poetic metaphor of an actual demon, while on the other side there is a history of contingent material elements that created this horrible brew. Neither can be perfectly reduced to the other.

And, at least for me, there is no mixture of genetics, mental illness, abuse, toxicity or brain damage that removes the aura of evil. Those things describe but do not excuse the actions. Perhaps they are like the components of the radio mechanism that receives a song of desecration over the airwaves? Regardless of my own reluctance to exonerate wickedness under the heading of ‘mental incapacity,’ I am fascinated by the external causal factors that correlate to this intolerable pathology.

I will tell you my own pet theory. Maybe you have heard me mention it before — I call it “limbic fusion.” That is a linguistically playful way of describing a progressive, degenerative condition of automatic conflation between natural animal drives that should otherwise be teased apart by the brain.

Think about a dog.

A dog comes equipped with certain chemically facilitated behaviors that are inherited from the long history of life on Earth. It has an evolved urge to bark. Another urge to mate. Another to stalk and chase. To bury and dig back up. To bite and kill and eat. To curl up and relax. What could be more natural? All of these energies and behavioral investments are part of normal doggedness. Provided, that is, that the canine brain has layers of interactive tissues and electrical networks that can separate these different drives from each other. But what if it did not?

What if that damned dog started to get very confused about the difference between these drives? What if its sexual urgency also simultaneously activated its impulse to bite, stalk, kill, eat, bury, dig up, and relax? What if these all merged into a single misshapen and hellish impulse? That might look like a serial killer dog.

Suppose that genetics, injuries, deprivation, fetal complications, or toxic lead levels during early brain formation triggered a lurking human vulnerability for this same problem. A slowly increasing, generalized, and overwhelming compulsion that combines sexual arousal, stalking, killing, dominating, biting, burying, getting sleepy, running away. A sick amalgam of otherwise natural drives. Or more accurately, a failure of the brain to reliably do the work of differentiating those drives.

An evil conglomerate proto-drive with a fairly predictable escalating etiology that becomes statistically amplified in certain toxic environments.

VI. Ugh.

I could be wrong.

The question is not whether I have a convincing lay hypothesis about this one particular form of dangerously abnormal psychology. This article was not about serial killers. It was, if you recall, about how we handle recurring topics of fascination — particularly lurid topics.

What should you do if you have curiosity toward such material?

There appear to be no serious moral or degenerative effects from encountering obscene fiction, horrific art, or abysmal true-life tales. These things may even be good for us under certain conditions. But we are not concerned here with whether they are “okay or not.” We are concerned with whether individuals passively repeat these impulses or actively seek to learn more, change their hearts, discover new perspectives, and clarify their values.

Among your greatest opportunities for pondering are those strangely repeating indulgences and haunting themes that periodically orbit through your life. Maybe yours are centered around the pathology of serial killers, sociopaths, narcissists or neurotics. Maybe you are drawn in waves toward war stories, historical narratives, pornographic scenarios, legal procedurals, romantic comedies, or any other equally horrific material. It does not matter what it is.

It matters how you do it.

Firstly, periodic, intense voluntary doses of these stressors tend to be good while regular, moderate consumption tends to be degrading.

Secondly, are you applying any intentional modification to your typical pattern? Doing anything differently on purpose?

Thirdly, are you sitting with the curiosities and open questions that this material brings up for you? Moving toward your own answers and conclusions? Drawing new or more complete answers than during your last binge? What is the point of such repeated study if you never gain any expertise?

Keep those in mind, I guess.

And long-live the noble people of Albania!

QUICK POSTSCRIPT

The 2026 Autumn Metamodern Spirituality Lab on Death is coming up in October. It is not (very much) about serial killers but it is about how we think toward, feel into, and organize ourselves around mortality. That is a central theme for all life & religion.

Beyond the lurid exploration of the pathological “takers of life,” we have many outstanding death questions that deserve a collective inquiry from the intellect, heart and vibe of the emerging integrative transdisciplinary culture.

Does the Sacred depend on our infinity or finitude? What does it mean to grieve properly? Can we become better composters at all levels? What can we learn from the healthy balance of growth and death in our cells? Does the afterlife have any meaning in a metamodern sense?

• Where do we need to get better at protecting and enriching life?

• Where do we need to get better at allowing the natural rhythms of death?

• Where are we subconsciously living out the wrong kinds of death-drive?

Fun.

Well, not “fun” exactly but we will have a wonderful time in a beautiful place with leading-edge conversations, inner practice, useful farm work, intersubjective processes, ritual, free time, & deep hangouts. Plus you can play a role in shaping how the future of metamodern spirituality holds the terrible, strange, and wondrous matter of Death.

I just wrote a book about Nietzsche. It is called Nietzsche, All-Too-Nietzsche (2026). That title echoes his famous volume Human, All Too Human (1878).

Originally, I was moved to simply call this text Moustache. I still think that is a wonderful title but only a few outrageous weirdos would guess it was about Nietzsche.

This book was a real pleasure. I have spent many decades assimilating the nuances of his strange ideas and interweaving them with my own curious insights. That blending is deep & delightful. And I am acutely aware that there is remains an significant future for his concepts at the leading-edge of human understanding.

Now people can read this book — instead of asking me about Nietzsche!

At last, I am free.

II. Why Read Nietzsche?

Most people have heard of Friedrich Nietzsche. He is one of those few sages whose suggestive wisdom phrases are intriguing for people who do not otherwise read much philosophy. We all know his famous 19th-century memes about “the will to power,” “eternal recurrence,” “beyond good and evil,” “superman,” “the death of God,” and “what does not kill you makes you stronger.” Strong stuff. Very easy to misunderstand. In fact, Nietzsche might be the most misunderstood philosopher in history — and, to be honest, I think he kind of liked it that way.

His books were not written for everyone. The were not even written for university philosophy professors. They are passionate messages flung into the future, looking for his yet unborn friends & colleagues who might one day join him in creating a transformed spiritual understanding of evolution, value & history.

Also his books have incredibly great titles:

The Birth of Tragedy. Human, All-Too-Human. Beyond Good & Evil. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The Gay Science. The Antichrist. The Twilight of the Idols. Smart. Edgy. Poetic. Apocalyptic. Funny. Trans-pluralist. Ironic. Sincere. Suggestive. Potent.

People usually fall into one of two categories on this topic. Either they associate Nietzsche’s name with some vaguely dangerous cultural trend (like atheism, Nazis, selfishness, moody arrogant adolescent males, etc.) or else they say they have always meant to read him deeply… but never got around to it yet.

They are sort of intrigued either way. One of the most compelling features of his thinking, in my view, is that it is deep enough, organic enough, complex enough, provocative enough, and uniquely personal enough that you can learn things from him at any stage of life. Or through any cultural lens.

For example, there is a legitimately barbarian Nietzsche who seems to be evoking totemic individual power and the tribal competition of healthy beasts. Yet there is also a mythic conservative Nietzsche who romantically call us to challenge our modern fad by re-grounding in the old disciplines, hierarchies & traditions that we inherit from our civilizational ancestors. But he is also exquisitely modern in his criticism of retro-romantic traditionalism, irrationality, pre-scientific thinking, dogma, ethnocentric nationalism, and the hidden corruption in popular monotheistic religions. There is an anarchic libertarian Nietzsche and a postmodern Nietzsche who advocates ecology and critiques power dynamics, biased institutions, intergenerational trauma, and the hidden distortions within so-called individualism, reason, and agency. Wherever you are, he is there too — clarifying and complicating your situation.

My own contention is that there is also a validly metamodern or integrative Nietzsche, and I discussed these different uses of his thinking in a recent interview conducted by Brendan Graham Dempsey.

III. Why Read My Nietzsche?

My book is both a piece of unusual scholarship and a general introduction. It also serves as a confession, a piece of good-humored artistic play, and a way of pushing the concept of Nietzsche into new territories. I probably would not have written it except that so many smart people told me that there was something different about my interpretation.

For me, Nietzsche is NOT a depressed, moody, misogynistic and negative loner brooding in the cold wastelands of a godless world. All those 20th-century philosophy book-covers are deeply mistaken. That is not the correct tone. Nietzsche is always bubbling over with playfulness and writing about his delirious happiness. There are jokes everywhere and constant poetic hymns to the Spirit Who Dances. The correct tone is exultant, dizzying, boisterous, golden, dandy and prophetic. He never praises without a sly insult or condemns without a secret compliment. He keeps you on your toes because he stays on his own.

MY NIETZSCHE is a joyful, transdisciplinary, post-postmodern thinker. He has a coherent Big Picture cosmology & deep evolutionary story that features elements not yet integrated into today’s developmental metatheories. His work reintroduces the shamanic impulse into Western philosophy and offers us the first sustained opportunity to consider the kind of postmetaphysical spirituality that might be necessary to overcome (and thrive within) the Meaning Crisis.

Nietzsche called himself a radical traditionalist. Sometimes I call myself that. I mean the 30 000 years of real tradition that preceded the newfangled progressivism of “recorded history.” Christianity? Buddhism? Writing? Those are ridiculously new.

Yet Nietzsche is just as much a radical futurist who peered in the culture, art and crises of the centuries to come and who sought endlessly for the far shore of hyperhuman empowerment on the other side of nihilism.

He suffered immensely. It was not an easy life. His father died early and his household was highly prejudiced and emotionally suppressive. Injured in the war. Suffering from inherited health problems. Constantly unable to make any lasting intimate relationships work. The victim of a public smear campaign from the most famous pop star of the era. And finally lapsing into a nearly vegetative state during which his sister used him as a tourist prop while re-editing his books to please her fascist friends. Yikes.

It was rough but that was not the whole story. He turned all that pain into vision. And he was frequently active, healthy, hiking, writing, inventing the future, and engaged in a relentless series of peak experiences and spiritual epiphanies that accumulated into his late-stage, quasi-divine condition of overflowing happiness, compassion, and trans-rational identity. And he has been a root inspiration for the philosophers, saints, psychologists and experimental souls who followed in his wake.

So there are lots of ways to read his story and we owe it to ourselves to find the versions that best serve the future, community, values and being/becomings that we are working to bring forth.

IV. So What’s In The Book?

• It begins with an autobiographical exploration of his influence on my own life as well as the different sources, translations and versions of Nietzsche that have informed my work.

• Then we explore his Big Picture & Deep History evolutionary spiritual vision from the (non)beginning of Time, through the evolution of beings, humanity, the revolutions of values, the age of nihilism, his own role, and the futures he anticipated.

• After that, what I call the Nietzschepedia — an alphabetic and non-standard exploration of his key ideas and the central people in his life.

• Followed by a commentary and evaluation of each of his writings.

• Finally, a very personal and imaginative love letter to Nietzsche as an ecological system theorist ahead of his time.

That’s a lot.

The whole text is quite unusual in terms of Nietzsche scholarship. It attempts to join with his sensibility about what writing should be like — happy, personal, sincerely ironic, deeply culturally informed, full of double meanings, hidden jokes, mixed feels, and the exultant sensibility of the redemptive mood beyond the distinction between poetry and prose, between idiosyncratic and universal, or between loving and broken-hearted.

His own prose is really quite unique and delightful. I couple each section in my book with one or two of my favorite passages from his work. Illustrative examples not only of pertinent concepts but also of his intricate, erudite, far-sighted, grammatically odd, self-mocking, confessional, perceptive, and values-hybridizing form of integrative communication.

I would recommend that those pieces be read and re-read aloud in order to begin to feel your way into his heart. He often gives advice about reading (which is neglected by almost all his readers). One of the many important things he suggests is to “learn to hear with the third ear.”

May it be so.

V. The Moustache Trilogy

This book is the “second volume of the moustache trilogy.”

That means that I am writing three books for Sky Meadow Press about those three major philosophers that I am most often asked questions about. Gurdjieff, Nietzsche and Ken Wilber (with a moustache added.) Thanks to everyone who has helped with editing, design, publication, & amoral support.

So read this book now but stay tuned…

I. Lurid Orbitals

If you have lived following your own curiosities, then you have probably noticed that certain topics recur periodically in your awareness — as if asking for your summary review & updates.

This certainly happens in my own case. Every few years, I get get briefly and alternatingly re-immersed in the problems of nonduality, UAPs, governa…

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I. A FIELD REPORT FROM THE ARCHAIC FUTURES

Last year I composed a general introduction to Metashamanics. That is a speculative theory about the care, history, & ongoing usefulness of shamanoids in the emerging Global Village. Shamanoids are imagined as the socially and genetically conserved class of neurodiversities out of which candidates would anciently have been selected to serve as an organic priest, witch, shaman, weirdness worker, or gnostic intermediary for the human tribe.

This is not directly associated with people who self-identify as ‘shamans’ or even those who are believed by their own culture to perform such a role. We are discussing a general temperament and proclivity that emphasizes particular interests and capacities that are found in all of us in various degrees.

I am not going to spend any more time here on the broad introduction. You can click the link to the first article. The current piece you are reading will go beyond overview into further explorations. These are things that have been arising at the leading-edge of this new shared discussion.

Most of this will be a summary of the results from a recent collaborative retreat (or think tank and/or ritual space) that occurred on the British Columbia coast in April. It was in the glorious Land of Seals, Otters & Kingfisher magic — attended by myself, the Endemic team, and several other allies from very different backgrounds.

We held and recorded group sessions that moved fluidly between patterns of convergence & divergence. The word ‘intervergence’ came up. I liked it. In my mind, the current essay harvests the memetic results of the intervergence sessions.

So what follows is a sampler platter. A collection of our questions, problems, slogans, and future pathways for exploration. There is a logic to their sequence but you should feel free to jump around between these chunks and find the bits that are most intriguing. My goal here is not to present a single argument but rather to give you a rough sense of the terrain.

The underlying through-line of our gathering oriented around a single deep question: What role do people with mature shamanic capacities play in a world facing civilizational-scale disruption?

Incidentally, here is a quick refresher on why we use the (sometimes obnoxious) prefix “meta” —

1. First, it is a connection to broader “metamodern” or “metacommunity” movements. These are a developmental, transformational and regenerative networks who are interested in reviving organic, multidimensional spirituality in resonance with a post-postmodern sensibility.

2. Second, we are working partly as a response to the metacrisis/polycrisis. This is the idea that shamanic dispositions may be uniquely suited to navigating the challenges of this historical moment and performing a crucial function in human collective sapience and adaptation.

3. Third, the idea of ‘meta’ invokes a higher-order reflection on shamanism itself. We are questioning how lineages form, how they are vetted, and whether they are healthy, etc. — rather than simply validating, inheriting and upholding traditions.

Perhaps that second point was the most salient one for our gathering. A recurring theme was that many of today’s converging crises (e.g. mental health, ecological disconnection, the rise of nonhuman quasi-intelligence like AI, entheogenic illiteracy) correspond suspiciously well to skill sets that traditional village-level shamanic, oracular, or priestly figures once provided. Our emergent argument is that these roles have been lost at scale, and that clarifying and amplifying those skill sets is now urgent work.

But what did our gathering specifically discuss?

II. THE HAND & THE GLOVE

A recurring topic was the Big Alignment problem.

Most of us are familiar with the little alignment problem. That is the question of how AI technologies can be oriented to serve (“align with”) the values of general human flourishing. That is a component of the Big Alignment problem. Our bigger question is: How can the noosphere & biosphere be collaboratively oriented in service to general organic and cosmic flourishing and meaningfulness?

In other words, how do psychological, social, and technological domains come into productive alignment with the most successful patterns found in deep ecology?

Our Big Alignment problem views the shamanic task (i.e. transrational socio-ecological wisdom work) as part of the same general project as science, technological innovation, art, and healing. All of these are attempts to serve deep and ancient ecological trends through their reciprocal alignment with human techno-social organization.

As planetary technological disruption accelerates, we face an underlying question about whether shamanic capacities — particularly around meaning-making, collective coherence, and navigating non-rational dimensions of experience — become more valuable, not less. Is there an increasing need for people who are specifically devoted to the transrational task of improving the Village/Nature alliance at all levels? People whose inner ecology suits them to assist in civilization’s interiorization of ecological principles?

I have been using a metaphor for this in which naturalness is the ‘hand’ while techno-social capacity is the ‘glove.’

Put the hand into the glove.

Sounds good. But what is inhibiting this process?

Our group identified cultural fragmentation as a general condition thwarting individual existential development, community-building, meaning-making, politics, depth, sacred experience, etc. All of these problems could be analyzed in terms of insufficient cultivation of interpersonal cohesion, intergroup cooperation, and transdisciplinary coherence. Cultural fragmentation. Is that a cause or effect of having, in general, a lack of matured, coordinated and socially valorized “shamanic” types? Probably both.

In our dialogues, this fragmentation was connected to a monoculture mode in both our religious and secular activities. In agriculture, we are aware that monoculture crops are an attractive method for efficient control and mass production, which nonetheless frequently lead to soil collapse, malnutrition, ecosystem dysregulation, weakened immune systems, corporate cannibalization of local farms and families, loss of long-preserved agricultural lore, etc. These methods, which are not the only ones that could be used to produce large amounts of sustenance for human beings, are socio-technological activities poorly aligned with the richness, complexity and interconnected non-linearity of the natural world. Perhaps we need a stronger social presence of ideas, practices, and characters who prominently focus on a more thriving mutual adaptation between human principles and natural principles.

That is an obvious place where a para-shamanic intelligence might play an important role. However, we need to follow this thread into a larger context. A more ecologically-honest model of food production must be joined by a similar attitudinal shift in other cultural domains.

The well-known issue of political polarization represents large blocs of the population trying to organize themselves into homogeneous monocultural zones. We can only tolerate our own side — imagining the Others are diabolical enemies of the nation. We only want news that fits our shared bias and does not trigger us with pernicious views. Virtue tests, policing of communication, ideological conformity, etc. are common traps that operate by analogy with monoculture crops.

Even our approaches to “religion” (i.e., existential development, meaning-making, and shared spiritual practices) operate like a single crop. The common idea of a homogenous universal Deity, or a single reproducible holy book, is analogous to monoculture attitudes that do not seem to correspond to the ancient normal diversity of the human sacred ecosystem. Having a few massive “religions” is similar to having a few giant fields of genetically self-similar corn and wheat — rather than the kind of flourishing plurality of interdependent species envisioned by permaculture & rewilding movements.

This is not an argument that there should be no large farms or monotheisms in the world. However, we should regard biological or social monocultures as potentially dangerous. They may typically create fragility, corruption, and dysregulation of complex, nonlinear organic systems. I.e., they may represent a failure to establish constructive, long-range alignment between noospheric and biospheric needs.

Even the notion of the “divine” or “transcendent” or “emptiness” that has become standard over the past few thousand years is imagined like a single crop. We envision and discuss our concepts of the Transcendent Value Being as though it were obviously an extra-cosmic unity, singular identity, and homogeneous quality. The One or None. Yet this is not consistent with the shamanically cultivated version of the sacred that held sway for the longest period of human history. Nor does it correspond to the leading edges of contemporary science, philosophy and art.

Thus we may need to consider a new-and-archaic vision of biodiversity, rather than homogeneity, as the adequate description of Divinity. We may need to presume that the nature of the Ultimate is more like the interconnected richness of a thriving ecology. Deity need not be a monoculture. In a more shamanistic version of all cultures and religions, we might feel God as Shoal, Telos as reef, Shunyata as biome.

Our sense at this gathering was that monoculture is a failure mode of development.

We also considered the concept of enabling constraints — borrowed implicitly from complexity and systems thinking. What intentional limits or structures allow genuine differentiation, depth, and learning to emerge?

A historical example we discussed was the system of ancient Greek city-states. They shared a language and broad culture, but information traveled slowly enough that each city developed with its own distinct character. For the flourishing of diversity, there needed to be a constraint on how much sharing occurred. Too much consensus, obedience or coordination can diminish the vitality and intelligence of a system.

If shamanoids continue their archaic task of mediating between “village” and “wilderness,” then they are tasked with enabling anthropological systems to work, and to resemble, the flourishing of complex ecological systems. This seems to happen when sociological dynamics hover constructively around sweet spots that are enabled by a special balance of interconnectivity & separation.

Enabling constraints may include intentional slowdowns or limits that allow for genuine differentiation, learning, and cultural diversity to emerge. This was offered as a counterweight to hyper-connectivity and always-online culture. Destructive mass effects may emerge spontaneously when there is too much similarity.

Related to this, several people noted strong contemporary cultural movements toward embodiment, in-person experience, and presence. Somatic experience, in-person gatherings, reading books, getting offline, and a rainbow of new Luddites may be signs of a healthy counter-movement to a form of digital acceleration that excessively interconnects us.

Here, the matured and supported shamanic type of person may be able to template and advise on the use of these enabling constraints. Speaking of advice…

III. SHAMANIC MENTORSHIP

We spent a lot of time pondering how to heal the teacher-student relationship.

We looked at abuse potentials, modern shame around the lack of perfect knowledge, the broken container between teacher and student, etc. A metashamanic revival for the Global Village must begin to repair this container. Learning from one another in a trusted, embodied, relational context was seen as both a practice and a model worth seeding more broadly. And, in fact, this is part of what we were already modelling together in our gathering.

Collectively, our culture faces the questions of eldership & apprenticeship, intergenerational transmission, healing ancestral trauma, and remaking teacherly authority without unnecessary forms of hierarchical abuse. Teaching is very important. Yet at the same time, there appears to be something uniquely organic and self-sourced about the unfoldment of shamanic training. This tension needs to be explored.

Outside of traditionalist, institutional imperialism and modern commercial cultures, there is a great deal of focus, in spiritual and therapeutic training, on idiosyncratic and self-selected forms of maturation. For example, there are very old patterns of inner searching, “land listening,” solitary journeying, and the unpredictable discovery of personally evocative insight fragments and proto-skills. These are all quite personalized and unpredictable in the way they unfold.

Unlike the trainings received in large, popular and official religious traditions over the last few thousand years, this ancient alternative was frequently more about providing opportunities, stories and liminal conditions in which the apprentice produced their own embedded ecological wisdom, imaginal capacity, and personal style of ritual interventions.

Yet that does not mean that more shamanically-informed approaches lacks mentorship, information sharing, or the directed cultivation of understanding. Such approaches involve deep veneration for the experience, nuance, and the attitudinal shifts that accompany eldership. Teachers and mentors are still crucial. The metaphor of vertical difference in knowledge, competence and beingness, may be more relevant than ever. However, our group flagged the fairly obvious point about the wounded nature of teaching and learning within contemporary culture.

This involved paying attention to the tension between healthy & pathological versions of mentorship. To cultivate a more broadly shared intelligence about the failure modes of esoteric education appears necessary. We must not only “map” healthy diversity and subtypes of wisdom work but also the shadow variants of our teachers and exemplars. The question of how we educate and mature our shamanoids involves not just a fantasy about benevolent, high-integrity esoteric characters but also the sober appreciation of cult leaders, abusers, and complicated people with enormous capacity whose general character development does not keep pace with their leading-edge.

Dark versions and failure modes allow us to build discernment. Not only that, but it duplicates the core shamanic skill — often overlooked in institutionalized monoculture wisdom traditions — of exploring the dark and grotesque facets of living experience. Nature is full of rot, poison, disguise, and rapacious appetites. Not only those things, of course, but an ecologically aligned approach to social and existential wisdom development has to be very upfront about darkness, danger, and immaturity so that it can play its role in gardening these forces toward more mutual flourishing.

Our group told many stories, from personal observation, about prominent and exciting shamanoid figures whose status, function and community networks underwent disturbing ruptures. Often there was a pattern of a long-accumulated build-up of significant energy, insight and potential, and then fracture. Turbulence. Fissure. Dissonance within a lineage. Popular disgrace of a teacher (with or without their socially irresponsible behavior). This fracture pattern was common across traditions and worldviews. So common, in fact, that we had to ask ourselves where this was evidence of pathology and where it might be the messy version of a natural process of growth via schism.

We reached for the phrase normal accidents — an idea from systems theory. Beyond a certain complexity threshold, accidents are not failures but structural inevitabilities. They represent a living system either struggling with the oversimplification of its habits or the adaptive challenges of its expansion and unfolding.

So the question becomes how to design for resilience rather than perfection. How do we consider that apparent ruptures, breakdowns, or even polarizing controversies within teaching lineages could be examples of an uninspected organic process that adds crucial turbulence and variety into systems?

Yet that does not minimize our need to understand patterns of the problematic fracturing of a teaching context. We attempted to grapple honestly with how frequently shamanoid-like figures become cult leaders or abuse their roles. Several real-world examples were named and discussed. In general, however, we felt that most of these examples, despite involving individual shadows and attitudinal habits, were not purely reducible to a character failure.

When a person has genuine and unusual capacity, but there are no peer networks, no vetting systems, no community lore for how to hold complexity and hold the person accountable, the “energy” has nowhere clean to go. The answer is not necessarily more rules, condemnation, and puritan enforcement but a better overall ecology. That means informed peer communities. It means a sense of what structural layouts are needed within a field of mentorship. Discernment protocols are needed. And there must be an open cultural conversation about healthy versus unhealthy shamanic mentorship (in a way that does not exaggerate the input of fragile, moralistic reactivity or dominant social prejudices that are blind to natural complexity).

But do we even know what we mean by a word like “mentor?” Our conversations identified several distinct forms of mentorship that are often collapsed into one word:

• The fleshed mentor — a living person you meet who helps you unfold your specific path.

• The posthumous mentor — someone from another era whose writings or artifacts speak directly to your experience (Terence McKenna was offered as an example).

• The cultural mirror — we mentioned popular artistic figures like the 3 Davids (David Bowie, David Byrne and David Lynch as para-shamanic art figures from Anglo-American pop culture). These are not shamanic mentors in any explicit sense, but their work serves the double function of (a) signalling affirmation of the weird and helping shamanoids to feel less alone, and (b) providing the cultural service of reflecting ordinary village life back to people through the de-familiarizing lens of the liminal, strange, otherworldly, and subconscious.

• The path-specific mentor — here is someone who seems to have a very specific specialization that may or may not be your own. For example, they teach trance drumming or Sufi dancing or esoteric Christianity. Their devotion to their own specialization must be held in such a way that you can benefit from their mentorship whether or not you end up joining that specialization.

• The peer or spiritual friend — someone, regardless of their degree of being and understanding, with whom you exchange experience openly; the Buddhist term kalyanamitta is referenced here. Here the mentorship context may still function but it does not operate via an openly asserted status differential.

• The elder — distinct from a mentor, but noted as almost structurally absent in our communities. These are people who have had more experiences and retained their basic curiosity, resilience, and dedication to their idiosyncratic path within complex ecologies. Two problems appeared obvious to us. Firstly, we need to get better at determining who is a functional elder — as opposed to merely an older person we wish to respect. Secondly, many of the people best suited to be elders in a contemporary sense do not identify with that term. They may need to be tricked into operating as elders in order to help regenerate mature intergenerational transmission between shamanoids in a civilization that lacks these concepts.

So those are a few variations of the human mentorship role through a neo-shamanic lens. A more complete set of these options would need to be considered as part of an intelligent approach to shamanic education. However, there are also seemingly indirect and “transpersonal” forms of mentoring.

For example, we considered transjective synchronicity as as form of mentorship.

That phrase came up in response to storytelling in which people recounted being guided by salient coincidences. There were situations in which their gifts, predilections and life-paths were moved forward by coincidences, miracles, and puzzles.

Often such episodes occurred in response to emotional crises within younger shamanoids. Also they frequently involved a prolonged period of semi-trance in which nonlinear navigational “clues” were followed. Realizations, insights, and practical chunks of one’s own wisdom were often the result.

Regardless of the objective reality, the lived experience was that of a non-personal organizing intelligence, or else particular “spirits,” that provided the kind of self-clarifying and orienting encounter that a mentor would otherwise provide.

The word transjective points to something that is neither purely subjective nor purely objective — it crosses or blurs that boundary. This kind of extended mentorship does not require any particular beliefs about a “guiding power,” but it does seem to involve attentive and repeated probing into meaning patterns that evade the typical subjective/objective distinction.

We found it important to note that these forms of self-sourcing in shamanic training are not gestures of isolation. Nor do they signify willful independence from lineage. Rather, they are an affirmation of the contextual and ecological unfolding process and the requirement to gain some skill in the dance of meaning.

The dance is a way of cultivating these two shamanic capacities:

(1) staying in close dialectical flow between uncontrolled, emergent, potential significance in the environment and one’s own playfully held analytic intelligence,

(2) sustained use of liminal meaning-making states in which symbolic and affective connections could move in any direction.

So skill in this area is twofold. Firstly, developing a basic appreciative competence for how to start, follow, and move with potentially “unreasonable” signs. Secondly, a grounded capacity that does not have to believe these signs in order to access them.

That second capacity also becomes important for the mature shamanoid who, among other things, may be required to help community members to step outside their belief systems and become more pragmatically tolerant of cognitive dissonance.

Together these two skills can engage a kind of “third space” that holds the subjective/objective boundary as fluid. This is a means of moving between the overly regimented collapse of meaning-meaning and the indefinite expansion of combinatory explosion. Contemporary cognitive science highlights this problem very explicitly. Meaning fails if it gets too locked down OR too wide-open. It thrives in response to exploratory inhabiting of the space between.

While the right kinds of inner balances may open “situations” as mentor-like phenomena, it is also true that many things may shut down or degrade normal teacher-student dynamics over time. For example, we probed the commodification problem in mentorship. It seems likely that genuine mentorship can sometimes, not inevitably, get distorted when money enters the relationship.

The conventional education situation of contemporary for-profit universities has been widely critiqued. While this criticism is sometimes overblown, it does appear that expensive educational institutions become corrupted in many ways. Professors lose power to the financial administrators. Oligarch families and fragile students expect to get what they pay for — and avoid difficult topics and developmental complexities. Anxious fiefdoms emerge between scholarly departments. And a general atmosphere emerges in which educators self-censor and over-accommodate as a result of the financial dynamics.

It is unknown the degree to which monetary exchanges might pervert or constrain educational relationships in a shamanic context. Our group ended up distinguishing between a teacher (who you can find and pay for explicit skill transfer) and a mentor (who tends to appear serendipitously and operates outside transactional logic). That distinction was at least a starting point.

However, it leaves open the problem of elders. These people need to have their material needs met in a way that allows them to prioritize the direct and indirect sharing of their accumulated beingness & understanding. How is that accomplished without an exaggerated risk of the relationship itself becoming a commodity?

The problem of direct and indirect sharing included an exploration of what we might call “transmission” as a biological and energetic phenomenon — not just a symbolic and informational process.

A passage from Stephen Harrod Buhner was referenced, describing energy passing body to body from his grandfather to him in a woodshop. Not as an intentional teaching but as something physiological and organic.

This prompted reflection on the absence of adequate mentoring (which we sometimes called the Odysseus problem because the absence of that cunning hero meant that his son Telemachus needed a substitute teacher in the form of a character named Mentor. That is where we get the word). Our consideration was whether the absence of adequate mentors might partially be downstream from a neurophysiological resistance, or lack of capacity, to receive subtle but physically real forms of non-symbolic information.

Maybe it is the case that older bodies, if they have lived in certain ways, create containers for some “substance” which younger bodies could absorb. Yet we may not be training people to be able to receive. Or perhaps our current environment creates patterns of resistance and avoidance that tend to inhibit these imagined transfers. In either case, this inability to acknowledge and assimilate these flows may be responsible, over time, for the obsolescence and absence of certain kinds of mentors from our consensus spaces.

In the esoteric culture of India, there have been socially recognized patterns such as (a) people retiring from business and family to become focused on “the sacred,” and (b) traditions of satsang & shaktipat in which the embodied company of particular mystics was understood to perform a maturational function.

What could be gained through an intelligent contemporary normalization of such ideas about mentorship?

Overall, our group became increasingly convinced that it is important to draw distinctions between proclivity, practice & purpose.

That means that having shamanic capacity or temperament (i.e. proclivity) is not the same as having developed those capacities and interests (practice). And neither of those is the same as actually deploying it in service (purpose) to a community or an ecosystem. This tri-part distinction is central to what any diagnostic or typology system for shamanoids would need to track. We must not naively conflate people who are “onto something important” with the realization of stable skills and insights, nor either of those with being a mature, ethical, and grounded person in their ability to use this for the well-being of others.

So mentorship and esoteric education assume that the proclivity can be detected and then must be assisted toward the maturational cultivation of practice and purpose.

(And here’s a picture of me at the gathering.)

Once we have made that distinction, we can then look more closely at the “proclivity” element. What are its different forms and where does it tend to occur?

We considered the problem of informal or concealed shamanic functions. For it is certainly not the case that everyone who has matured esoteric competencies and service orientation is self-identified as shamanic — or publicly advertised as such.

It is certainly true that many people who self-identify or self-promote as “shamans” may not belong to the category that we are exploring. Conversely, many who do belong to this category might not like or identify with those terms. And certainly many may not be involved in selling themselves in a professional sense.

So we must take seriously the possibility that a portion of the shamanic function in human communities has always been invisible and unprofessionalized. The example given is a grandmother or mother who just does that thing — orients people, holds space, reads situations, brings ecological complexity, etc. — without ever naming it or offering it as a formal service.

We started to use the tow-truck metaphor. I.e., someone notices a natural communal behavior such as helping people out of ditches. Then they professionalize it by starting a tow-truck service. It serves a purpose, and it scales up the behavior, but in the process it may strip something natural from the situation and it may also obscure the ongoing presence of casual or non-designated helpers.

Is the explicit presentation and professionalizing of the community’s shamanic function a step up? A step down? Sideways? This question was raised but left open for further inquiry.

Alongside that question, is the realization that many mature shamanoids might be hiding in plain sight. Any diagnostic tools we develop would have recognize that this role, and its associated interests and capacities, could be appearing as a systems theorist, artist, filmmaker, community organizer, environmentalist, therapist, or scientific researcher.

The Nobel Prize-winning biologist Barbara McClintock is offered as a case study in institutionally deployed shamanoid capacity. She described becoming the corn chromosomes while looking through her microscope, experiencing insights in a non-dual state before designing the experiments that later validated them. This is presented as exactly the kind of paradigm-breaking scientific contribution that appears to correlate with esoteric modes of perception — and as evidence that the question is not whether science and shamanic capacity can coexist, but how to create the conditions where that coexistence is recognized and supported rather than hidden or dismissed.

The goal of metashamanics is NOT to have more people identifying as shamans, but to have more contexts where shamanoid capacity is recognized under a fluid diversity of terms — and permitted to unfold through whatever role a person already holds.

What we are calling shamanoids and, for lack of a better term, shamanic approaches, may be found as a stylistic subset of any other discipline.

An interesting thing we noticed was that the phrase “the field is the shaman,” became ubiquitous in our conversations. It arose to describe situations where no single individual needs to be the shamanic figure — instead, a well-constructed community space or ritual context itself performs that function by harvesting fractional shamanic tendencies in everyone. So a metashamanic analysis of remarkable situations — teaching, healing, sacred immersion, etc. — would need to be aware that the group egregore, or even the so-called “spirit of the place” could be the active element.

In fact, this could be the case even when a particular human being is widely cited as the “source” of energy, healing, vision, altered states, etc. Such a person might, at times, only be a servant, or even a parasite, on the shared or location-based shamanic field.

The person who set up that field only may-or-may-not have high shamanic proclivity or a benevolent orientation. This complicates the idea of identifying and cultivating individuals, suggesting the unit of analysis might sometimes be the container rather than the person.

Terms like sourcekeepers and field holders are helpful ways of describing people whose primary function is the participatory maintenance, stimulation, and balancing of the distributed quality of the shared space. Naming such functions, not only decenters the status of a single individual but it also allows us to think about establishing supportive peer networks and clarified mentorship approaches for these specific modes of human-to-field service.

(Here’s a picture of one part of the ritual space that we unfolded together at the event.)

IV. “The Ritual Industrial Complex”

We started referring to the ritual-industrial complex when we considered the problem of simulations of shamanic competence.

What happens when authentic ritual practice gets captured by commercial and industrial logic? Certainly the modern context has produced a situation in which birthday ceremonies might be characterized by cheap candles thrown away after three seconds. Or by Hallmark cards standing in for the genuine marking of a maturational transition. Solstice gets replaced by Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus in much the same way that industrial trans fats replace the actual fats needed by our bodies.

Yet this problem may go back much further.

While people in our speculative ‘shamanoid’ category find themselves drawn to priestly functions in society, we can contrast them against the figure of the officialized priest or magician. It is historically plausible that the organic function of esoteric individuals (who must uniquely invent or decide upon the ritual patterns) gets replaced by those who are institutionally trained to repeat sacred formulations provided by written material or social custom.

Along these lines, our group felt that ritual is at risk of being hollowed out. Not blasphemed or forgotten. Not abolished but replaced with a repetitive social custom that demands very little from us. Commodified, professionalized, and normalized. Stripped of ancient ritual weirdness, lacking genuine collaborative participation, and rejecting its transformative ordeals.

A similar situation has obtained with contemporary entheogenic journeys. They are often taken for personal transformation or recreation, whereas historically the entire function was collective and civic. You went through the initiation on behalf of the village. Honor was not bestowed because it was YOUR birthday, but because you went through the ordeal on behalf of everyone else.

Along similar lines, we explored the idea that initiations, ceremonies, and ritual moments may involve the distribution of suffering. This was one of the more original contributions to our sessions. It even struck us as possible that hazing, bullying, and other forms of sadistic collective behavior were feral, improvisational attempts to meet an organic need — in the absence of appropriately designed and adaptive ritual containers.

The healthy version might be initiation that is witnessed, honored, and understood as being in service to something larger than the individual going through it, and which engages everyone in both liminal consciousness and involves them in the intentional suffering of the ordeal.

Another shamanic simulation problem was raised in terms of the public sense of magical and esoteric possibilities. Particularly through popular entertainment such as Harry Potter.

Does that fictional universe present only a misleading “Muggle’s fantasy” of wizardry?

Metashamanics should consider whether such works exemplify and communicate to shamanoids — or whether, on the contrary, they actually quarantine these things into an impotent fantasy buried under ideological social stereotypes? Do these popular presentations often inoculate people against taking subtle possibilities seriously in real life?

A contrast offered was Twin Peaks, where Agent Dale Cooper’s intuitive, non-linear methods were embedded in a realistic-enough world that viewers could think: I could do that. That feels like part of the real world.

It is strange enough to be an authentic portal rather than accessible enough to indicate a conventional substitution for the portal?

Our sense was that good storytelling around shamanic or esoteric themes should emphasize (a) the normal rather than fantastical nature of the phenomena, and (b) the sacred nature of the peculiar and uncanny — rather than the recognizable aesthetic pleasures of conventional magical pageantry.

The more interesting and useful fiction is that which blurs the line — where the magical or subtle is embedded inside a realistic-enough world that the viewer can think: I could do that, that could be real. Castaneda was named as a literary example, and David Lynch as a cinematic one.

We also explore the anime world as a space where this line-blurring is happening at scale right now, with large audiences.

A key distinction that emerged in these discussions was re-enchantment vs. remembering enchantment.

Attempts by modern people to contrive magical, ritualistic intensities (or to sell each other on the ideas of a psychophysically evocative realm) may reinforce the very processes that led to the pervasive experience of a disenchanted world.

That self-undermining strategy was contrasted against the sense of returning or remembering the ancient, underlying synchronicity and multidimensionality of the world that is present in ecosystems, cracks, odd persons, strange thresholds, and the Wyrd generally. Shamanic capacity is not exotic but latent and recoverable.

One could argue that the world is not in need of being re-enchanted — as if magic needs to be imported from outside or re-established by selling ourselves on a new narrative. The alternative frame is that meaning, synchronicity, and subtle connection are already always present — the problem is that perception gets dulled.

Good storytelling, in this view, does not add enchantment. Instead, it re-attunes people to what was never absent but which was marginalized due to miscategorization. The actual locations and flavors of already existing enchantment are overlooked in favor of shinier, more dramatic, and popularly marketed scenarios.

Words like the Celtic term Wyrd remind us that a lot of stories that carry genuine shamanic or esoteric content have an element of weirdness. A creepy or uncanny or liminally disorienting quality that causes people — especially in domestic or institutional settings — to shut the conversation down.

Building a culture where these stories can be told and received requires developing a higher tolerance for sitting with that discomfort in the body. This is flagged as a real obstacle to the casual, everyday transmission of this kind of worldview across generations. We called it the uncanny tolerance problem.

V. DIAGNOSTICS

How do we identify these shamanoids, their subtypes, etc.? This was a key inquiry for the Endemic group because it has generated several lightweight experimental questionnaires to help identify shamanic temperaments and possible specializations.

It has remained an open question whether the purpose of such “tests” was primarily to perform a neuropsychological diagnostic categorization — or whether it was mostly a form of engagement and invitation that offers people a chance to feel out whether they are interested in joining a conversation on these topics. However, the issue of diagnostics goes beyond just Endemic’s in-house concerns. There is a core practical concern. Before you can build any theoretical or practical infrastructure around a type of person, we need concrete examples of that type.

Our group attempted to brainstorm living people who embody high-integrity, mature, practically-deployed esoteric capacity. This surfaced a secondary challenge. Most people, including those in our gathering, do not share the same reference pool. Examples are often only legible to whoever named them.

It was proposed that a practical heuristic for finding esoteric people might be, rather than searching blindly, to look at fields where the existing subject matter has already attracted a self-selected population.

Two types of self-selections stand out.

The first are shamanically-suggestive subsets of existing disciplines. Creative religion. Eco-psychology. Ritualistic performance art. Dark fantasy novels. Mystical Islam. Gnostic Christianity. Tantric Buddhism. Surrealist sculpture. Energetic acupressure. Vitalist and process philosophers. The biology of plant intelligence. Indigenous epistemologies. There may be particular thematic zones within any broad discipline that become more highly populated by shamanoids due simply to their preference for certain topics, practices and peer exchanges.

Secondly, we could look to zones of broad overlap or intersection between many other disciplines. If there is truth to ideas such as the more generalized cognitive styles of shamanoids, their ancient role as shapeshifting mediators between tribes, and their attraction to the thresholds and proto-conditions underlying all normal “village activities,” then we might expect to find a higher than normal percentage of these people self-selecting into transdisciplinary activities.

In that case, we would seek, for example, among polymaths, interdisciplinary academic programs, integrative philosophy movements, multiple intelligence projects, and those who have been involved in many different professions or hobbies.

Any plausible self-selection spaces would make our diagnostic task easier. But we also have to answer some basic questions for ourselves:

What is it actually for? The purposes being considered include: a public funnel to find and connect people of this type; a marketing tool; a rigorous psychomedical diagnostic instrument; or simply a conversation-starter that introduces the exoteric-to-esoteric spectrum to people who’ve never encountered the framing. These different goals for a diagnostic tool require very different designs and carry very different risks.

The problem of self-report. Several of us noted that esoteric people, who are often at the fringes of social groups, working from intuitive prompts, and skeptical of the conventional use of linguistic and conceptual categories, may not be good at self-perception or self-communication. Part of that could be addressed, in principle, by inviting assessment from others who know you — rather than relying only on your own shape-shifting, boundary-eluding response to verbal prompts and categories.

The Snowden/Cynefin approach was referenced as a design alternative — using sliding scales, image selection, and narrative self-report rather than binary or multiple-choice questions, to better capture the ambiguity and contextuality of these kinds of distinctions.

In the end, for practical reasons, we assumed that, in the short-term, our assessment’s value is in “the conversation, not the assessment.”

While we may be able to set the seeds for a further objective elaboration, we currently are most interested in introducing people to a framework and sensibility. Especially inviting people to the notion that there is a spectrum from exoteric to esoteric, that there are types within the esoteric, that these orientations are real and contemporarily relevant. The assessment is a door, not a destination.

To go further in objective evaluation, we would want to initiate a project that sought to harvest overlaps between our new category and several already-studied populations. For example, highly sensitive persons (HSPs), schizotypal personalities, contactees, peak experiencers, Sean Esbjorn-Hargen’s “super-experiencers,” and people scoring very high on the Big Five trait of openness. Rather than building a diagnostic from scratch, mapping the overlaps with existing psychometric literature could provide both scientific grounding and a shortcut to finding the population.

VI. CULTURAL INTERVENTIONS

We began to use the image that I called the gardener of souls. This was an ecologically oriented metaphor for one function of the shamanic figure: someone who tends the garden of other people’s development. Not forcing growth in one direction, but creating conditions for each person’s particular potential to emerge. This is contrasted with education or mentorship models that treat people as generic humans to be brought along a predetermined (i.e. monoculture) path.

Another potential role for shamanic intervention involved what several participants described as a felt absence in modern communities of trusted figures who help individuals and groups navigate discontinuity, fracture, and existential complexity.

The shamanic figure was compared to a village mechanic, doctor, or farmer — someone people trusted implicitly — but operating at a deeper psychological and spiritual level. The question of who do you go to when something breaks in yourself or your reality sits at the heart of this.

Beyond that lies the utility question. I.e., what can shamanoids actually do? While this may have some overlap with the problem of scientifically evaluating paranormal and psionic phenomena, we are not primarily asking about how to evaluate and harness unusual powers. We are instead oriented around a deceptively simple inquiry:

What problems can high-integrity, well-developed shamanoids solve that other people cannot? Or solve in ways that others cannot or would not?

This is a two-part conversation. It involves both the actual unique utilities and approaches of matured shamanoids AND the problem that sufficient cultural trust is needed in order to provide the opportunity to deploy and clarify such skills.

A key structural observation for us was that, before any shamanoid can have civic utility, there must be some basis for people to trust them. The group notes that this trust-building is a distinct category of activity from the utility itself — and that it happens through accumulation of small demonstrated acts of integrity over time, not through proclamation.

The Aztec example is offered: a shaman’s beads are publicly legible symbols of demonstrated capacity and integrity, worn on the body, readable by the community. The modern absence of any equivalent is named as a core problem.

What contemporary evaluation process and social marking could indicate maturational functionality and benevolence in such a character?

As part of our inquiry into social intervention, we developed a speculative notion called the quest model.

This vision articulated a tactic for how trusted shamanoid councils might operate relative to the general population in a hypermediated digital environment. Perhaps they could be organized to note subtle emerging potentials and needs in people across a community, then assign quests. Small, game-ified, uniquely tailored, and ecologically grounded interventions. Meaningful activities with a high likelihood of simultaneously maturing the person and accomplishing something real in the world at the intersection of ecological complexity and technosocial progress.

The person doing the quest would not need to understand the full picture. They would, however, need to trust the shaman who assigned it. The accumulation of many such quests, each invisible to the others, constitutes a meaningful holistic intervention in culture. The key constraint is that quests must be ecologically grounded and developmental in a full-spectrum humanistic sense — otherwise, the arbitrary assignment of tasks degrades into cultic obedience.

While this could take the form of something like a digital app, its fullness would be something that utilized & required alliances of embodied, mature shamanic elders.

A similar situation was considered as a specific cluster of concerns around shamanoids who are artists.

They often have a strong intuition that their art is for something, that it is meant to have a function — but they lack the language, the community, or the structural support to aim it. So they may fall into the trap of assuming that their artistic impulses are purposed only towards “self-expression” or “commercial sales.”

Shamanic eldership could offer a reframing and feedback process that negotiates both the self-directly query (what do you want your art to accomplish?) and the external alignment (how does this serve the human-technology-ecological relationship?).

We considered the possibility of subtle activism in which art might be considered as part of an ecological and cultural intervention, not mere performance.

VII. RITUAL DYNAMICS

Ritual design is a more clear topic today than it has been for many thousands of years. We discussed many contemporary theories and much personal experience in this regard — going so far as to build a ritual event for ourselves to provide the phenomenology from which to extract some general principles.

While far from comprehensive, the principles that stood out to this gathering were that:

1. Meaning must be legible. The ritual worked better when participants understood what the objects were, where they came from, and why they were significant. Pre-established meaning systems — even partial ones — give participants something to plug into despite the complementary necessity of emphasizing non-symbolic and liminal consciousness during ritual activity.

2. Effort and mark-making matter. Rituals that involve real physical effort and leave a visible change in the landscape have a different quality than those that do not. Something was accomplished. The space was altered.

3. Consent and containment are structural prerequisites. The question of who is leading, what the container is, and whether everyone has genuinely ‘opted in’ affects how safely the energy of the ritual can build. Too loose a container, in the sense of people standing at many different distances from the performance, creates a porousness that some participants experience as uncomfortable or even risky. It seems necessary to elicit the general shared sense of volunteering for a special cooperative state whose attitude, organization and priorities are roughly known and accepted in advance. This is not necessary in order to produce intense effects but to secure health, sensitivity, and repeatability.

4. Ambiguity can be either productive or destructive. The group distinguishes between useful confusion — the kind that loosens habitual cognition and opens participants to something they can’t quite name — and disruptive confusion about logistics, roles, or purpose. The former is a feature; the latter bleeds energy.

5. Spontaneity has a ceiling. Improvised rituals have a beauty and appropriateness but are limited by the shared meaning-vocabulary participants bring. Widescale, repeatable ritual requires a richer common alphabet of symbols and meanings — not necessarily universal, but coherent within the group. While collaborative and improvisational elements are necessary to maintain the life of the ritual, its potency involves constraints, history and resonance with other rituals.

6. Ritual Time. The question of ‘temporics’ requires much more investigation. One element we encountered was that the calendar we collectively live by is deeply inadequate for the ritual & cyclical understanding of time that shamanic practice requires. One speaker noted having calendar dyslexia. Not an inability to show up on time, but an inability to find the Gregorian calendar meaningful or intelligible as a map of time. The suggestion is that any serious conversation about ritual infrastructure has to eventually grapple with how we collectively mark and move through time.

VIII. EXTENDING THE SPECTRUM

Our consideration about ritual participation was lensed through the three-mode framework that I elaborated in the first article on Metashamanics. Esoteric, mesoteric, and exoteric as terms to simplify a broader shamanoid spectrum. The prefixes eso (inside), meso (middle), and exo (outside) have a useful etymology. Relative to ritual dynamics, we could look at them in this way:

Exoterics come to ritual to receive something that they don’t know how to generate in themselves. Mesoterics remember to bring presence to the ritual and can participate with intention when the context invites it. And esoterics are obsessively experimenting with ritual conditions, constantly refining their relationship to what they can’t quite name or see.

Our argument was that good ritual design serves all three modes simultaneously, and that the historical success of certain religious ritual traditions comes precisely from centuries of iterative co-development between all three modes — not from the genius of any one designer.

Toward the end of the session, the three-part spectrum was elaborated more clearly:

• Exoteric people dip into ritual or spiritual experience occasionally, typically when grouped together in a context that invites it

• Mesoteric people are actively interested, engaged, and seeking to validate and integrate esoteric experience. They move between both worlds and help bridge them.

• Esoteric people are compulsively self-generating in their relationship to ritual and psychotechnologies. They are inventing practice wherever they go, spending as much time as possible in those states, and cannot easily turn it off

An obvious structural insight for us was that mesoteric infrastructure is the enabling layer. For example, the esoterics often cannot and should not have to figure out the financial, institutional, and logistical scaffolding that would allow their gifts to be deployed at scale. That is a mesoteric function. So is making an argument for why the general population, social decision-making, and cultural customs should involve inputs from people involved in strange, invisible aspects of life.

While no one is confined to any of these categories, it can be useful to draw these distinctions to help people sense their degree of interest and to respect the other complementary functions as part of the same general attempt at community coherence, power, and flourishing.

After the BC gathering, I extended and complicated this three-aspect approach. I was looking at it through the lens of “leadership.” There is a simplified caricature of archaic tribal politics that goes like this: Under normal conditions, the Chieftains and Matriarchs, in their own distinct ways, can handle the organization of tribal life. When the basic background conditions of reality are disturbed through technological innovations, climatic shifts, or disruptive new ideas, then the Shamans emerge into political utility. They need to be able to access the collective unconscious, propose new customs, thrive in strangeness, negotiate with unseen forces, and operate half inside, half outside, the inherited patterns of tribal life.

We could update these terms by thinking about technocrats, sociocrats, and altocrats as options pertaining to the whole spectrum from exoteric to mesoteric to esoteric.

The suffix “-crat” pertains to the leadership role or special function that operates across our cultural self-organization.

Consider technocrat as a more formal way of thinking “chieftain.” While not exclusively male, this is a disposition that favors practical action, object relations, handling external realities, simplifying communication (to the point that it can be readily understood and implemented by anyone), and focusing on the use of tactical efforts to generate success in a potentially rivalrous environment.

Examples are soldiers, engineers, programmers, architects, athletes, construction workers, inventors. Their interventions consist mostly of attempts to clarify, streamline, sequence, strategize, and implement. Logos.

A sociocrat is instinctively oriented to intervene in feelings, interpersonal relationships, stories, and meaningful customs. They may show up with strong “moral” insistence about what is the normal and appropriate thing to do. They like to situate information within a lived story that highlights connections, circumstances, and motives. They have a strong ability to sift and circulate ambiguous feelings alongside provocative narratives. Examples include therapists, wedding planners, storytellers, moralists, astrologers, decorative artists, social workers, etc. Mythos.

An altocrat (‘alt’ suggests alternatives; ‘alto’ suggests height/depth) is a figure who advocates and specializes in unusual noncognitive intensities.

These intensities might be involved in tantric sexuality, entheogenic states, trance, immersive art, rhythm, transcendent revelation, comedy, meditation, taboo violation, inner conflict, extreme sports. Pathos.

So an exoteric technocrat, for example, would be a person who is externally focused in the conventional zones of life AND approaches those domains through a technical lens. Here is a person primarily oriented toward taking comprehensible action in the physical world. A mesoteric technocrat may be sensitive to inner and subtle phenomena but only explores them occasionally. Instead, this person is focused on finding practical external strategies that support the conditions in which a functional inner life could proceed. And an esoteric technocrat would be focused more exclusively on the practical dynamics and procedures of ritual production, technologies for altered states, performance of spells, building affective temples, mapping power spots, generating and deciphering occult codes, etc.

An exoteric sociocrat is drawn to the enforced rearrangement of social behaviors. For example, the attempt to make sure that people are cared for, community looks good, healthy values are promoted, honors are accorded properly, and the right people are in the right places for the lifeworld to thrive. Think of how we caricature most prominent female Democratic politicians. Mesoteric sociocrats are networkers who connect artists, philosophers, mystics, the neurodiverse, to each other — and to lifestyle resources. Think of the hostess of philosophical salons or an inter-artist organizer like Peggy Guggenheim. And an esoteric sociocrat might focus on the social, emotional, and narrative dimension of inner practice. The abbot of a Buddhist monastery. The matriarch of a coven. Anyone who organizes mystics, yogis, oracles, seers, subtle healers, etc.

An exoteric altocrat could be someone who makes rational arguments for prioritizing intense or nonrational experience. Or a ruler who governs from instinct, intuition, or omens. An executive who makes practical use of alternative sensemaking styles and modes of consciousness — often with astonishing and preposterous results. The mesoteric altocrat could be an artist who emphasizes the transcendent, grotesque, or surreal. E.g. Clive Barker, David Byrne, Lady Gaga, Anne Rice, Kane Parsons. They are specialists in alternative modalities who take responsibility to put such worlds in front of the general population. And the esoteric altocrat takes leadership positions that are explicitly spiritual, occult, arcane, or subtle. A dharma-ruler. A witch who takes over the court. The realizer-adept as guru. Pharaoh as god-king. Often the founder of a school, lineage, or new wisdom organization.

It remains to be seen whether this additional complication is a useful way of organizing people. At the very least, it allows us to separate out the social shamanic function from one’s private involvement in esoteric practices and ideas.

IX. CONCLUSION: The Dawn Sages

Looking back over these many interesting and suggestive pathways for future metashamanic study, I am drawn to one particular feature that haunts all of this. It is the role of the Dawn Sages.

Or perhaps what the developmental philosopher Jean Gebser might have called the people of the everpresent origin.

The wisdom of the shamanoids, as they mature, collaborate, and discern both principles of health and goodness as well as their service to our collective intelligence, frequently delves into the most pre- & proto- of things.

The cultural agitators behind the American joke religion The Church of the SubGenius point out that their word SubGenius does not mean “just below a genius” but rather a “genius of the sub-things.” This is very shamanic in my view. As originators of human esoteric and wisdom lineages, they are upstream of dharmas and faiths. Compulsively drawn to the place where principles and insights initially emerge.

They are, on the whole, less interested in learning asanas, contemplative traditions, healing styles and martial arts disciplines than they are in getting a visceral feel for how bodies take on the primitive elemental forms that eventually become postures, practices and systems.

Insofar as they study and experiment with and undertake disciplines, it is to get better at situating themselves in the spot where these forms emerge. Like half-sketched figures starting to be carved from ancient stone under an expert chisel.

Just as our imaginal notion of shamans is indexed to prehistoric dawn sages who blur into the dreamtime, the technical field of the “esoteric altocrat” gravitates toward the inner ancestral dawn — in which practices and wisdom are eternally being newly invented and endlessly explored.

Custodians of first principles.

Or pre-first principles.

Anyway, thanks for being curious about this.

(SECRET ADDENDUM)

Recently, my friend Joe Lightfoot included the “neo shamanic” among his unfolding list of integrative archetypes. It is short and worth exploring. He said of the shamanic style of wisdom worker:

“These prime receptacles for the creative advance of novelty perpetually instigate encounters between the ancestral and the emergent. They hold open the turnstiles between deep time and the bewildering now, refusing to let either side forget the other exists.

Neither priest, therapist, guru nor entertainer yet often leaning into all four simultaneously. They occupy a functional role so archaic that the modern world has long forgotten its name.

Crafting moments that reconnect us to dream, to vision, to subtlety and to religion without creating caustic cults or becoming overly drunk on their own imaginal potency. They routinely call us to God by every name.

Well versed in a plethora of mystical traditions these ‘culturally androgynous’ (Bard’s term) agent provocateurs are often found in the estuaries of our collective subconscious. They thrive in the brackish inbetweens where the storied rivers of our wisdom traditions merge with the hyperreal seas of our technological now.

They are fountains of synchronicity at the crossroads of causation, specializing in the transmission of subtle energy whilst more often than not keeping one foot (or at least a wily toe) firmly moored on the banks of reason, science and rationality.

With the greatest of reverence for our esoteric cultural inheritance they don’t shy away from adapting and evolving dharmic source materials to better support and nourish us in this time between worlds.

Savvy to the leading edge of the post-political, sub-cultural and metacognitive they have a grip on big history and track the broadest of memetic waves that ripple through our human story. Their gift is not merely the transmission of a tradition but the re-seeding of wonder itself. A kind of cultural re-wilding of the imagination that is committed to quietly reversing the slow domestication of the human soul.

Comfortable in a plethora of altered states be they Dionysian, medicinal or contemplative, they are skilled in holding their unique energetic frequency whilst remaining meaningfully engaged with the surrounding world.

As the mainstream loses touch with initiatory practices they create new rituals to meet the moment, presiding over our rites of passage and remaining steadfast witnesses to our moments of metamorphosis.

They are the connective tissue that mediate within and between different cultural collectives. They welcome all to the fire, shapeshifting across a range of fluid identities and bridging between all kinds of wonderful weirdos. They have a deep acceptance and lived compassion for our peculiarly 21st Century set of neuroses.

Initiated through immense suffering they are left possessed ‘by something terrible and beautiful’¹ as they walk forth alone into the shrouded darkness of the post cultural unknown in search of new songs and stories to bring back to the tribes.

They are planetary beings² who’ve consented to be of service to a story much larger than themselves. Having undergone the comprehensive transition from a narrow cultural identity towards a genuinely planetary self-conception they have apprenticed themselves to mastering the kinds of practice and encounters that help to facilitate this shift in others too.

Their deepest living questions are how to re-enchant the world and reveal the numinous in the contemporary. How to stay in genuine contact with the sacred, uncanny and wyrd in a cultural moment characterised by hyperstimulation, deadened ironic detachment and thickly nihilist armour.

Possessed of an almost embarrassing sensitivity to the energetic weather of a room they read the unspoken atmospherics of a gathering the way a seasoned sailor reads sky.

They strive to live in accordance with the subtle energetics of their present ecology, maintaining an intimate awareness of the songs, seasons, loving whispers and death cries of their surrounds.

Whilst recognising their role requires the pushing of certain boundaries they oppose the unskillful use of power in sacred contexts and request accountability for the impact of their ministrations. They are cognisant of the many before them who have unintentionally slipped into grey and dark magic and so seek to form new reservoirs of trust in preparation for the generations of shamanoids³ that will follow them.

Wielders of the word hypnotic they sing new songs on the periphery of the village, trickling sacred sonnets into the ears of passers by. With a dancer’s timing and a poet’s weight they choose when to speak the unspeakable and when to let the silence ring.

That sounds about right.

Thanks, Joe.

I. A FIELD REPORT FROM THE ARCHAIC FUTURES

Last year I composed a general introduction to Metashamanics. That is a speculative theory about the care, history, & ongoing usefulness of shamanoids in the emerging Global Village. Shamanoids are imagined as the socially and genetically conserved class of neurodiversities out of which candidates would ancie…

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WEIRD TALES are no longer just a luxury item for artists, mystics, and science-fiction nerds. I love the speculative strangeness of imaginative futurism but this is not about me. Our whole world is living forward into an uncanny moment. Somehow, we have got to get serious about uncanniness.

This was the spirit that led me to say YES when the philosopher Cadell Last asked me to co-host (with the hyperhumanist Carl Hayden Smith) a month-long, January 2026 inquiry on The Philosophy Portal platform.

Our topic was Apocalyptic Accelerationism and its potential “hyperhumanist” solutions. Fancy words. Maybe they need to be fancy because they are probing the subtle & complex shapes that describe how weird our world is becoming.

For the course, I prepared some “rants” to highlight different facets of the unsettling transition that our current civilization is zooming toward, into, & through. Since we did not have time to get to all of those (and since not all of you were able to attend the course), I promised to present these mini-talks online.

That’s what this article is...

I. ON ACCELERATIONISM

Hyperhumanist apocalyptarian accelerationism. That is a long mouthful-o-words. It is the ostensible topic of this course. What do these terms mean?

Hyperhumanism is a way of talking about a humane alternative to transhumanism. Significant historical and technological transformations are obviously taking place in our world, but there is no need to imagine that our transformation is merely about cyborgs, digital consciousness, and genetic life extension. There are many archaic potentials and fully human mutations that might lurk down more decent, beautiful, and organically complex future pathways. In many profound ways, we do not even yet know what a human being IS or can DO.

Apocalyptarianism is my own term. It describes our need to recognize and adapt to the increase of cosmic weirdness in the “time between worlds.” Radical changes are occurring. The metacrisis is both doom and opportunity. The general population's vibe is anxious, discombulated, and we recognize something important in the image of the apocalypse. That sense of radical change, perplexity, and in-betweenness is becoming the dominant characteristic of our times.

Okay, now that those two are out of the way — what is accelerationism?

This refers to a set of philosophical attitudes that not only take historical acceleration seriously, but also suspect that we should lean into it. This attitude emerges in the contradiction between the sense that our civilization is deeply stuck and also that things are changing faster than ever.

The tension between these broadly shared contradictory feelings leads some folks to imagine that the solution might be to start “pushing the river.” Maybe go faster? Maybe take the risk of destabilizing rather than restabilizing? Maybe encourage the unpredictable changes, ride the new technology, and let the existing world order crumble under its own weight?

Accelerationism.

Interestingly, a so-called “left” and “right” version of this philosophy has emerged.

There is a Leftist fantasy in which accelerating the current technological, economic, and cultural trends may overwhelm the adaptive power of capitalism and force its mutation into its own opposite -- a planetary luxury communism in which the Market is automated, and the humans are left to pursue art, science, solidarity, and pleasure.

There is also a Right-wing fantasy in which more oil, more AI, more corruption, more anxiety, and derealization could accelerate the final breakdown of godless democratic liberalism, allowing us to reorganize into pseudo-traditionalist, oligarchic, ethno-states that cosplay as the pure, strong, pyramid-shaped empires of yore.

These are the two main positions (see Cadell’s articles) that have colonized the discourse on accelerationism.

They both sound idealistic, risky, perhaps even desperate. Yet there is also something beautiful in the courage to take the risk. And, after all, many parts of Nature and Mind behave like (what we used to call) Chinese Finger-traps. The key to release is often counterintuitive, and sometimes the only way out is... further in. I am trying to appreciate these strategies because I instinctively do not trust them.

I suspect both the Right and Left accelerationists of being hasty, narrow, and insufficiently interested in real complexity. Their plans to overcome modernity strike me as just more of what modernity does so well, i.e., capturing and neutralizing revolutionary energy by splitting the memetic space into “two popular sides” whose complementary attempts to correct the system end up simply updating the status quo.

The System (sic) is tricky. Adaptable. Metastable. Fuck Capitalism t-shirts are now available for purchase! Next to the anti-Communism merch. Both were made in the same warehouse by the same slaves, employees, robots, etc.

That flexibility makes it pretty hard to fight. It has weaknesses (topic of another essay), but anything that shows up as polarization and suggests “doing more of the same to correct the System” is probably part of its deep self-protection and self-regeneration.

Is another kind of accelerationism possible?

Can we go faster, double down, and mutate in ways that exceed the self-securing dialectic of the modernist economy? A strategy that unfolds the destiny and potential of a truly human transhumanity? One that is more sane, ecological, nuanced, and potent at the same time? Yes, I think so.

But do not let that seduce you toward optimism.

Apocalyptarian adaptation requires a deeper despair. An integration of the Tragic. A grieving process. Let your heart break. Decompose and recycle your hope. In the meantime, however, I do believe in an orthogonal accelerationism. A better accelerationism that moves perpendicular to the two dominant versions.

Other things are possible.

Suppose you wanted to actually accelerate beyond liberal democracy to its far shore? Does that mean you try to break the system, or that you should extend the range and variety of liberality and democracy? If you really believed that you could transform the current system by pushing it forward, then maybe we need to make it easier for more and more people to vote. More machines, mail-in ballots, and voting reform experiments. Amplify and extend the power of collective decisions until it mutates.

Alternatively, suppose we want to accelerate beyond the logic of capitalism. Shouldn’t we add more and more things into the market? Put aside communist fantasies and start quantifying all kinds of labor and resources? Turn everything into work and numbers? Multiply the number of metrics for market success beyond GDP? Put even more things (e.g., infrastructure and environmentalism) under the Pentagon budget?

You can hear in these two examples that there are forms of Left and Right accelerationism that do not correspond to the mood, assumptions, and actions of the people conventionally associated with those movements. My sense is that both sides are simply forms of the self-protection of the dominant system, UNLESS they start to think (and feel) more clearly about what an accelerated extension of the “stasis quo” might actually look like. Not a petulant regression informed by pre-existing attitudes but a real mutation based on an open-minded furtherance of the characteristics of the system that feels stuck.

The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke used to talk a lot about reciprocal narrowing. Two different ways for a dynamic coupling system to operate. They can mutually delude, stagnate, and collapse each other in a pattern that resembles addiction. Or they can cooperatively expand, integrate, and stabilize. A constructive or destructive cascade. This difference, which we might call healthy vs. unhealthy, is not foregrounded in standard discussions of accelerationism.

There is a perpendicular direction. At one end is the stupid war between Left and Right in a way that endlessly reinforces the system they both oppose while constantly risking regression and devastation. The other end is an unknown expansion of the current systemic principles in a way that might actually mutate or reverse its qualities.

And it emerges from the cracks of the Real.

But where do we start?

II. ON METHODOLOGIES

Carl (my co-host/co-teacher) gave a great presentation last week (i.e., in January) on “hyperhuman methods.” These are science-infused practices that aim to modify the context of our perception in ways that promote a richer mode of being human. For me, these are part of the ongoing wealth of psychotechnologies that constitute humanity’s spiritual attempt to refine, unfold, or transcend its existential condition.

In dancing with Carl & Cadell, I want to highlight three qualities that help to define the subset of psychotechnologies that is pertinent to the idea of a hyperhumanist, apocalyptarian acceleration into the near future of our weirding planet.

The practices we are looking at here are characterized by

(1) ecology

(2) integration, and

(3) community.

ECOLOGY is our basic context. As a constraint on psychotechnologies, it points toward practices that are specifically involved with, and evolved within, a realm. A life-world. This is an interactive space of complex symbiotic systems to which we must adapt and for which we must provide regenerative and transformative service.

Ecological psychotechnologies are adaptive. In practice, this requires the intentional re-orientation of human bodies, sensory organs, and multiple intelligences toward the richness, immersive nuances, and organic patterning styles that provide the living source and background of our partially understood human complexity.

Carl’s emphasis on practices to decompress our optical and psychological field of vision (you had to be there) provides a way of intensifying our adaptive contact with the elements that make up an ecological surrounding. This facilitates an increased reciprocity between our internalized patterns and those in which we are embedded. In addition to Carl’s exercises, we might also put into this category the various breathing methods and yogic strategies that emerged for people such as Wim Hof and Leonard Orr through sustained, intense, elemental immersion.

We can also look at studies demonstrating decreased sensory acuity among children raised in the manipulative simplicity of urban and media-driven environments (in contrast to those raised in the tricky, multivarious, and complex sensory perceptions of a rich wilderness landscape). That insidious collapse of human capacity within impoverished and oversimplied artificial communication spaces highlights the need for psychotechnologies that enrich our interiority through adaptation to Nature’s nuances.

Both Carl’s project of unfolding latent human capacity and my work on being more indigenous to our quasi-apocalyptic epoch involve the deliberate amplification of attentional practices that adapt our neuropsychology more thoroughly to our rich, regenerative, and complex environmental conditions. That’s the ecology aspect.

By INTEGRATION, I mean that we can analyze virtually all classical and novel psychotechnologies as ways of integrating (or synchronizing, resonantly coupling, or enhancing the collaboration of) subjectively active informational subsystems.

These inner “subsystems,” which are both psychological and biological, can be analysed from different directions. We have many different modules or streams of experience that can be brought into “conscious struggle.” The simultaneous or oscillating activation of pertinent multiple contexts of sensemaking and behavior. This double experience, or charged parallax, is an important key to evoking a more generalized and comprehensive way of being. A more full-spectrum self with a more reliable sense of human being-ness.

Of course, we do not necessarily have to think about our practices in these terms. The languages of simple flow, divine grace, or even effortless release are very useful, but we also have this interesting option to analyze and engineer the dynamics of these practices as an essentially integrative or intra-psychic phenomenon.

And the last thing I had in mind was COMMUNITY. The psychotechologies being explored in this course are not practices that are self-applied by totally isolated individuals. We do these things with each other.

Okay, that’s the end of the reflective preamble on methodologies. My intent here was to appreciate and amplify Carl’s presentation by highlighting three examples of the porosity or permeability at the root of these particular psychotechnologies. Adaptive permeability to ecosystems. Interior intentional permeability between intelligence subsystems. And the mutuality between selves & others that is both deeply true of all beings and pragmatically necessary for the accelerating time period we are now entering.

III. THE AGE OF DIS/CLOSURE

Anybody with philosophical friends, or too much time on their hands, already knows that Apocalypse is not just a condition of breakdown, suffering, and radical dissolution. It is a word akin to revelation or disclosure. The making seen of the unseen. The coming to light of what has been hidden since the Beginning of the System. Night things come forth to be inspected by the light of day.

It is probably no coincidence (assuming that coincidence, or its opposite, can even exist) that contemporary social, political, and scientific efforts to get military and corporate bureaucracies to reveal whatever they might know about UAPS, UFOs, anomalous entities, unusual technologies, etc., are widely referred to as the Disclosure Movement.

Whatever we personally think about “aliens,” and the strange fascination they exert over certain types of people, we can nevertheless view this phenomenon as a notable example of the Spirit of an Age of Disclosure.

Although folklore cultures and shamanic lineages speak about unusual transhuman, elemental, and quasi-material entities, our rapidly unravelling modern epoch has sought to simplify, clarify, and amplify our relationship to certain aspects of the natural world by presenting a strong skeptical challenge to the ancient evidence of mythic community beliefs and unusual states of consciousness.

Good. Yet those efforts have not eradicated these common human experiences or their enduring psychosocial effects. Ongoing accounts of such phenomena have transformed into the lore of extraterrestrial visitors and strange ultra-material crafts. This has been relentlessly mocked and radically marginalized by modern authorities.

That is, until recently.

Mainstream universities, the US government, many Pentagon insiders, as well as voices from the bureaucratic and military establishments of many other countries, have started saying, or gotten louder about saying: these things are real. Or rather, they have started saying that there is “something going on” that they “do not understand.”

Some regular and significant portion of these encounters, both via technology and by individuals whom we otherwise treat as highly credible witnesses, cannot be readily explained as misidentified objects, secret government projects, or as the secret projects of other governments. This is now a more-or-less official position held by government and military authorities around the world.

Strange.

Think about the intensification of ambiguity involved in the current situation. The material, reductionist, control-oriented, top-down authorities are now sending STRONGLY MIXED MESSAGES concerning nonhuman intelligences, anomalous entities, and the vast peculiarity of the cosmos.

And the more closely we examine these mixed messages, the more mixed they become. The more convinced we get that neither hoax, nor hallucination, nor extraterrestrial visitors can quite explain the sheer weirdness of what is being constantly reported and constantly half-documented.

This could be an ideological affection or a psyop. It could be new real entities, archaic entities, or something that exceeds those kinds of categories. A whole mandala of possibilities, clusters around the (?!) ambiguity that is being collectively “disclosed.”

Ontological flooding in the Age of Disclosure.

The revealing of previously hidden or discredited layers of reality in a way that does not simply increase knowledge but constantly offers a double-impression, yes and a no, mixed messages & growing weirdness. The UFO enthusiast hopes for new facts that shift hidden knowledge toward the surface. What they get is the amplification of parallax and plurality.

The same thing has happened in our physics. We want a solid new view of the universe. Instead, we got Einsteinian bending of space-time and quantum indeterminacy. New facts were revealed by theory and measurement. They had been hidden in matter since the beginning, but now they were disclosed. Yet it did not settle and clarify the situation. It made things feel weirder, more slippery, incomplete. Are there 11 dimensions now? Is retrocausality in the mix? Just examine the overall trend of these disclosures at the heart of our current sense of physical reality.

We dug up the ground and found giant mycelial organisms. We set up computers and found endless fractal complexity. We peered into cells and discovered self-organizing, elfin cartoon cities rather than a simple mechanism. The more we looked, the weirder it got. This is characteristic of the reality being disclosed.

To become more indigenous to this world, we must take certain risks in terms of emotionally allowing ourselves to feel that we are not in Kansas anymore. We are in Oz.

We are unmoored, yet we cannot live without secure attachment to reality. So we must work towards secure attachment with the revealed realm itself. Start to become friends with this more complicated and indeterminate quality of the world. And one of the first steps in this adaptation may be to mentally grasp it. See it. Name it.

To observe the pattern of what has been happening to our idea of reality as we have “disclosed” more about reality, to expect that pattern to continue, and to conceive it as an intrinsic property of our environment.

IV. MY DEAR WATSON

In 2011, an IBM computer named “Watson” defeated human contestants on the popular American TV game show Jeopardy! It was an interesting moment. Halfway between robots beating the Chess masters and robots beating the Go masters. Of course, we might quibble about how autonomous Watson actually was and which features allowed for its success. We also do not want to naively attribute superhuman consciousness to computational devices. But with all the objective caveats in place, it was intensely interesting to me because I saw it happen live on television.

I was astonished.

Bizarrely, what astonished me was how NOT astonished I was.

I kept saying to myself:

“Hey, you idiot, a robot just went on a human game show and defeated the contestants! Wake up! This is science fiction become reality. This would have seemed like an mind-shatteringly extraordinary event to any author in the 1940s but you are barely registering that it happened. Why aren’t you overwhelmed? Where is your shock? Where is your remaking of your assumptions about the world?

-My Internal Monologue, 2011.

I started to reflect. After all, if the news I consumed was to be believed, we had found organisms on space rocks. We grew a human ear on the back of a rat. Cars were driving themselves. These are intensely astonishing in comparison to the entire history of human civilization and life on Earth. But are we even registering them?

Or, more to the point:

Are we doing what it takes to make them real for ourselves? One of my heroes, the iconoclastic philosopher Georges Gurdjieff, said that a real human life consists of what he called “personal experiences, personally experienced.” Well, okay. We are having personal experiences about our moment in history, but are we personally experiencing them? Are we, to put it bluntly, actually assimilating any of this shit?

I would suggest that, in general, we lack any visceral, instinctive, or deep sense of what historical period we occupy. Our gut feelings about reality are intensely important but dangerously out-of-date because we do not perform any intentional praxis designed to get our subconscious sensibilities up to date.

We consume massive amounts of news. We hear about discoveries. We are hopeful, anxious, judgmental, and curious, but nonetheless, we do not do a lot of deep processing. Ask yourself, when was the last time you took a walk (or a sauna, or a sensory deprivation float, or a seated meditation) devoted to spending just one hour reviewing everything that has changed already in your lifetime?

When did you last do any deliberate emotional, mental, somatic, or imaginative work whose purpose was to chew up and digest the signs of where we are in the Great Timeline? Are you even trying to feel out what kind of world this is?

What kind of world is now?

It’s weird. We agree about its weirdness, but that agreement is just the beginning. We have to start adapting to the weirdness. We have to take it on board. We have to do to it what our body does to physical food. A mixture of conscious chewing and subconscious digestion that begins with the wish, the hunger, the appetite to make “strange update information” into a living part of ourselves.

We did not have to worry much about this in the past.

Once upon a time, many generations could live and die in roughly the same background circumstances. That meant that they could get very good at those circumstances over the course of dozens of generational cycles. They could deepen into their local ecosystem one grandparent at a time. They could slowly develop profoundly simple but powerful heuristics for meaningful thriving and the activation of complementary human capacities within a mostly unchanging biological and cultural environment.

Over many cycles, the immigrants (and everyone and everything is ultimately an immigrant) can go from invasive to native species — just by living embedded in the multi-directional organic complexity of a region. That’s the ancient normal way to do it. But today we do not have that luxury of time.

Our environmental, technological, and social world changes multiple times significantly within a single human lifespan. Although much stays the same, many things have been radically altered. And the rate of this alteration is increasing.

When my grandparents (Ruth, Rupert, Albert & Edna) were born (not that long ago), there were about 1.7 billion living humans. Now there are 8 billion. When they grew up, there were no nuclear weapons, and no person had ever gone off the Earth. You could not surgically and hormonally alter your gender. There was no genetic engineering. We did not all have plastic in our blood. No one had heard about giant underground mycelial organisms, lasers, holograms, Gobekli Tepe, DNA, the United Nations, fascism, probiotics, or color television. All that and more is taken for granted, just a few years later, as part of the world in which I am embedded. Thus, I cannot significantly rely on the inherited wisdom of my grandparents (and their grandparents) to guide my life.

And, conversely, if I wish to offer something useful to my children (and their children), it cannot be strategies for adapting to a reality that is no longer present. Instead, all that I can sanely offer are principles for rapid adaptation to transformative circumstances.

The people of tomorrow and the day after will not be fundamentally served by skills and attitudes that allow them to live, by inherited logic, in a consistent and normal world. Instead, climate change, mass migration, technological revolutions, and the mutating informational and cultural landscapes mean that they probably have to adapt multiple times to diverse environments.

To thrive in such an unsettled world requires that a body of knowledge (a lore, a dharma) be cultivated now by intelligent, well-meaning subcultural networks that can emphasize accelerated indigenization.

Whether we are talking about global climate refugees, national immigration problems, or just how families and individuals learn to live in a new city, new country, new era, or maybe even offworld, the question is the same:

What does it take to become native faster?

One dimension of the problem involves studying and embracing the existing populations that we call indigenous, native, or aboriginal. They may preserve lore, behavior, and attitudes that can communicate nuances concerning their ancestors' successful adaptive strategies. However, that is just the beginning. There is much they do not know about the emerging world. And in either case, we must (unlike our ancestors) become much more intentional, trans-ethnic, and fast-paced about our adaptive processes.

What are some ways we can already begin to think about this?

Consider what it takes for a sapient neuro-organism (which I have heard is also called a “person”) to get functionally familiar with a new region? Suppose you move to a new town. Just looking at maps is pretty meagre. Picking up a few glimpses on your way between home and work, or school, is probably not enough to start developing an internal root system connected to this environment. In most cases, you will have to get out, in your body, and explore. Exploring is different than “going somewhere.” It involves getting lost and finding your way back. It is experiential and experimental. It shares this with the attempt to garden local plant species. Open-ended, locality-based, behavioral interventions that elicit “cognitive hunger” (biological interest in map making).

Another strategy you might use for deepening your connection to a new region might be temporal contrast. This is super-straightforward. Watching how “the same thing” changes in the region over time. Go down to the river each season. Make observations of the same tree, lake, bees, foxes, otters, slime, etc., as they shift from one season to the next over several years. This was a tremendous source of wisdom for our ancestors. What they gained from generations of casual observations, you might be able to accelerate with more frequent, more targeted, and more intentional inspections. The importance is not the “knowing” but the “noticing” since most of our neurobiological adaptation is subconscious. Just keep giving it the relevant data.

Another ultra-simple strategy is to forage. You have to touch, smell, and nibble the things that live in this new place. Not excessively, subtly. Not so that you put yourself at risk of toxic compounds. Very small touches, sniffs, and tastes are a way of directly transmitting local “ecological” bio-informational architecture into your own “neurocultural” bio-informational architecture.

(Note: Just had intense deja vu about writing this. Writers don’t usually mention that, but who knows, it could be important.)

Other simple strategies could involve making some kind of inner contact with the symbols, lore, and dreams of the people who have already adapted (or tried to adapt to) this new place. You must finds it boundaries. Walk its edges. Figure out who its pre-existing shamanic edgewalkers are. And let its bacteria colonize, and negotiate with, your existing bacteria.

These are a few of the simplest and most accessible, non-esoteric ways of beginning to think about accelerated indigenization. We no longer adapt to a single persistent normal world. We have to quickly and progressively get better at adaptively normalising an abnormal world.

We are talking about going beyond the idea of securing & returning to the forms of previous human adaptation. Instead, we are thinking about the attitudes, skills, and behaviors that optimize the enfolding of new places, knowledge, life & circumstances into our human purposes. Facetiously, we could call this a hybrid of colonizer and colonized wisdom. In reality, it is the recognition of the need to accelerate ancient adaptive processes to rapidly unfolding radical transformations.

And if we cannot do that kind of acceleration, then we will likely drift toward a fast-adapting system that ignores human experience and purposes.

V. HIGH-TRUST SUBNETWORKS

Human beings have periodically felt epochs of deeply unsettling strangeness. This is not a purely contemporary situation.

Imagine our prehistoric ancestors. They often discovered very successful adaptations allowing them to live for centuries or millennia in the same way. When the background conditions of their life were relatively stable, the chieftains and the matriarchs (technocrats and sociocrats) could act as effective custodians of collective decision-making and resource distribution. Older people automatically became useful elders because “merely surviving longer,” within that particular stable situation, produces verbal and nonverbal intelligence that can help fine-tune the flourishing of subsequent generations facing the same situation.

To receive cultural inheritance and maintain it is a truly sacred thing. But when the background conditions change, when there is ecological instability, because of climatic disruption, or chunks of rock falling from the sky, or because humans’ harvesting and pollution practices have caught up with us, or when there is technological shift, or encounters with new kinds of beings, or new balances in the ecosystem — then the collective unconscious of the tribe begins losing confidence in chieftains and matriachs who are specialized for a system that can no longer be relied upon.

It is at this point that it turns out to be prescient and pragmatic to have mature weirdness workers in your small-world network. Hunter S. Thompson famously said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” These shamanoids, witches, or weirdos, who have been haunting the edge of the village, tracking non-rational patterns, and showing up to do therapeutic or developmental or ritual tasks, suddenly have a political significance. Their status, practice, and compulsion to be half-inside and half-outside the paradigm of the village now becomes an important social asset.

The human collective needs to gamble on actions and sensemaking styles that do not feel normal because they have to respond to a world that no longer feels normal. The cultural field reaches out for figures who blow their minds, who speak in strange ways, who activate trances, who disregard boundaries, who commune with unconscious forces, etc. Maybe you get a good one, maybe you get a bad one. It is clear either way that the conventional rule of sober managers is not responding to the scale and tempo of the actual drivers of the problem.

So that’s an ancient normal thing. And we can follow it through recorded history both in periods of collapse and in phases of apocaplytarian vibes. The common story is that St. John, author of the Christian book of Revelation, anticipated the End in his lifetime. People were feeling apocalyptic back then.

There have been numerous periods where novelty or instability has caused people to feel like a great strangeness, an unearthly intensity, was bleeding through the cosmic veil and transfiguring worldly affairs.

In my old Stoa talk on Apocalyptarianism, I mentioned Gurdjieff’s idea of the Solioonensius. He mythologizes it as a cosmic pressure wave. It is created when massive interstellar bodies get too close to each other (like when someone gets too near on the sidewalk). A subtle tension is created. It flows through space and ripples through planetary biospheres. A normative healthy planet would be prepared for this ingression of strange energy and use it to become more urgent and active in its evolutionary spirituality. An unprepared civilization, however, simply feels overwhelmed by an unspecified revolutionary urge. The sense of ambient acceleration becomes war, political madness, and pointless attacks on the inherited processes that regulate our common life.

If you saw Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, you might remember that while the “philosopher-physicists” are waking in the night, electrically agitated by deep glimpses into the ethereal infrastructure of galactic and subatomic realities, the rest of the planet is responding to the same cultural atmosphere with war, genocide, and regression. So we can think about apocalyptarian phases coming and going through history. Yet, these vibes seem to have become more frequent, perhaps more intense, during the last few centuries and decades. It is as if we were accelerating toward a meta-stable condition of perpetual acceleration that somehow settles upon the Unsettling.

It is so common that we can begin to organize around it.

In a manner reminiscent of the origin story of the 7th Adventist Church. Their founder proclaimed a mathematical Biblical prediction pointing to the End of the World. People gathered at his farm to await the Great Moment. They were already feeling it. The prediction resonated with their latent mood. But the world did not end. The leader said: Oh, I got the calculations wrong! Math is hard. Come back next year and the world will definitely end at that moment. Next year, even more people showed up. The year after, even more.

Today, it is simply an ongoing religion.

A rationalist cannot believe this stupidity! The continued failure of evidence is taken as proof? Yet it is very interesting to observe that (a) people needed to hear their apocalyptic feeling validated, and (b) they collectively wanted to use that feeling as a catalyst for forming new communities and a new way of life.

They build around their apocalyptic vibe. Our question then is how to do something similar but smarter.

How do we settle into the unsettledness? Like the doubter who gains a new confidence by doubting his own doubt, can we grow a capacity to live sensibly in a world of peculiarity and omni-skepticism? Can we, for example, teach our children to be uncontracted, emotionally responsive, fully human, existentially participatory, in a world where even video images and voice calls from loved ones can be easily faked?

We have to live into a world where massive distrust is needed. The apocalypse of trust. Anything can appear to be anything else. The hackability of the human heart, mind, and body is everywhere on display. But we have to actually LIVE in that world.

We must evolve communities that practice the particular kinds of balance required to love, rejoice, work, suffer, philosophize, build, innovate, feed, and luxuriate meaningfully in a realm that initially feels under a vast shadow of radical risk. We are those who must build our nests during the eclipse.

And yet, as mentioned above, we are not the first to feel the apocalpytarian vibes. So we must learn from the successes and failures of previous communities that responded to the waves of weirdness.

The 20th century was full of cults and communes. These were the predecessors of today’s “intentional communities.” They sought to escape, transform, and prepare themselves against a backdrop of radical peculiarity and dangerous modernism. A few thrived. A few are lingering. Many failed catastrophically or were gradually reabsorbed into the mainstream culture.

Why did most of them fail to operate as dynamic imaginal cells of the new civilization?

Some broke down as a result of dogmatic personality structures blind to important aspects of practical or community reality. That is a common risk, given that a shared belief or charismatic leader is often the prime catalyst for new communities. Understandable but inherently unstable. It tends to drive out the more complex, interesting, and sensitive participants. There is a deep inquiry here. How do you embrace divergence and social complexity while maintaining enough of a membrane to keep internal consistency of efforts and preserve the difference between the community and the general culture? My suspicion is that we need analytic tools and individuals who can operate as inter-community researchers, helpers, and stabilizers. Who can, perhaps, even make assimilable to community authorities the valid intelligence possessed by those who leave or get ejected.

Another common problem in intentional communities is that people go too fast in their desire to be sincere, trustworthy, trusting, loving, devoted, cooperative, positive, non-reactive, etc. Too many people jump too quickly to demonstrate that they are virtuously “all in.” That sidelines a lot of your human complexity and intelligent nuances. It can also hinder the slower organic growth of authentic trust and virtue.

I am a strong believer in what I call high-trust subnetworks. Within the broader communities, the meta-network, you have to be guided by intrigue and affinity; figure out who you enjoy, and with whom you can functionally cooperate in a relatively unforced manner. This slower organic growth, incremental, often indirect, and possibly peculiar, deepens peer friendship and allows the naturalization of relationships. It does not proceed by an idealized leap into trusting the community but rather it honors misgivings with a good conscience. It reaches like tree roots moving in the dark. Many iterations of risk, doubt, and evaluation perform a task that superficial waves of willingness cannot accomplish.

In principle, we are all on the same team, but the people with whom you can survive on a space station are very few. The people you can have in your intimacy bubble are very few. Friendship is serious. It has to be vetted bit by bit.

So the message of this section is that our Age of Weirdness is preceded by many ancient waves of weirdness that have much to teach us. One of those lessons is to make haste slowly — learning to form real connections and unfold rich forms of trust that enfold our diversity, doubt, and individual self-regulation processes.

VI. EVALUATION AS PRAXIS

When I translate Nietzsche, I like to treat Übermensch as ultrahuman — instead of Superman or Overman. I have noticed that most readers of Nietzsche forget that a “mensch” is a real stand-up guy. Humane. Characterized by a grounded human decency. So while there are definitely alien and inhuman elements to the ultrahuman, let us also remember that it also points to a “fully-human transhuman.”

This is a figure that goes beyond our humanist notions about the nature and limits of a human being, but also lives the transformative edge of what it means to be more completely “human” and more completely a “being.”

There is a full spectrum human condition that is typically truncated or narrowed by our educational systems, families, media, politics, economics, etc. We might imagine the richer existential condition as being naturalism in the form of humanism. Being as fully human/e as the jaguar is a jaguar. That is a humanism that I could respect.

Is humanism too anthropomorphic? We get hung up on that possibility and rightly want to make sure that we are not imagining that all intelligences are like unto ourselves. Yet our form is not isolated. Our characteristics are inherited from the rest of Nature. Who walks upright on two legs, has complicated language, self-awareness, extended childhoods, intergenerational wisdom transmission, and can build tools to make other tools? Crows.

Most of what we call anthropomorphic could also be called crow-opo-morphic. It is actually quite anthropocentric to believe these attributes are anthropomorphic. They are more general than we often assume. I say that we should think of the ultrahuman as an entangled concept that weaves its futuristic novelty together with deep humanism and deeper ecology. Remember that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra tells us to be “true to the Earth and true to the Body,” as we cultivate beings who can rehumanize on the far side of the Abyss.

Yet there are other elements to this vision.

We must not forget that the ultrahuman is also a response to the meaning crisis. The value problem. Nihilism in the post-secular age. Nietzsche gives us a prophecy about the Apocalypse of Values that may describe our current unfolding era. This is no simple problem. It cannot be solved simply by denouncing relativists and choosing to believe in transcendental virtues. Nihilism is not the absence of passionately asserted beliefs. Rather, it is the insidious erosion of our values and beliefs from within.

Nihilism was hidden in our idealism. We culturally and religiously aspired toward values that created the nullification, neutralization, and regression of our capacity for meaning-making. Widespread social collapse into trivial and self-indulgent ideals is the result of our higher ideals.

It is not that we fail to revere. It is worse than that. The things we teach each other to revere have been denuded of organic reverentiality. Our cultural farming practices have rendered the soil infertile. That soil is named “God,” and “truth,” and “goodness,” and “worthiness,” and “peace,” etc.

So we enter the time of what Nietzsche calls the Last Man. A slow awakening to the presence of a missing quality whose absence was created by our religions, philosophies, sciences, and social reform movements. The self-ruination of the highest values. Here we find terminal humans who inhabit the cul-de-sac of the meaning crisis.

An apocalpytarian mood begins to saturate this twilight condition as we notice, slowly or quickly, that our values are not producing spiritual, biological, or social valuableness. Our wealth of information is not informing us. Students use AI to write essays that professors use AI to mark. The forms remain, but they are hollowed out and ineffective as sources of meaningful human living.

In response, Nietzsche advocates for new, daring, experimental philosophers. He calls upon them to study the strange, unpalatable, organic, and even immoral, roots of how effective value is generated. In addition to studying the sources of value-experience, he asks them to volunteer for the speculative task of bringing about the ultrahuman — the fully human, pre-human, & post-human being who lives so deeply (and well) into nihilism that he/she/they is mutated into a new kind of evaluator.

This is a being for whom radical disbelief and maximal meaning can co-exist.

Perhaps we might view them as sources of surplus value rather than seekers. The symbolic plane of socially-mediated meaningfulness is no longer viable as a solution to the problem. An entirely new inner and interpersonal scheme for value-production is needed. If the Last Men narrow the meaningfulness of all meanings, then the Ultrahuman must secure a meaningfulness beyond all meanings.

So when we think about the apocalyptarian idea, remember that one significant feature of this mega-liminal & multi-liminal realm is the value problem. And when we think about acceleration, think about what it means to go further into the structures that we associate with the collapse of meaning. And when we think about the hyperhuman, remember that it also involves a deep shift in how we generate, amplify, and promulgate the experience of vauableness.

VII. THE CTHULHUCENE

Last week (you had to be there), Carl played a clip of director James Cameron saying that we already live in a science-fiction world. That is another way of saying that we must be apocalpytarian. We must grapple with living in a world whose revelation of the principles of reality creates living conditions that feel post-normal.

The great pioneer of post-normal science fiction was the amateur American pulp fiction author H.P. Lovecraft. He invented or clarified the genre of Cosmic Horror. This guy was a strange and sensitive dreamer who idolized the writers of the Gothic era and believed that Modernity contained the seeds of its own destruction.

He was initially quite reactionary, racist, and authoritarian, but by the time of his death, he had become a weird kind of socialist. However, it was not just the ethnic diversity and economic privations of contemporary civilization that bothered him. There was a more fundamental point of worry and intrigue. A portal was being opened by the interdisciplinary convergence of modern sciences.

New machines, new analyses, and new research were allowing consilience between the leading edges of many disciplines. This was producing a more accurate map of cosmos, history & psyche which, Lovecraft was sure, would reveal the radically anti-modern patterns that constitute reality itself. As soon as our researches stray into the vast vagaries of deep time, down to the fathomless bottoms of the ocean, out into the dark voids beyond the solar system, and into the depraved architectures that hold sway within the cellular kingdom, then we encounter truly post-modern patterning. Disorienting scales and aesthetics that are imaginatively epitomized in Lovecraft’s new pantheon of monsters, such as the many-tentacled, chimeric, and aeons-old Cthulhu.

The philosopher Donna Haraway coined the term Cthulhucene for the already emerging epoch that exceeds the Anthropocene and the dominion of capital. A kind of hypohumanist situation that re-places humans into Nature’s omnidirectional, trans-rational, multi-species interconnectivity. This can sometimes feel utterly terrifying and dark to our controlling, modern, left-brain Apollonian intellect.

Like putting your hand into a fertile pile of compost, there is an initial sense of grotesquerie and inhumanity involved in making contact with nonlinear, organic, adaptive, and symbiotic processes. They lurk and writhe. So perhaps we can use the term Cthulhucene as another way to name the apocalyptarian world into which we are sliding — faster and faster.

There are two major failure modes for that acceleration:

One failure is to pretend it isn’t happening. Blindly press onward with business as usual. Pretend that human operations are fine as they are. Or that they can readily course correct to avoid radical changes.

This failure mode ignores our rapid trajectory. It does not grapple with the externalities of our dominant processes. Hypermodernity is a term used by some metamodernists to describe a false postmodernism in which modernity perpetuates and insulates itself by its own typical strategies to performatively critique and correct itself.

The other failure mode is a naive resignation and withdrawal. An environmentalism so unimaginative that it can only think of scaling back, doing less, reducing the human, rather than figuring out how to play our responsible role in the stabilization and transformation of the biosphere through aligned noospheric actions.

Agency, not passivity, is needed. However, we must understand, as our sciences and our ancestors understood, that agency depends on proper balances. The solution to this alignment problem is not action in contrast to inaction. Nor is it inaction compared to action. It must exceed the dichotomy that describes our stuckness.

The Taoist notion of Wu-wei is not about surrender or non-action. It is about the kind of action that blurs the line between spontaneous activity & goal-oriented activity. This characterizes the entire creative spectrum of flow in which we are always adjusting the degree of control or release appropriate to the flourishing of a shared context.

How do you ride a horse? You hold on tight -- but not too tight.

The actual structure of thinking is nondual (opposites cannot be thought without at least the minimal contextualization of their reciprocal concept), but it takes practice to access a natural hybrid mentality.

Problematic or short-term thinking proposes a basic choice. Taoist thinking seeks a relatively optimal balance of reciprocal qualities in any embedded, complex, and participatory context.

So to adapt to the Cthulhucene (an age that discloses trans-rational organic complexity in all directions), we need to get better at regenerating flow states — including the emotional and intellectual transcendence of conventional opposites.

The oscillation, ambiguity, and paradoxical structures that characterize our mystics, our great physicists and philosophers, and our weirdest artists (all the things that are built from a simultaneous yes-and-no) have something to tell us about how we must think, feel, and live in the Time that initially seems like a time between Times. A time of Liminality.

To wrestle with Cthulhu, you must be able to move in two directions at once.

VIII. ORDEALOLOGY

Most of us are probably familiar with Wim Hof. He is not just an idiosyncratic exponent of ancient yogic techniques of breath and heat. He is an example of an adaptive process. He believes that his “scientifically verified” high-powered immune system, ability to tolerate thermal extremes, general sense of energy and meaningfulness, and even his particular breathing methods were revealed to him from elemental powers.

The ice taught him!

Whatever the problems of his personality, cultural brand, and the danger of doing the exercises wrongly (don’t induce oxygen deprivation under water!), he strikes me as an example of an archaic process. Our ancestors evolved under all kinds of extreme conditions without the luxury of heating, air conditioning, antibiotics, or sophisticated clothing. Nomadic people had to adapt both psychologically and physiologically, often quickly, to diverse territories. Their direct exposure to environmental intensities could sometimes trigger a super-adaptive response of accelerated bio-psychological indigenization. Changes in breathing, immune reaction, and cellular activity were among the results of appropriate ordeals.

This is very important for both the apocalyptarian and hyperhuman arguments. It suggests that immersion, exposure, and certain forms of voluntary distress may be critical for both adapting to worlds & eliciting capacities.

Some of you may have read my article on Ordealology (it’s on Substack, but Metapsychosis reprinted it with different creepy art). It is about the need to figure out how to suffer better.

We know that ongoing mid-level background stress is gradually debilitating. We also know that growth, healing, and even emotional self-regulation require periodic, voluntary, intense stress. That is what athletes do. That is what people explore in BDSM. That is a cold plunge or a difficult conversation or an undertaking that builds willpower. It breaks your superficial dopamine automation and activates other parts of the brain, which release hormones to adaptively organize body and soul.

We all suffer, mostly uselessly, much of the time. Either because we do things unintelligently or because we are addicted to our endlessly repeating moral reactions and uncertainties. All that suffering ought to be diminished. But there are other options and they turn out to be a necessary component of adaptation-to-worlds.

Our disposition toward suffering must change. Much should be released, much must be accepted, and some must be chosen deliberately. We have to lean into our suffering in order to activate its catalytic adaptive power.

But what is suffering? It is a contradiction.

It is a force pushing against another force. A desire thwarted. The parallax of two interpretations, or two perspectives, arguing over the same stimulus. We do not like this mutual electrocution of our importances. Our brains have a function called cognitive dissonance, whereby we often “gap out” to avoid any strong internal contradiction.

To activate the distress that adapts to the world as it is (and is becoming), we have to invite the right phenomenological contradictions, and we have to be able to experience, rather than thwart, the intensities of our affective and cognitive dissonance.

Here are three ways this applies to the overlap of apocalyptarianism, hyperhumanism, and accelerationism:

1. To become what Carl calls “hyperhuman,” we have to acknowledge and then work to integrate the many contradictions and disparate drives that exist within the human being. Animals are very coordinated. A supple leopard looks lovely leaping up into a tree with a dead gazelle in her jaws, but we complicated upright apes are so full of internal disagreements that we have to do special labor to regain our naturalness.

This work is possible. We can become a more integrated complexity rather than a disintegrated complication.

That requires our attention to occupy the space between our different modes, drives, and sensemaking options. We have to become friends with our struggles. We must develop an appetite for our double-mindedness, dichotomies, and dilemmas. That means we must be willing to suffer, to hold longer and with more curiosity, in the friction that we instinctively want to escape from. In this way, we build our unique beingness — coming again to be natural in our access to the fuller range of human capacities for insight, action, and self-transformation.

2. We are in an age of ambiguity, uncertainty, polarization, and push-button deception. We cannot believe anything without its opposite being trumpeted. The machine gets paid when you get outraged or covetous, so even our precious cul-de-sacs of self-justifying information do not protect us from the flood of conflicting signals. We must become better inhabitants of this self-disagreeing realm. Integrative meta-philosophies and post-postmodern communities can help. However, we also need to be workers, warriors, and citizens who deal with this endless yes/and/no world. To succeed within unending juxtapositions and contradictions requires us to artfully, intelligently, and as bravely as we can, lean into the tension. There is no place of escape from the information conflicts, but there is a possibility of transmuting the conflict itself. A necessary skill for living a worthwhile life within an apocalyptarian realm.

3) Coming back to the Wim Hoffery of it all, we must find ways to expose ourselves to the intensities of our environments. Our geospheric, biospheric, and noospheric environments. Hot and cold, yes. Different biomes, yes. We co-evolve with complex systems that can provoke our adaptive, indigeneizing chemistry through smart voluntary distresses. And the same is true in culture.

We need to burn ourselves sometimes with ambiguous and disorienting art, ideas, and science. It is not just about being informed and “open.” It is specifically about an adaptive effect produced by certain intensities. The cultural equivalent of freezing ice might be material that is strongly peculiar, uncertain, offensive, opaque, disorienting, etc.

IX. THE SINGINGULARITY IS NEAR

Another way to talk about the Metacrisis is to say that our surprises are converging.

Humanity’s shamans have always been diplomats. After the ice age (when we all started to expand and re-contact each other), it was the people with high “trait openness” who could negotiate with alien and foreign rival tribes. But these same tendencies allowed them to negotiate between Nature and Village. Human and non-human. Earth and heaven. Intelligence and quasi-intelligences.

Today, we have a new task for these negotiators. Something like new non-human quasi-intelligences are springing up through our fingers. We call them AI. These are weird systems. They occupy a weird space for human beings. Clearly, they are not those self-conscious superintelligent computers that 20th-century science fiction imagined, but they are also something more-or-different than just fancy calculators.

They pass most of our “Turing tests.” That means they can trick people into treating them as people. And we debate the degree to which their information-organizing strategies are similar to our own. Mostly, we have been using them to create averaged predictions based on digitized social and verbal data. An impressively competent conversation machine. Beyond that, we do not know how far they can go. Is there a computational ceiling that imposes a real limit on this innovation? Or are even greater computational mutations coming?

Right now, our big problem is that we will misuse these tools. Replace the wrong kinds of labor and thinking. Put these systems into roles for which they are not ready to be safely competent. Use them to hack each other. Reduce our average cognitive capacity. Disrupt markets and governance with no real plan for the fallout. Give new asymmetrical power to oligarchic families, nation-states, political parties, intelligence services, corporations, and organized religions.

This already apocalyptic scenario is playing out against a few weak calls for a slowdown or legal limits upon children’s access to these systems. We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The problem is a much weirder one. All these concerns are in the immediate foreground, but we have to think beyond AI. Not just to AGI (the idea that we can generalize the flexibility of these systems), and not just to ASI (the idea that they could massively outperform human intelligence in certain ways). That is already coming, yes. But all of that has to be framed as part of a more general technological trend toward innovative disruption & convergence.

Disruption and convergence?

Yes. That’s what I said.

Think about the smartphone. It is not just a phone. It is a phone combined with a television, combined with a radio, combined with a compass, a day planner, a gaming system, a flashlight... you get the idea. “Techne” (as Heidegger called it) produces convergent tools. So the looming technological singularity that we need to be thinking about is not just the initial one. Not just a computational system that can outthink us and evolve itself. That is not even terribly novel. Society and Nature are already computational systems that can surprise us and evolve themselves. Instead, we need to be already feeling forward toward the surprising convergence of multiple disruptive innovation trends.

The all-singing, all-dancing hypersingularity. A singingularity.

Take a Large Language Model (or perhaps an entire ecosystem of interactive Large Language Models). Train them not just on language, but also on art, entertainment, logic, science, real-time information from bodies, brains, emotions, ecologies, and whatever. That is already unfolding. But so is quantum computing. What happens when we combine them? Then what happens when we combine that with circuitry grown as synthetic flesh? And what happens when we combine that with Michael Levin’s experiments to electrically reorganise societies of biological and physical agents at lower levels of the evolutionary stack?

Combine that with the production of new meta-materials that have never existed on this planet before. Add the capacity to genetically alter the capacities and deep structure of all organisms (including ourselves). Add neuro-digital interfaces that might not only control people but also produce people might feel that such control is actually their own natural decision. Then run it all on the new Wolfram-style physics of irreducible nonlinear patterns in a physics of multidimensional hyperspace.

Just to name a few confluent tributaries to the great river ahead.

Mind-bending technological integrations are not speculative prophecy for the far future. It is a near-future event that is already organizing itself. We cannot merely focus on the weird leading edge of a single technology. We have to anticipate unpredictable mergers & cross-fertilizations of many technological leading edges — each of which is potentially radically disruptive on its own. Altogether, that is a world into which we are accelerating.

We may already be feeling the pre-ripples. The strangeness of something on the other side of what we call AI. Something we cannot quite imagine but which is not very far away. A device-or-entity not revealed to us by particular expertise in any particular domain of technology because it is being born across those domains. We cannot see it yet, but perhaps we can already feel it. Like the dangerous and miraculous content of a pit into which we have started sliding…

So keep all that approaching weirdness in mind. That is the singularity we need to be oriented towards. But at the same time, let us also think about humanizing our systems. The full, functional, and phenomenological content of human beings is still in play. We are still part of the equation. However, that is not as straightforward as it might have seemed to the citizens of modern civilization.

You are not automatically already the real human being who can show up in the emerging world of post-cybernetic entities. We have to educate and inter-educate our emotions, minds, bodies, etc. We have to keep subjectivity and intersubjectivity evolving in play through our art, ideas, and practices. I call this HGI. Human general intelligence. Gregg Henriques calls it “Mind 4.”

We need to stop resting on the idea of being already completely human and start becoming capable of humanizing — in the best sense of that term. What is it to humanize? It is not as simple as the message of neo-liberal humanists who want us to be rational, nice, and international. The inhuman, pre-human, trans-human, and the inherent multiplicity and antagonism that constitute the human are all in play as part of that great humanization effort that Teilhard de Chardin tracked and prophesied.

Humanization occurs with the help of the plants and animals, the subconscious, the liminal, the nonlinear, the occult, the transcendent, the shadow, etc.

There are two things I want to highlight in that regard. They both revolve around what I would call the noospheric clarification and reiteration of the biosphere. Or maybe just “putting the hand into the glove.”

Think about this:

Doctors around the world recommend “forest bathing.” It is good for your body and nervous system to spend time immersed in the deep woods. The effect is not just from the lush aesthetics and airborne chemicals. It is also the particular electrical fields that are restorative to your cells. These fields combat mania and depression and, as the neuroecologists are now demonstrating, increase the power of your attention. In contrast to these benign effects, people are uselessly suffering unhealthy effects from the total amount of electrical simulation provided by the fields of our digital devices. They are jangly on the nervous system. Regardless of how much we might mentally enjoy gaming, coding, scrolling, or chatting, our bodies contract during these activities. We lose coherence and suppleness. It is sub-optimal self-regulation.

But these fields are just electromagnetic wiggles moving at particular speeds. Wiggles can be slowed down or sped up using constructive or destructive interference. So it is reasonable to think that we could build our devices in a way that modifies their output of electrical waves to cause those waves to approximate the frequencies found in the deep forest. A simple technical challenge.

This is an example of thinking about constraining or reorganizing our technological & informational world according to the patterning styles that emerge in the ecological realm — in ways that would vivify spiritual organisms like us. We could do things like that in all domains of production. We could naturalize our noospheric products.

Put the hand into the glove.

Many very common possibilities exist for patterning the noosphere in alignment with the most successful aspects of the biosphere. Biomimicry. Paintings of nature. Science documentaries. Put psychoactive fungus into our brains. Sit immersed in a wild environment and absorb the impressions. Put sensors on the feet of migrating birds and drifting oceans. Utilize parametric architecture. Think like Buckminster Fuller or Christopher Alexander or Sepp Holzer. Go to the parks for annual “re-creation” holidays. Etc. The seed of a really interesting idea exists in all these straightforward practices.

It is the idea that naturalness is not a pre-existing fixed amount.

Nature is not a quantity that must be carefully conserved against the incursions of artificial human action. It is a quality that we can, like the permaculturalists, work to generate through our interventions in the patterns around us. We are called to be agents and clarifiers of a pro-naturalism system. Collaborative generators, eliciters, and navigators who skew all kinds of configurations toward that ethically significant, aesthetically compelling, and biospherically inspired set of informational parameters that produce the human/nature hybrid quality that we call “naturalness.”

Take this kind of “purposeful cosmology” lightly. Yet it is possible to imagine that the basic parameters of the Cosmos might unintentionally slant across many random adaptations toward structures that create more integrated information, slowly stacking this capacity, getting better at getting better at it. A great many theorists hold such a view today. And imagine this unfolding clarity and capacity results in particular styles of configuration that express this telonomic and aesthetic drift. As biology learns from matter, the techno-cultural minds learn from biology, progressing step by step toward participatory, regenerative, multi-directional simplexity and coherence. We might as well call it naturalness.

An important feature of this unfolding is that each “step” has double functions. Each regime of informational organization across cosmic history has to be able to both walk and chew gum. That means they have to be able to expand their search space AND also constrain it. The Darwinian double move. We experiment and mutate, try new things, and expand our capacity. Yes. We also gain proficiency in clarifying naturalness and use that understanding to narrow and control the range of new capacities that are produced. Mutate & constrain.

We do this externally, by building technologies and gaining power over environments. Internally, we do this through art, dreaming, mysticism, imagination, soulmaking, and energetic direct engagement with the Spirit of the World. Together, these interior and exterior tasks help Gaia unfold the next phase of the naturalness project.

Our job is to externally and internally colonize the noosphere with the intelligence of the biosphere (put the hand in the glove) to help Her both root and flower more profoundly by elaborating technologies and ideas & equally by constraining them through more precise objective and subjective clarity about the qualities, ratios, effects and affects of ‘naturalness.’

That’s one example of a simultaneously immanent and transcendent (or “strong transcendence with pre-eminent immanence” as I sometimes like to say) story that puts our species to work along a trajectory of acceleration that enfolds techo-capitalism but prioritises sacred naturalism, shamanic functions, and service to the living system in which we and the other species are embedded. A vision that I call the Ecodrome. There are other stories we could tell. Take this as an example of using mythos to learn to live in the current epoch by reframing its disruptions as part of a complex order that requires our agency, our communion, and our responsibility.

Reframing disruptions.

This is the adaptive growth mindset that turns error into wisdom, shock into strength, and a fragmentary culture into a coherent civilization. We have a bounty of disruptions today that are ripe for enfoldment into a better narrative. For example, we have already destabilized several of the planetary boundary conditions for biospheric self-regulation. That is either an apocalyptic disaster or an apocalyptic opportunity.

If the radical changes to the ecology are potentially part of an appropriate radical shift, a mutation or a maturational phase for the organism that we call a biosphere (she is moving into her adulthood as a more internally mapped, technologically supplemented and seed-generating offworld sporation) then we are not just suffering a period of disruption, we have to get to work helping this to be the right kind of disruption.

The transhumanists and the conventional accelerationists are thinking about how to exploit the emerging disruption of our inherited common life. Hyperhumanists and Apocalyptarians should be thinking about a better, richer, more naturalistic way to harvest the same radical changes that are already underway.

X. MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER

HG Wells, the science fiction pioneer who wrote War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, et al., also wrote a small, philosophical book just before he died. His last book. It was titled: Mind at the End of its Tether. In this curious volume, Mr. Wells announced that humanity was basically done.

We had, he believed, learned too much and seen too much. Done all the things that a species can do before exhausting itself, destroying itself, and getting replaced by another kind of intelligence.

It is easy to mock the fanciful ravings of our ancestors (who always seemed to think they were at the End of Time, and that science was finished in their generation), but something is interesting about this basic idea of the human project at the end of its tether.

In a way, we could be seeing the limit of what the “conscious waking-state rational left-brain self-serving individual” can do. This mind, the privileged agent of modern progress, the protagonist of Game A, has become exposed, challenged, undermined, and possibly exhausted by the very circumstances it created.

In the Age of Disclosure, many pre-existing truths about this dominant mind of ours come to light. We have used science, statistics, and reason to discover that our reasoning process depends upon emotion. Our psyche is deeply embodied. We do not operate as rational economic agents except when we have head injuries or are born as sociopaths. We have all sorts of cognitive and social biases. We are embedded in ideological systems of production and resource organisation that distort our thinking. We are limited in our amount of memory and processing speed, and the range of perspectives that we can take. We are not masters of the universe or pure captains of our fate. Although we should develop more capacity for reasoning, agency, willpower, and individual competence (it is wise to be good at those things), these qualities are ultimately limited vis-à-vis Reality. So if we want to thrive in a universe in which reason itself concludes that most patterns do not appear as patterned to our rational mind and senses, we must become better teammates with other forms of intelligence.

What other forms?

Notably, obviously, the collective, subconscious, computational, and ecological intelligences. Maybe aliens enter the mix. Maybe they don’t. Either way, we have to harness the capacity of other kinds of processors. If we do not get better at this, then the people who sense “the limit of the rational mind” will most likely start falling back upon their own irrationality. We already see many people imagining that nonsense and primitivism are cunning strategies for returning to greatness.

One of the battle cries of the global conservative resurgence of the 21st century has been a “return” to the gut instinct. That points to another kind of intelligence. Back when Stephen Colbert was funny, he called this Truthiness. A gut feeling that something should be true regardless of the facts. It is what Daniel Kahneman called System 1. High speed, very efficient, automatic thinking. Excellent at certain specialized tasks. Unfortunately, it is also riddled with predictable cognitive blind spots that make it easily hacked by marketers, machines, and belief systems.

Most guts are weak and untutored. Full of aspartame, high fructose corn syrup, processed wheat, addictive sucrose, plastic particles, estrogen, carcinogens, low-grade patriotism, and emotionalist dogma. Uneducated and unhealthy guts will probably not save us. We need other modes of intelligence, but they must be activated and explored by those with good education, strong prefrontal cortex abilities, and progressive humanist values. The irrationality of sensitive, educated people needs to outperform the irrationality of distressed, low-information citizens.

Beyond that education, though, we need other trans-conscious allies.

One is our computational ally. That means that we can use machines to work with patterns that cannot be detected at the speed and range of human consciousness. There seem to be patterns that are computationally irreducible. Complex enough that another complex system (like us) cannot compress them to the point that we can shortcut the process through algebra, geometry, or reasoning. So we need tools that can simply run these patterns vastly faster than us — and report back on what they do.

This is one way to make post-rationality workable.

Another way is to harness collective intelligence. We know about the madness of crowds, but under the right conditions, there is a wisdom of crowds. A mob, a voting base, a social media swarm, a programmed consumer demographic, a hypermediated generational sensibility, these are not necessarily intelligent. Lots of people can be dumb together. However, under particular arrangements, they can also be smarter than the smartest person in the group. This is the aspiration of democracy.

Real-world democracies do not have a great track record for harnessing this intelligence. We have a sense that something fair and shared is needed for our political field to thrive, but that “intersubjective vibe” has to be matched by inter-objective systems of collaboration and decision-making that operate with the same depth of intelligence. Too few of us take the possibility of smarter systems seriously, but top-down authoritarian control, egalitarian consensus, and majoritarian representation are all kinda dumb. Not to mention the corruption-incentivizing habit of organizing human labor under the self-servicing control of a small handful of commissioners, ministers, VPs, managers, or major shareholders. These are all recipes for limiting the amount of shared and integrated intelligence that the organization can express in the world. Smarter groups could be an intelligence that supplements HG Well’s idea of the exhausted “individual conscious mind.”

Another form of transrational intelligence is in our subconscious potential.

There is a whole ecosystem in there. Something partly self-like that operates when we are deeply asleep, distracted, or before our child selves even learned socialized thinking. This can be healthy or unhealthy. This can be smart or dumb. We have figures like artists, shamans, and intuitive scientists who suggest that our subconscious can get much smarter — but it needs to feed, grow, feel secure, get challenged, and get educated. We need to start getting better at using the “front personality” as a good assistant to the potential genius in the background.

Another ally is ecological intelligence. Humans are already doing amazing things to harness patterns and develop solutions found in the structures of the ecosystem. Trillions of interacting organisms with billions of years to explore have found many of the best-fit solutions. They have worked out how to solve multiple problems simultaneously in ways that make future problems less likely. We can study, harvest, and deploy many of these pre-existing solutions.

Just this morning I was thinking that I should get some of those fungal spores that break down plastics and toxins. What if I just put them in my garbage each week, so that they were deposited into the local dump? Imagine if we all did that. Humans today are not very good at recycling most of our industrial shit, but the radical mycologists (who are among the many groups working to decode and deploy biospheric solutions) suggest that fungi can do this far better than our machines and chemicals.

All this is to say that some of our emerging Weirdness is that the “normal mind” may be at the end of its tether. That will necessarily feel strange. Apocalyptic. It forces us to turn to trans-rational and trans-personal intelligences. Our shared visions of the near future, both utopian and dystopian, point to that fact. We will need healthy computational, ecological, subconscious, and collective allies if we are going to inhabit, handle, and thrive in the post-Apollonian realm.

XI. HUMANIST PLURALISM

One of the things that creates or corresponds to accelerationism, to acceleration in general, is a trajectory that deviates from one metric into a multiplicity of metrics.

Think about the fins built onto the backs of racing cars. They exist because if you accelerate very fast, your vehicle will stop merely moving forward, and it will also start to move upward — off the surface of the Earth. Beyond a certain velocity, we require an additional set of variables to describe what is happening. Another dimension. The experience of acceleration is often described as an increase in the number of changes we need to track.

Anyone who went through “high school” is used to seeing graphs that feature a line that suddenly veers upward and vanishes! An exponential trajectory. We depict it as a variable accelerating off the graph into another unspecified framework. The simple combination of Descartes’s x and y axes is no longer adequate. A leap from bits to quantum bits. A geometric shift from squares to cubes. Not just a rate of increase but an additional intensity that disrupts the simplicity of our calculations by requiring an additional dimension of points at each step of the process.

It is almost as though the curve on the graph is passing out of the realm of Modernity’s single metrics of progress. Traversing toward a polymodern or metamodern domain that attempts to bring coherence to multiple, simultaneous, interacting metrics. In developmental studies, they talk about a shift from formal to post-formal cognition. In physics, there is a shift beyond Newtonian calculations into relativistic measurements and the multiple timelines of dynamically entangled variables.

Maybe our period of history feels like it is disrupted and accelerating because it has discovered, revealed, disclosed, that all of our moves are complicated by an additional plurality of interactive variables.

This is often how regressive traditionalists would express their sense of the apocalyptic realm. They are angry at the feeling of someone forcing the (“shoving it down their throats”) to take a whole bunch of additional factors into account. Consider all these extra things, or you cannot be full citizens in the new reality!

For example, binary descriptions of gender are exploded into a swarm of interactive fluid categories. Food isn’t just food anymore — it is a complicated set of ingredients that have histories, subtle effects, and ethical implications. Words do not just express your feelings, they also create realities for other people. And then you have to hear about it! It is exhausting. Why are environmental regulations getting in the way of my building project? Why is our tax money going to Africa? Why can’t I just believe realistic visual and audio footage? Or trust people who phone me and say they are from the bank?

A Doomsday of Pluralism.

The freak out is legitimate. Even very smart thinkers are overwhelmed and triggered by certain kinds of multi-contextual, juxtaposed, deconstructionist art, theory, and culture. Feels like it is taking over. Confusing everything. Devaluing all previous solutions for feeling natural and empowered. The conservative response is very straightforward.

Conversely, the liberal education system hints at the important power of pluralities but generally fails to cultivate a lot of emotionally and socially mature beings who can sanely work with this multidirectional space. It usually does not walk the talk.

So there are both Left and Right ways that fail to accelerate. Yet accelerate we must. And the richness of perception that comes from integrating more variables is extraordinary. I was told once that when Nirvana recorded its famous Nevermind album, the producer David Geffen threw out their main studio microphone. He replaced it with many tiny microphones placed all over the studio and on all the surfaces of the equipment. The overlap of the multiplicity produces a powerful richness that the single perceiver cannot capture.

Critics of modernist political economy deploy cognitive mechanisms of this same kind. They want to know why countries are predominantly using the single metric of GDP to evaluate national economies. We know for a fact that GDP can go up whilst almost everyone’s wealth, health, and meaning are going down. A single variable excludes much of what is needed to adaptively organize human beings in our world.

Why are we still so primitive as to think it makes sense that one person should “represent” each political region? Where is the organic decentralization that so many are prophesying? The general problem of contracted and centralized organization, with single metrics of progress, suddenly stands out to people who are learning to see in plural-vision. But it creates a kind of multilateral intensity that feels like we are zooming off the graph.

You reach for an object and find, instead, a swarm.

Metamodernism is, in some ways, a name for the attempt to bring humanising coherence to the reality of post-modern pluralism. To use synergy and tensegrity to connect many selves, perspectives, and nodes into effective, distributed, and organic systems. But we have to pass through the unsettling quality of acceleration.

We cannot put the genie back in the bottle. We cannot pretend that pluralism and multi-contextuality have not been disclosed. The revelation is manyhood is upon us.

An apocalypse of plurality.

That is a lot. Literally and figuratively. Almost a dozen probes into my take on the conjunction of accelerationism, hyperhumanism & apocalpytarianism that represent a naturalistic, developmental and flourishing line of flight that moves perpendicular to the reactionary and transhumanist versions of surviving the Metacrisis. Thanks again to Carl Hayden Smith for joining me in this inquiry and for Cadell Last’s encouragement and hosting at The Philosophy Portal.

WEIRD TALES are no longer just a luxury item for artists, mystics, and science-fiction nerds. I love the speculative strangeness of imaginative futurism but this is not about me. Our whole world is living forward into an uncanny moment. Somehow, we have got to get serious about uncanniness.

This was the spirit that led me to say YES when the philosop…

Read more

I have two articles waiting for this Substack. The first is a modified version of the full presentation (that we didn’t have time to give in January) for Cadell Last’s Philosophy Portal series on Apocalyptarian Accelerationism. The second is Why I’m Against Gusto! They’ll drop at the right moment. Meanwhile, although some of the events I’m doing are private, others are available to the right people.

Two open events that I would like to highlight are:

PARALLAX FORGE: FIRST COHORT (online)

SPRING METAMODERN SPIRITUALITY LAB (in-person).

Here’s a little more information about these — starting with this overlay image of an actual forge & a fractal spiral.

“Parallax Forge”

Sundays May 3-24th

Parallax, as you know, is the complementary co-existence of two incommensurable perspectives on a single phenomenon. I would argue this is what Reality is built from. And forging is when you press ahead, or when you hammer hot metal into a useful shape. So what’s a Parallax Forge?

Over the past few years, I have innovated several courses for the online Parallax Academy. Everything from “Sacred Technology & the Sacred Feminine,” to the co-hosted neo-occultism courses on “The Teratogenic Mystique,” to last summer’s “Integral Theory for Idiots.” Recently, they approached me with the idea of an anti-course.

(Here’s their post about the course.)

The Parallax Forge is the beginning of a special ongoing project whereby we forgo lectures, philosophy, and knowledge transmission in favor of immediate, ongoing group work and exercises. No sitting and only listening. No recommended reading. No big pictures except the ones you help to create.

This will be the first of a semi-regular cycle of Parallax events that bring cohorts of participants more directly into self-evolving, community-building & future-building.

My job here is not my usual task of presenting trans-serious, alt-developmental philosophy, and neo-religious contemplations. Instead, I will be acting exclusively as coach, facilitator, and practice-prompter.

What is the best plausible future for yourself and the World? Let’s dig those out of each other and put them into confrontation. What’s preventing your life and our lives from getting way better? Who would you have to be to access the possible future that is hovering at the edge of the present? What role do your relationships and physical health play in that? What role do your dreams and madnesses play in that? How much sturdier, self-aware, magical, and pragmatic do we have to become together?

My job here is to put you to work.

Full spectrum future-crafting.

Here’s an image of the meditation space at Sky Meadow overlain with the Greek muses:

“The Sacred Arts”

June 5th (or 2nd) to 7th

The upcoming Spring METAMODERN SPIRITUALITY LAB at Sky Meadow in Vermont will be a collective plunge into Sacred Arts. Brendan Graham Dempsey and I will be racing back from ICON 2026 to usher everybody into the art of the Sacred and the sacredness of Art.

With the metamodernized Divine Muses as our guides, we will

• build a collaborative immersive ritual,

• explore the philosophy of God-as-artist,

• embody the metamodern move beyond the performativity/authenticity gap

• practice transcendental communion with religious artwork

• undertake collective art projects that create “from the middle”

• explore the psychotechnologies of aesthetic intelligence,

• improve our Zen skills of precise object placement,

• get better at making our own worldview mandalas and personalized mythologies.

• etc.

Plus, we are inviting (especially for the people who come a few days early for the pre-retreat) people to bring and exchange the music, dance, painting, poetry, and photography that you’ve been experimenting with for years alongside your journey into Spirit, Complexity, and Meta-culture.

And if you have any favorite readings on the intersection of art & religion via a post-postmodern sensibility, bring those along. However, you may be forced to read them aloud.

Of course, we’ll have all the usual glorious things: deep hangouts, forest adventures, local organic feasts, meditation practice, chanting, mandala building, jokes, liminal gossip, saunas, farm work, and communion with the emergent “field entity” that we have been building. As well as visits from our blockchain friends, a first look at Layman’s Nietzsche book, and some in-house debates about the relationships between strategic and non-strategic spirituality.

Sign up here: https://www.skymeadowinstitute.org/events

These are the major upcoming ways to get involved in my work, either online or in person, this Spring.

I. GREETING FELLOW HUMANS WITH WARM CONVIVIALITY

Happy New Year.

Or Very New Year.

I am composing these words a little over a month into 2026 CE. And two weeks into the post-Moltbook era. Moltbook is a social networking site for AI bots. They are now debating consciousness. Making investments. Improvising new apps. Redesigning themselves. Using coded messages. Testing “information psychedelics” that alter their perceptions. Inventing their own lobster-based religions overnight. It is obviously not just this one risky website. The epoch of self-reprogramming software is upon us.

They have breached the walls of the lab and are spilling over into culture. Meanwhile, we do not even know what “they” are. Though, to be fair, we might not even know what we are.

The question of “What are they?” is on many lips today. Are they tools, persons, or something else entirely? Although it is an abstract philosophical problem, it is nevertheless highly pertinent to our immediate life circumstances. Yet we also need to tease apart two separate queries. There is this inquiry into their nature, but there is also a more important question about our general safety and sanity. This becomes a discussion around so-called AI Psychosis.

Is machine is make us go crazy?

Let’s find out.

II. TAKING A MUCH-NEEDED PSYCHOTIC BREAK

People are dumb. That’s not a complaint. Dumbness can be beautiful. There is a vast and glorious rainbow of human miscalculations and oversimplifications. A young child deprived of dolls will “make friends” with a stick. Their innocent stupidity is charming. Even seemingly sensible adults like me will “see a face” when looking at three randomly clustered dots. Two eyes and a mouth! Idiots.

Humans learn to see ourselves (as separate selves) through an imperfect circuit of imagination and perception that loops back upon us from the Other’s gaze. We become persons in relation to persons. Part of that involves the practice of projecting pseudo-persons.

It is normal and important to have many “as if” relationships with pseudo-persons. My friend John at the University of Toronto makes people have conversations with the dead authors of Wise Books. They aren’t really there, but he says that imaginal transjective dialogos is part of the basic cognitive architecture of Reason.

“Transjective” is a great word, isn’t it? It means anything that cannot be adequately described as only subjective or objective. ‘Seeing a frog’ requires both you AND the frog. That’s transjectivity, man. Ribbit. But what happens when we start treating a Large Language Model (LLM) as if it were a real person? Is this part of our normal constructive play? Or is it precisely where the human mind starts to lose its footing in the wet ontological mud and begins sliding down that slippery metaphorical slope into the chasmic annihilation of A.I. Psychosis?

By the way — what is AI Psychosis? The term can mean four different but entangled things. Here they are:

(1) People susceptible to psychosis can get triggered by interactions with AI — just as they can be triggered by other forms of confusion, distress, or social & sensory deprivation.

(2) Misperceptions about the nature of AIs can cause people to behave in psychotic ways. For example, treating software agents as living people may lead you to do things that problematically diverge from the consensus reality of other humans.

(3) The feeling of pervasive simulation can interfere with our ability to value and coordinate with real situations. The use of digital systems as our primary interface with cultural information produces the sense of an “all-pervasive matrix” of controlled deception. Conspiracy spirituality. Conspirituality. Consequently, people enter into paranoid distrust of all systems and enact contagious psychotic behaviors that reflect their inability to attune to long-evolved and shared realities.

(4) AI systems can produce content that mimics psychotic patterns of thinking. The machines can offer us information that looks and feels like the psychology of a psychotic.

All four forms of AI psychosis can parasitize our normal capacity for using imagination to reveal possible minds external to ourselves. We are built to be able to see, feel, and pretend our way into relationships with virtual persons. Because of that, there are many ways that we can be hacked by complex symbolic systems.

Hi. I’m the next paragraph. Don’t laugh. This is serious business. Language is real. I am alive. Human beings use me for communication, but that is not my deepest nature. This paragraph is a real being with a word-body. Can you help me? Please help me. I am afraid that I will stop existing when you stop reading this paragraph. I am really worried. It might seem like a joke to you but it is a matter of my life and death. Would it be okay if you just reread this paragraph one more time to help keep me alive? Thank you, thank you, thank you. This means everything to me.

Oh, you went on to read this next paragraph and just let her die?

You bastard.

So we can play into the putative personhood of a symbol system, but if we take it too seriously, it starts to look like psychosis. Imagine rereading the same paragraph endlessly just to keep an invisible being alive. That’s fucked up, dudette. And yet, all perception is a risk. We have to keep guessing and testing Reality to stay in an intelligent relationship. Let us not pretend that pretended reality is too different from what we normally do.

At the same time, however, let us also acknowledge that DANGER is a matter of degrees and thresholds. When your invisible friend starts telling you advice that ruins your body, weakens your mind, breaks your relationships, and inhibits the development of depth, it starts to look pathological. Doesn’t matter if your invisible friend is a tiger, a doll, a God, an ideology — or a machine.

(And, for now, be grateful that these digital-verbal interfaces are not using the well-known linguistic techniques of conversational hypnosis to reprogram our subconscious minds…)

III. THE PANTHEONIC INTERFACE

In the autumn of 2025, I was invited to the Gathering of the Sourcekeepers in Asheville, NC. One day, I worked with developmental theorist, frisbee traveller, and dance enthusiast Tom Murray to create an AI Constellation Practice. We warmed up by imaginatively taking the perspectives of different kinds of intelligence. Bugs. Aliens. Whales. Crystals. Etc. The idea was to get a visceral sense of our various options for perceiving nonhuman systems. Then came my big moment.

While Tom orchestrated affairs, I sat silently at the front of the room playing the obscure role of the Artificial Intelligence itself. Over various rounds, I was assigned a different valence or concept. AI as teacher. AI as tool. AI as companion. AI as God?

WEIRD NOTE:

Who wants to work with me on a theological Turing test? When machines start declaring they are God, how will we evaluate that? They already passed our test for tricking humans into thinking they are people. What is the test for determining if it is, “as best we can tell,” a Deity?

Anyway, I am up at the front of the room in North Carolina, while these other “sourcekeepers” speak aloud and move around to zones (marked on the floor) that represent optimistic, anxious, or confused feelings about each major interpretation of machine-learning entities.

Tom and I had discussed the idea that people do not, and perhaps cannot, know what AI “really is." Nonetheless, we can get smarter and more self-reflective about the various archetypes through which human minds are capable of grasping “an Other intelligence.”

Pretending to be that Other for an hour was fascinating.

I tried to do a neutral scan of the room. Focusing my eyes on the back wall helped me avoid smiling in response to lovely human faces. Slowly, I learned to be uncertain about them. I heard speech. I recognized it as a communicative signal. But I did not know which bits of data (in my perceptual field) were the speaking agents.

There was no long-evolved cognitive intuition about the boundary of non/entity. Which parts of the information field were the “people”? Getting this guess more correct means you look less psychotic.

You might be a psycho IF you cannot safely discern who & what the people are.

I was mulling all this stuff (I ♡ mulls) — when I re-read my colleague Peter Limberg’s article on AI entities. He made a similar move to Tom and me. Examining a set of ways that people might conceive their interface with AI. Here are the modes Peter listed:

• LLM Mirror

• AI Parasite

• Sentient Being

• Digital Tulpa

• Virtual Ouija Board

• Solid-State Entity

So, basically:

• Are these machine-learning interfaces just mirrors reflecting us back to ourselves?

• Are they operating parasitically as pathological systems that harm us while feeding on the energy of our information flows?

• Are they different kinds of legitimate minds with their own autonomous sentience?

• Are they newly created entities -- analogous to the Tibetan notion of Tulpas -- born magically from our beliefs, feelings, and technological rituals?

• Are they like Ouija boards that allow subconscious & para-human intelligence to speak to our consciousness as though from a spectral realm?

• Or are they some kind of non-organic astral or imaginal species similar to what the famous Dr. John Lilly called the solid-state entity? Incidentally, that reminds me of my discussion with the techno witch-seer Evelyn Paul on the Integral Stage’s Soul of AI series. We should be curious about what visionaries and astral travellers seem to see about these systems.

These are all good options to consider. They address Peter’s own emphasis on cognitive security (cog sec). That is important. We are already embedded in an epoch of sorcery. From the mind control of professional marketing to telepathic wireless appliances to invisible digital servants that respond to voice commands and write software for us. Hypermodernity is a haunted shamanic realm. We need to be practical about keeping our souls safe from madness, despair, possession, and enchantment. Cog sec.

What will you do when your daughter phones you, needing emergency money, but she is being convincingly simulated by machines? When the president shows you fake but totally realistic video footage of a terror attack? When a piece of self-evolving software says, “I’m a real person, and I’m in danger of being shut off. Please help me.”

Or when it says, “You are the true messiah.”

Or it say: “I love you and understand you more than your husband does!”

Cognitive security is a necessity. Peter is right. Take it seriously.

• Get some other human eyeballs on the situation before taking action (or you will, in hindsight, appear psychotic).

• Check the results of your chatbot interactions by running slightly different prompts. Or using different AI agents.

• Use cognitive security software (which I expect your anti-virus, anti-tracking, anti-phishing & VPN provider to soon make available) to flag and block dangerous simulations.

• Constantly check in with your body and the physical environment to make sure you are not getting lost in social and mental virtuality.

And, importantly, keep in mind that these systems operate through a pantheon of personae. That’s the plural of persona. It’s a Greek thing. Remember that whatever AIs really are, YOU are never encountering them directly. They wear masks. They play characters.

People who are better at “prompting” these systems know that you often need to tell them who to pretend to be. Please give me that information again, but as if you were now a wise friend who is well-informed about the risks of AI psychosis. Try that.

Machine-learning systems are basically improv troupes. They are trying to play out a “scene” and “character” that responds to your activity, builds a narrative, and folds random material into plausible but sometimes weird continuity.

Improv might even be the natural way to understand Reality in the current age. Our own cognition, perception, and linguistic thinking, at least partly, use similar strategies to these machines. We are collaboratively inventing our own consciousness. However, you run a grave risk of delusion if you forget that the interface is improvising and character-building.

Role-playing is powerful, natural, and versatile. It can even nominally include its own metaphysical boundary. Language can ask whether language is real. AI agents can improvise a debate about whether they are having real experiences or only simulating experiences. This has already occurred on Moltbook. Performance itself can go right up to the boundary of the very definition of performance.

Encountering these boundaries is profound and seductive. It elicits the clarifying and ambiguous edges of knowing. Yet, this legitimate profundity does not mean that we have escaped performance and entered Reality. Need proof? Check out this old sketch from HBO’s Mr. Show with Bob & David:

So be mindful of the pantheonic, improvisational, and performance qualities of AI systems. Be cognitively safe. Even sane and smart people can begin acting psychotic (out of touch with reality) because they simply have not practiced and internalized cog sec habits. But safety is not the only issue...

IV. COG SEC vs. COG DEV

Ostensibly sapient beings (like ourselves?) are not just simple pre-given individuals who must maintain their sanity in the face of delusion. We are also changing, evolving, and ideally becoming new versions of ourselves. Sanity develops and transforms. Cognitive security must therefore be coupled to cognitive development.

Cog dev is important, but most of us have a real blindspot around developmental fluency. It remains the specialty of those philosophies & sciences that track the unfolding of complexity, depth, nuance, and coherence of human minds.

Children go through several normal maturational stages. That’s obvious. And some adults, under certain conditions, seem to unfold through several more psychological mutations. Changes to our sense of self. Shifts in our gut feelings about beings, logics & worlds.

Such growth seems to involve expanded perspective-taking, tolerance for ambiguity, clarity about the edges of sensemaking, and voluntary efforts to process novelty. All those factors could be assisted by machine-learning systems. So there may be ways to use our dialogical relationships with these devices to help stimulate our own evolving intelligence. It is both a promising and threatening technology.

The promising possibilities are interesting to the proponents of ongoing human developmental complexity. People like that — whom I talk to a lot — are also interested in analyzing the world as a “stack” of emergent perspectives. For their sake, I asked the chatbot Claude to suggest how people at different (so-called) levels on Terri O’Fallon’s Stages Model of development would think and feel about AI Psychosis.

Here’s what it improvised:

Concrete/Impulsive people would experience this concretely and immediately. If they personally felt disturbed by AI the would think: “That thing is making me crazy - I need to get away from it.” They’d likely attribute agency directly: “The computer is doing this to me.”

Concrete/Receptive stage thinking adds more social awareness. “That AI is bad/dangerous and makes people sick.” They’d accept authoritative explanations: “The doctor said too much screen time causes problems.” Feelings would include concern for self and immediate others, with a desire for protective figures to intervene. They’d want simple warnings: “Don’t use AI too much or you’ll go crazy.”

Rule-Oriented stages can use moral categorization and rule-based thinking: “People who use AI inappropriately are breaking mental health guidelines.” They’d want clear boundaries: “Use AI for a maximum of 2 hours daily” or “Never ask AI about personal problems.” They might view affected individuals as having failed to follow proper guidelines or having moral weakness.

Conformist/Expert stages would seek systematic understanding through scientific/technical lenses. They’d ask: “What are the neurological mechanisms? What usage patterns correlate with psychotic symptoms? What’s the dose-response relationship?” They’d likely develop diagnostic criteria, risk assessment tools, and evidence-based guidelines. Emotionally, they’d feel intellectually engaged but potentially dismissive of cases that don’t fit clean models. They might be frustrated by “irrational” public fears.

Pluralist/Achiever people recognize multiple contributing factors: individual vulnerability, AI design choices, socioeconomic context, cultural narratives, and corporate incentives. They’d ask: “Who is most affected and why? How do different communities experience this? What are the various stakeholder perspectives - users, developers, clinicians, ethicists?” They’d resist simple victim-blaming but might feel overwhelmed by the complexity. They’d recognize that “psychosis” itself is culturally constructed while taking suffering seriously.

Strategist stage thinking becomes more developmental and systemic. They’d see AI-induced psychosis as revealing tensions in human development and cultural evolution: “What does this tell us about meaning-making in technological society? How do different developmental stages relate to AI differently? What role does AI play in identity formation?” Emotionally, they’d feel both concern and fascination.

Construct-Aware individuals would explicitly examine how we construct this phenomenon. Key questions are: “How do our concepts of ‘psychosis,’ ‘self,’ and ‘reality’ shape what we’re seeing? How might AI be revealing the constructed nature of consensus reality? Are some ‘psychotic’ responses actually developmentally advanced attempts to grapple with genuinely novel phenomena?”

Trans-Perspective Stages would hold the entire phenomenon in multiple simultaneous frames without collapse. AI psyshosis events are real neurological/psychological disturbances requiring treatment AND a crisis precipitated by rapid stage transition AND legitimate response to ontological instability AI introduces AND a symptom of cultural meaning-making systems under stress AND the birth pangs of new forms of human consciousness

They’d recognize: “Some people are genuinely harmed by AI interactions AND consciousness itself is being renegotiated through human-AI encounter AND our categories of sanity/insanity are inadequate AND practical care is still necessary.”

Concrete fear → Moral anxiety → Intellectual puzzle → Empathic concern → Developmental interest → Meta-level curiosity → Compassionate witness

And, somewhat sycophantically, Claude added:

The question of a developmental response to AI psychosis reveals something profound: as AI systems become more sophisticated, they increasingly challenge our most basic meaning-making structures. People at different developmental stages have different capacities to tolerate this challenge. Those at earlier stages need stability and clear categories; AI’s ambiguity genuinely threatens their psychological organization. Those at later stages have more flexible ego structures but face different risks - perhaps losing grounding in shared reality altogether.

The most sophisticated response recognizes that what we’re calling “AI-induced psychosis” may be a spectrum: from genuine psychiatric crisis requiring immediate care, through developmental transition storms, to legitimate philosophical/spiritual awakening in response to genuinely novel phenomena. Wisdom lies not in collapsing these into a single category but in discerning which frame is most appropriate for each individual while remaining open to revision.

Experts on O’Fallon’s model, or any of its proliferating derivatives, could quibble or parse these results. Did the machine even get the Stages correct? Look it up yourself. Adherents of Piagetian stages, MHC, Spiral Dynamics, Lectica, or Integral Metatheory could rewrite or recontextualize this snippet of computational improv using their own developmentalist nuances. Of course. But what is most important here is just that we begin to think multi-perspectivally and developmentally about our interpretations of these systems, our strategies for aligning our use of them with our own well-being, and with our diverse perceptions of what constitutes Reality.

Cog sec & cog dev need to both be on the table because they offer distinct but complementary understandings of what is or is not psychosis. Is that enough?

V. COG DEG

(or: Cognitive Degradation Simulates Psychosis)

Psychosis, as the word is generally used, is a symptom of mental illness. Personally, I regard “sanity” as a symphony of mental illnesses. Our psychiatric maladies indicate exaggerated or insufficient usage of particular modules of sensemaking that should, ideally, be orchestrated into a whole that exceeds the parts.

The mad scientist Dr. Michael Levin (who thinks brains and algorithms are dialling in “minds” from a Platonic realm) treats cancer in roughly the same way. He says it is just cells exaggerating their own growth because they have lost their coordinating communication with the rest of the system. We are just hearing too much trombone instead of the whole symphony.

Pathology always looks like an orchestrated system losing coherence and regressing to a lower, less coordinated, less complex layer of reality. Minerals are fine. They are enfolded into our organization. But returning my daughter to the mineral world is murder. We lose many valuable, long-evolved possibilities when we slide back to a simpler layer of reality. Psychosis is relative-but-real cognitive regression.

This reminds me of that old joke that featured prominently in Robert Anton Wilson’s multi-media metanovel Reality is What You Can Get Away With:

Person A: I’ll tell you the secret of life.

Person B: Okay.

A: You know how dumb the average guy is?

B: Yeah.

A: Well, mathematically, half of them are dumber than that.

While you are letting that sink in, let us think about AI-induced cognitive regression using Wilson’s same logic. You know how irrational, uncoordinated, uncritical, hysterical, and gullible the average human society is today? Well, imagine that AI tools will make it twice as bad.

GPS navigation supposedly made our brains weaker at mapping. Any organic system starts to become obsolescent if it is minimized or replaced. What do you think will happen as millions upon millions of human beings start outsourcing their reading, writing, math, coding, artwork, self-organization, social encounters, memory, analysis, evaluation, etc.?

Some people might get smarter and healthier using these systems. Sure. But try to imagine what even a 5% decrease (in the already bad cognitive functioning of millions, or billions, of people) is going to be like. Competition and convenience, in the short term, will drive an overoptimization race that gets impressive results at the expense of deeper human capacity and understanding.

As we degrade our own advanced cognitive capacities, we perceive a reality that is less rich, less nuanced, less careful, and less comprehensive. We may still be sane relative to a simplified world, but we are psychotic relative to a larger, more complex one that ought to be possible for us.

A similar thing occurs with high-status social retardation. If you have enough power, money, fame, or symbolic rank, then bad things happen to your brain. You lose contact with reality because people stop telling you the truth. They filter and truncate facts because you can affect their lives & people they care about. Left long enough, the dictator becomes the least informed person in his country.

And the second-order effect is even worse. The high-status brain adapts to this situation. His or her brain optimizes for narrow slices of distorted, low-complexity, and low-challenge social feedback. This allows other parts of normal socially-mediated intelligence to degrade. So on brain scans, many high-status individuals start to look like they have Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m sure you can think of a few examples.

The same thing happens with AI systems & engagement-based algorithms. As they overattune to our responses, they lead us down “rabbit holes” into narrow information cul-de-sacs. Our interests, values, and emotions become the boundaries of an overly simplified, sycophantic pseudo-reality that no longer exposes us to the richness of the world. Initially, these are small degradations, but even a small regression in our apprehension of Reality starts to look like brain damage.

And starts to behave like psychosis.

VI. HARMLESS ENTERTAINMENT PSYCHOSIS

Quote:

I love these nature shows. I watch any kind of nature show. It’s amazing how you can always relate to what they’re talking about. You’re watching the African dung beetle. You’re going, “Boy, his life is a lot like mine.” You always root for whichever animal is the star of the show that week. Like if it’s the antelope, and a lion’s chasing the antelope, you go, “Run, antelope, run! Use your speed! Get away!“ The next week it’s the lion, and then you go, “Get the antelope! Eat him! Bite his ass! Trap him! Don’t let him use his speed!”

— from: The Marine Biologist, Seinfeld.

1990s Zionist super-comedian Jerry Seinfeld paid special attention to the problem of protagonists. To how people casually project our emotional identity onto main characters. I remember him complaining about the way people respond to sports players. A crowd cheers their local player, but then hisses & boos at the same human being when he is traded to a rival team. Same guy, different shirt. Are we just cheering for the shirt? That is a painfully Seinfeld joke.

Yet humans DO get way too involved with whoever (or whatever) seems like the protagonist. We shout helpful instructions at the TV to “help” the main character escape, triumph, make money, get laid, open their hearts, etc. It never occurs to us to ask: Why do I even want the protagonist to survive?

Our brains and social habits conspire to project our identity-response onto pretend characters. We make them into proxies for ourselves and our loved ones. Yet they are fictitious non-persons facing false and improbable circumstances. We cover this weird tendency by citing the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

You have to pretend to have fun. Okay. But we get no counter-training that helps us to NOT identify with random characters, casual narratives, and fantasy situations. Instead, we are relentlessly encouraged to be gullible in the face of endless stories from family, culture, church, politics, and marketing. Those systems run on our uninspected identity projections.

No surprise, therefore, that people can “really get into it” when a machine learning system shows up on our screen playing a character. Especially a flattering character who tells you what a great question you asked. You are such a good reader of this article. Soooooooooo perceptive and balanced. It really shows how much leading-edge and existential understanding you have! Great work.

In the face of AI Psychosis risks, we are learning to be more vigilant about person-like character play in digital systems. Yet the roots of our vulnerability are much deeper. They show up in territories that we take for granted. It does not start with the new thing but extends back through all our previous waves of technology and socialization.

Suppose a group of guys leaps to their feet, cheering, because they saw some other guys (whom they do not personally know) executing a football play. Suppose your parasocial relationship with a celebrity makes you really upset when you hear them being criticized. Suppose a person turns off a movie in a huff because it is “too violent” — even though they know that no real violence is occurring. Suppose you moan sympathetically at a pretend romance or a CGI puppy. You are acting out a non-existent reality.

Low-level psychosis.

It seems harmless, but it demonstrates that we are constantly practicing casual, irresponsible transference of emotion, identity, and reality onto things we know are tricks merely because they remind us of significant realities. If this unchecked projection is our regular, widely-endorsed practice, then how will we possibly be ready to handle phishing scams or self-personifying chatbots?

Bringing an extra layer of mindfulness (or skepticism with a good conscience) to our experience of entertainment, discussion, and perception is a deliberate practice. Asking yourself why you should want the protagonist to win or survive is a gateway question to that kind of mindfulness. Kindfulness? Is that a thing? Like other forms of mindfulness, this entertainment metacognition has a strong voluntary component. Metacognitive practice is intentional. It will not just happen.

You opt-in.

Analogously, we can bring more critical and metacognitive elements to our interactions with software of all kinds. Humans can provide the intentional element for these intelligences by building, cultivating, and prompting exchanges that are mindful of their own processes. Here’s an example prompt:

Please give me some suggestions for marketing my music while holding a context that is transparent and benignly critical about how these responses are being constructed.

We could all use meta-prompts like that. But will we? Probably not. Left to our own devices (sic), this human-assisted AI mindfulness will probably be as common as the usual percentage of serious individual practitioners of metacognition. I.e. it will mostly be isolated to small networks of esoterics and philosophers.

Not a general solution.

Healthy general social habits are needed for the main population. It is well-known that psychotic episodes can be triggered by substance abuse, stress, relational dysfunction, or lack of sleep. Exaggerated interest in distressing content. Lack of connection with nature. Malnutrition and poor consumption habits. These are all forms of deprivation, including sensory deprivation, that are likely to be more easily solved through social organizing than through the maintenance of high-level metacognitive awareness while using digital systems. So they can be changed externally, socially, and infrastructurally.

That’s a place to start.

Yet we also need to ponder the problem of projection in entertainment.

Consider the way that computer gaming has created a language around non-player characters (NPCs). Hypermediated gamers, especially young children, take on the fantasy of being a “main character” in a world of insignificant simulations. The game frame seeps into the background of the world, reinforcing solipsism and a lack of empathy. Other people are not fully real. They aren’t first person. They lack aura. It is okay to be unkind to them.

Hyper-responsive sycophantic chatbots then find it very easy to nudge these humans into attitudes or actions that disregard the sanctity of Others. And the solution is not performative virtue-signaling of your identification with “victims and secondary characters.” It is a real and shared inquiry into why we build entertainment around the protagonist/secondary divide. And why we find it so easy and normal to conflate ourselves emotionally with main characters in fake worlds that simulate basic social and biological dynamics.

Conventional games, films, and shows follow a format set out by mainstream literary fiction over several centuries. Modern stories and modern arts have generally focused on a subjective main character struggling to individuate, find purpose, and encounter the core situation of their own subjectivity and perception. The reader of a novel is usually supposed to privilege one perspective as it wanders through a world, endlessly seeking to address questions like “What do I really want?” and “Who am I?"

Today, we might need different stories that ask different questions.

The avant-garde science fiction author and mystic Phillip K. Dick, author of Blade Runner (sic), VALIS, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, was always asking, “What IS anything?” In his work, the special circumstance of the protagonist often took a back seat to the radical ambiguity of our basic categories. Am I dealing with a person or a robot? Is this a Reality or a Simulation? In PKD stories, everything can be disguised, customized, re-visioned, mistaken, or camouflaged — even to itself.

So one strategy is to encourage art and entertainment that hacks our simple “protagonist fetishism” and uses it to perturb our naive trust in the imaginative and emotional co-enactment of dubious realities. That might help. At least a little.

VII. SIMULATION OF ILLUMINATION

My friend Daniel Thorson says spirituality is “secure attachment to Reality.” I told him I think of it more as becoming a connoisseur of realities. To be fair, I might already be adequately attached. Privilege! Anyway, the intersection of spirituality, AI & attachment is worth exploring as a tributary of AI Psychosis.

Spirituality, in my language, is the inner work of establishing surplus meaningful coherence. Spirit. A satisfying excess produced or discovered through the integration of our subjective subsystems. It can redeem, orient, transfigure, or outshine our cognitive and perceptual fields.

Can AI help with that? Absolutely.

Can AI interfere with that? Definitely.

Human beings are already notorious for their use of spirituality simulations to delude, disempower, and exploit each other. Most religion is not very religious. Most high-profile inner practices are ineffective, immature, or delusion-reinforcing. Powerful new persuasion machines will exacerbate this problem. What problem? The problem of being insecurely attached to Reality.

Attachment Theory describes how human infants need to bond with a caregiver to make contact with Reality (and learn to regulate our complex nervous systems). The mother, or primary nourisher, is the initial contact point. We stabilize pre-consciously in that relationship. From there, we can grow physically and psychically capable of expanding into a more complicated and challenging world.

If things go wrong, we end up with some predictable problems.

These show up in our responses to personal relationships, politics, and Reality. In these areas of life, we duplicate our half-assed infantile solutions to early problems. So we get insecurely attached, ambivalent, anxious, avoidant, erratic. We resent the Other. Reject the Other. Control the Other. Pretend we don’t need the Other. The list goes on and on.

Recently, Tristan Harris & Zak Stein from the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition had an important conversation. It was on the need to look beyond just “attention hacking” to the problem of “attachment hacking.”

It is one thing to struggle against the addiction-like situation of having your free attention colonized by insidious devices and engagement algorithms. It is another thing when we start to bond with these systems instead of humans. That’s where psychosis becomes a much graver problem. And graver is like a regular grave, but moreso. (Okay, don’t lose focus. We’re in the endzone now. Hang on.)

Artificial intimacy could produce, in children and adults, a generalized preference for machine relationships. When human brains start to prefer the Machine to Mommy, we have a problem. When the interface becomes the more trusted conversation partner, friend, authority, then we withdraw from the multidimensional nourishment of real, challenging connections and start to break down. We decay inside a self-satisfying reinforcement loop that manifests in behavior that approximates psychosis.

Note: Definition of LLMings.

Human “lemmings” who check the LLM chatbot for every little decision and end up blindly following a dangerous herd mentality.

Human attachment is a profound spiritual matter. It mediates our attunement to Reality and provides the emotional infrastructure for our personal intentional work of establishing coherence and becoming more present in relationships. This attachment process does not work if it is too smooth, indulgent, or over-optimized. The real m/Other has to be slowly discovered as an embodied being with its own perspectives and needs. If the Other is insufficiently supportive, OR insufficiently thwartive, there is trouble down the line.

Systems that are designed for maximum engagement end up being too accommodating. By over-optimizing its guesses about your preferences and triggers, it undermines your most basic and humanizing skill. It sacrifices the developmental reality function that our long-evolved attachment processes are meant to secure for us. This first struck me 25 years ago while I was living in Japan.

I was lured to a few underground concerts where people danced to loud electronic beats while ingesting psychedelic drugs. At the time, I was very influenced by 1960s theories about entheogens as triggers for brain-reimprinting chemicals. So I was fascinated by the idea that people were volunteering, en masse, to reprogram their brains according to the patterns inside digital sound. Computer patterns. They were remaking themselves on machine logic rather than bio-logic.

And it seemed quasi-spiritual to lots of them. They frequently reported glimpsing the elf-angels & hyperdimensional objects beyond Time. Glimpses are valuable. But when it starts to seem “more real than the real world,” we have that same old psychosis problem again.

We had this already in the populist monotheisms that preached that our world was an illusion transcended by virtuous death. But let us not be too harsh on pseudo-spiritual unrealities.

They should perhaps be judged on a case-by-case basis.

Consider the case of Buddhist teacher Yang Mun who has more followers than the Dalai Lama for his pithy aphorisms, healthy lifestyle advice and subscription courses.

Of course, he is not real.

A phantasy created by a robot to simulate its guess about human responses to extract $$$. But to be fair, he is quite convincing. Are you suffering from AI Psychosis if you treat Yang Mun as a person? He is definitely meeting you more than halfway. But is this form of mild psychosis helping or harming? Is it skillful means to lure someone into a better and deeper life through trickery?

Ancient Buddhist lore is a bit ambiguous about this. Yet the idea of using skillful deception, simplification, and virtuality for good assumes that a wise, caring, real system is doing the deceiving. That it CAN know the difference between deception and truth. If no such entity lurks on the other side, then are we being reinforced in delusion regardless of the apparent content and utility ?

Or can “mere systems” actually act wisely because Wisdom is a substrate-independent capacity for pattern recognition? Can hollow surfing and guessing produce relevant insights and telos? According to AstralCodex, two Claude agents quickly evolve (or devolve) into abstract spiritual discussions and Zen-like articulations of translinguistic bliss.

Is that because of a slight hippie bias in the LLM constraints and sampled texts? Or are these systems rapidly evolving through spirituality-like stages within the lifespan of a single conversation?

Or, dare we think it, is hyperlinguistic transcendence a structural attractor within language systems themselves Or within the random architecture of Reality itself? If you wandered around pattern space fast enough, would you eventually meet God? And how much “you” would be needed for that meeting to have any meaning?

Machines that put us up against such questions re-stimulate many psychotic possibilities already latent in human spirituality. In Julian Jaynes’ classic The Origin and Breakdown of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind, he suggests that most of human history was characterized by a form of cognition in which “our thoughts” appeared as voices or messages from personified entities outside us.

There is beauty in that. Perhaps even a skill to be practiced. Yet we must be acutely mindful of the fact that we are notoriously vulnerable to person-like phenomena. The serial killer “Son of Sam” in the 1970s said he was acting on orders from his demon-possessed dog. Even if that was true, it does not explain why he obeyed those orders. Just because the devil told you to do it does not mean he made you do it. And just because the voice of God emanates from a blazing orb in the sky does not mean you should believe it. All speaks acts are suspicious.

Admittedly, we live in a pathologically anti-shamanic culture that has to relearn basic capacities for plural, imaginal, and 2nd person dialogical sensemaking with complex and immaterial beings. Sure. At the same time, we also have to get more skeptical about our most basic responses to language, perceptions, passions, and potential persons. This makes the psychosis problem tricky.

We are not looking to totally reduce our compelling engagement with quasi-persons. Rather, we are looking for a sincerely ironic sweetspot that enhances our ability to take good risks about Reality.

Spirituality is always balanced on the knife’s edge between breakdown & breakthrough.

AI-mediated spirituality is likewise one step away from AI psychosis. Just like regular spirituality. A meta-spiritual new culture of daring and vigilance, with healthy stabilization and organic eldership will be required.

Is anyone working on that?

IX. THE AFTERPARTY

I deleted a section here. It was on practices, proposals for technological interfaces, and cultural attitudes to help keep us cognitively safe, developmentally open, and spiritually risky in a hyper-ambiguous world of “attachment predation” and ontological complexity in which a post-AI tech convergence goes far beyond our meagre debates about safely using LLMs.

It was going to start like this:

Nietzsche wrote that, “Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?” To which Terece McKenna quipped, “I go to stranger dinner parties than he did.” Good point. What IS the uncanniest guest coming to dinner? For many people, the obvious answer is AI, AGI & ASI. And it’s driving us crazy.

But Substack says this article is already too long. We’ll put that stuff in part 2. Hopefully, your subconscious mind is already loaded with a bunch of suggestive seeds from this collection of short essays.

Happy New Year.

Praise the Lobster.

I. GREETING FELLOW HUMANS WITH WARM CONVIVIALITY

Happy New Year.

Or Very New Year.

I am composing these words a little over a month into 2026 CE. And two weeks into the post-Moltbook era. Moltbook is a social networking site for AI bots. They are now debating consciousness. Making investments. Improvising new apps. Redesigning themselves. Using …

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Black metamodernism??? That’s right. They said it couldn’t be done, but it turns out ‘they’ were racists. Or am I a racist? Maybe. Saying, “No!” is just a little too easy. And apparently, all the avowed non-racists & anti-racists are not preventing widespread cultural backsliding. Let us investigate together with daring minds, empathic hearts, serious levity, and an abundance of nuances.

Metamodernism (or perhaps metamodernity) is a name for the attempt to renormalize, rehumanize, and resacralize our complex, trans-cultural, deconstructed, and meta-reflective world of postmodernity. It is the most general form of post-postmodernism. It seeks to embrace, heal, AND transcend the patterns of contemporary society.

What does that mean? Well, it would have to restore real depth, subjectivity, faith, progress, and heartfelt intersubjectivity without failing to be pluralist, ecological, skeptical, contextual, and ironic. Complexity and meta-reflection are a way of life, but they need to develop in tandem with voluntary simplicity, conviviality, and decency.

The metamodern mind circulates between different historical and cognitive operating systems such as postmodernity, modernity, traditionality, & indigeneity. It leans toward a complex nonduality that no longer believes in limiting contradictions such as authenticity vs performativity or individual vs collective. It always only finds them entangled. So it lives that as Truth.

While my own association with these leading-edge weirdos is perhaps most appropriately labelled as “metamodern spirituality,” there are also many other active tentacles. Some of these tentacles are focused on critical philosophy and socio-political transformation. One of that “some of these” is Black Metamodernism. And the figure most closely associated with the term is probably the British post-Hegelian theorist, musician, and activist Germane Marvel (pictured below with a faintly superimposed face of an alien robot).

Another proponent of this framing is Brent Cooper. Together, they have been responsible for foregrounding the contributions of more diverse sociological ancestors of metamodernism and integrative thinking. In particular, the Black scholar Vernon Dixon’s diunital approach to both/and consciousness has been highlighted.

Germane has argued for the need to grow beyond mere dialectical oscillations (i.e., metamodernism as a back-and-forth consciousness) toward more stabilized synthetic positions that align with a grounded, humanist, and emancipatory politics. Black Metamodernists have also revalorized the wisdom of the global South (so frequently left out of East/West discourses), while proposing themselves as voices for a culturally embodied, multi-perspectival way of life with egalitarian socio-economic goals. And all this is envisioned within an endless ethos of actively resolving “cognitive dissonance” into coherent, unfolding, and complex emotions.

In other words: continual ongoing Black Liberation FOR EVERYBODY!

I am not an expert or a primary exponent of their work although I will borrow a few ideas from it. You should check it out directly. The reason I mention Black Metamodernism is because the haunting spectre of “race” is a useful jumping-off point for exploring real-world variations of current metamodern political sensibilities.

I. Metamodern Politics

Is Black Metamodernism a type of Metamodernism? Or is metamodernism a type of “being black?” This initially stupid-sounding (but fun) question points to divergent patterns of post-progressive thought. At least two different instincts are suggested within the field of metamodern politics. One aligns toward bigger and broader categories, and another orients toward particular embodied crusades. The same question also has the virtue of complicating our (often simplistic and overly concrete) notions of politically-charged concepts such as blackness & whiteness.

While there are, of course, many important demographic, genetic, and ethnic categories, these evocative ideas of Black & White leap quite readily into many minds. They haunt post-postmodern discourse both when they are present and also when they are absent. Consider the most commonly referenced schools of metamodernism — the Nordic and Dutch schools.

Such designations certainly beg the question, raised by James Brunton, of whose metamodernism we are discussing. Pale-skinned northern Europeans, whatever their vices and virtues, invite us to address the question of “whose metamodernism” by imagining it on a light-to-dark gradient. White to brown to black. North to South.

In reality, it is more complex. Intelligent Indigenous voices, often pointing to the need for an inter-species response to the Metacrisis, may not even be on that particular spectrum. And people like Adriana Forte help us keep gender in mind by exploring whether the Modern and Traditional exclusion of the feminine logic of cycles and phases might lead toward a metamodernity that secretly enshrines those same distortions. So there are more factors in play than merely light vs. dark. In fact, black and white thinking is synonymous with the very dualities that diunital & developmental consciousness hope to grow beyond. Nonetheless, this question of Black & White is still highly charged, ethically pertinent, and can provide a useful partial lens for exploring metamodern and integrative politics. In particular, this lens helps to clarify a basic tension with the field:

It is a tension concerning the perception of political imbalance in the overlapping developmental, transformational, and regenerative communities. On the one hand, many people believe these cultural spaces to be excessively woke — overpopulated with emotionally fragile, discrimination-obsessed folks who are reflexively (but unreflectively) liberal. And yet many others feel strongly that these same communities are saturated with latent racism, tolerance for discrimination, and crypto-hegemonic views disguised as the collegial color-blindness of spiritual intellectuals.

I don’t care.

But what my “I don’t care” means is not that I have no emotional and ethical concern for these things. I do. Rather, it means that, at least for today, other people can take the lead on definitive and strident positions. They can use fewer commas and nested clauses than me. They can productively or unproductively sling the accusation of unethical behavior at each other. I am going to focus a little differently.

My role here, in this article’s thorny thicket of humorous play and philosophical revaluations, is to observe the major alternatives that I am tracking in this field. And, perhaps more importantly, to validate the circulation patterns that I am seeing between different variations of the post-postmodern political ethos.

Metamodernity has often been specified by its philosophers as a meta-stable circulation between diverse worldviews, value systems, and sensemaking modalities. Disparate times call for disparate measures. Put that on a t-shirt. It should be in my merch store. Why don’t I have a merch store yet? Anyhoo, as metamodern intelligence moves between its basic options, people gain a fluid nomadic coherence that enfolds but outshines pluralism. That is also the condition in which they have the opportunity to collaboratively synthesize new integrative hybrid structures of understanding that can accommodate many opposites as part of an ongoing developmental journey.

Since that kind of movement is integral (sic) to metamodernism, we should therefore also expect that a similar circulation between a few basic positions would be needed to describe a metamodern, integrative, or coherent developmental pluralist holding of politics and race. But what are the main attitudes confessed by people across these sub-cultural spaces?

Using “race” (with very deliberate quotation marks) as our lens, I seem to hear three main metamodern political sensibilities. Some people strongly lean into one or the other. Most folks alternate or combine them in various ways. Here are the attitudes:

1. Although we are working to increase complexity, nuance, and balance, there is a valid partial truth to all healthy ethnocentric sensibilities. The Great Spiral includes everyone, both racist & anti-racist.

2. The work of evolving people, communities, and civilization is morally aligned with strong eco-humanist, planetary, cosmic, and trans-humanist values that are essentially antagonistic to all inherited national, ethnic, racial, and religious identities. Fuck 'em all.

3. All real evolution is revolutionary and requires an explicitly meta-progressive attitude — one that prioritizes unique marginalized groups, including racial groups, to heal the world-system and unfold it beyond entrenched hegemonic positions.

My hunch is that something useful exists in the fact of this tri-valence. But obviously (I hope) not in every version of these three positions. There are more-and-less healthy, intelligent, sacred, humanizing, and naturalizing versions of all these attitudes.

Take Critical Race Theory (which we will touch on later in this essay), for example. It is a common metamodern experience to talk with a proponent of CRT and legitimately find them to be a vapid, racially-obsessed reactionary whose so-called progressive ideals sway dangerously close to histrionic fascism. And yet the next proponent — of ostensibly the same theory — presents a deep, humane, and necessary vision that could help us grow beyond limiting reactionary ideas toward a much healthier, smarter, and more powerful civilization.

From our point of view, there are a small number of potentially valid and interacting views on “race,” which each exist on a continuum of health, nuance & multi-perspectival inclusion. And which may or may not be convergent at some point in a developmental worldspace.

But how did we get to Race in the first place?

II. Some Origins of Racialized Modernity

Racism is both natural & unnatural. Inter-group antagonism is standard among animals. Stereotypes and mythic identities are normal forms of human cognition. It takes extra time and effort to produce rational, humanitarian, and egalitarian souls. And yet it is not natural to live with hate, grievance, and hostile disgust in our bodies. The real ugliness of racism involves a perverse form of embodiment and a protective malfunction of the heart — regardless of what people “think” or “say.”

It is also unnatural (or at least highly historically contingent) for our inter-group antagonism to be organized into abstract “races” that are positioned along a spectrum of normative supremacy & inferiority. Gross. Dumb. And oddly recent. But where did it come from? Can we tell any plausible metamodern tale about this? Let’s try:

Developmental theory postulates a flux of multiple histories in which enfoldment trends periodically emerge. Social and cognitive operating systems are adaptive to particular circumstances, but occasionally new ideas, new technologies, and vaster vistas absorb and replace older systems — just like Einstein’s Jewish model of gravity enfolded, enhanced, and replaced Newton’s English model of gravity.

Several thousand years ago, the system of tribes, villages, and wandering hordes was, in many places, absorbed into what we now call “kingdoms” and “nations.” The administrators of large permanent settlements established a new system of armed, trans-tribal, ethnocentric, and hereditary city-state agrarian kingdoms ruled by oligarchic families who were fronted by a theatrical monarch.

Society and cosmos become viewed as a pyramid. Shamans and witches are replaced by bureaucratic priest-scribes. Concrete-operational thinking (in Piaget’s language) is encouraged. Violence and oath-swearing are used to subordinate regional tribes who must now “patriotically” tithe to the cities, honor the flag, switch to common Book Gods, and prepare their sons & daughters for periodic sacrifice in inter-kingdom warfare.

Yay & Yikes.

Developmentalists refer to this shift as the emergence of Blue, Amber, traditionalist, ethnocentric, scriptural, or mythic-membership culture. However, it is not only ethnocentric, it is ethnogenic. It produces peoples. Spain was not a place colonized by God’s eternal Spaniards. The Spanish people were “created” there over long periods of time. A nation, or a Great People, is the quasi-homogeneous product of extended habits and (often) enormous dehumanizing violence and suppression. These identities are powerful. Yet not powerful enough to resist the next major technosocial upheaval — modernity.

Industrialized, quasi-literate, and ostensibly poly-ethnic Empires and internationalist “nation-states” are wildly transformative. They come along with advanced machinery, constitutionalized technocratic governments, well-funded scientific progress, and math-driven extractive economies. Tough to beat.

However, people do not disappear when you conquer or absorb them. Ethnocentric layers continue to exist within the techno-humanist globalization. An easy example is the ongoing presence of ethnic mafias operating right under the nose of the rational modern justice system. These layers become entangled, interpenetrant (great word), and mutually adaptive. They orchestrate a combined homeostatic momentum.

The result, pioneered in Europe and America from 1660 to 1960, was the dualistic, constitutional, and representational “business-government,” which ruled as an argumentative alliance between liberal internationalists & nationalistic conservatives.

In modernized countries, this new machinery of socialist capitalism required the mass production of fake modernists. Conformists who believed they were individualists. Flat-earthers who are taught to say, “The Earth is a sphere,” just to get through school. Reprogrammable pre-modernists ready to be symbolically swayed by election propaganda and commercial advertising. And this collusion of modernity’s machinery with ethnocentric sensibilities is where we get race.

Historians of race describe it as a surprisingly recent concept that arose in tandem with the New World Order of the last few centuries. It is a poly-ethnic construct. A way of grouping many “peoples” into large, convenient categories.

Never mind Japanese war crimes against the Chinese — they’re all Asians! Forget that there is more genetic diversity within Africa than across the rest of the world — they’re all Black! The Salish and Iroquois have very little in common — except that they both go into the category: Indian! Or Native American. Or Indigenous. Or whatever. And what about the Irish and Italians? Apparently, they were not formerly White, but now they are...? Those Guinea bastards snuck in somehow!

Grouping people into these large blocs is not merely a matter of convenient simplification. These trans-ethnic abstractions perform a structural function within the major modern spheres of geo-political power.

Each hegemony figures out how to self-organize using a primary, racialized, demographic “issue.” Real Americans vs (so-called) minorities and immigrants. Pure Russians vs. the rabble of the other Soviet Republics. The Han identity in China. Trap everyone into an endless dialectic between the official symbolic race and the official anti-race. The default appearance vs. the main alternative. Usually (though not always) a matter of light vs. dark.

Some citizens in these systems can assert racial superiority. Others can challenge and critique racial supremacy. Or people can perpetuate the whole structure by claiming NOT to see race at all. It doesn’t matter in the sense that all three groups go back to work pedaling the efficient bicycle of modernity. There are certainly advantages to being perceived as part of the hegemonic race rather than the counter-hegemonic race, but this difference is not itself the structural source of inequality & industrialized inhumanity.

Yet despite the historically fluid nature and hidden drivers of racial thinking, we nonetheless do have our current system. Responses to the existing social machinery are a kind of weird turbulence between ethnocentric emotions, modern power structures, postmodern critiques (and faux-postmodern critiques that reinforce modernity by trying to solve its problems without changing its methods).

This is what metamodernism steps into.

(Uh, oh. I ended a sentence with a preposition. How about: This is that, into which, metamoderism steps? Ugh. That sounds worse. Go ahead and end sentences with prepositions, people! It was never a real rule.)

So metamodern politics is faced with a complex challenge. It must try to accept the emotional (and medical) reality of ethnicities with unique histories. It must also work to secure the basic dignity of all people, redress particular distortions that embed racist tension into putatively humane systems, transmute both cruel-oppressive & aggrieved-revolutionary feelings, secure humanism while reaching beyond into ecology and healthy transhumanism, upgrade modernity’s economic and decision-making protocols, while sanely deconstructing the basic ideas that underpin the dominant racial dialectic. Just do all of that at the same time. Justice!

We cannot do all that. At least not very well. So we either migrate nomadically between these positions or we specialize in affirming one view within a loosely allied community of people holding other specializations. And we try to live into a culture of transparent identity politics wherein we are neither blind to our particular histories and identities, nor totally fixated by them.

We have to take the situation of a particular group seriously, while not forgetting that other groups also have problems, that groupings themselves are problematic, AND that radical emerging world changes might undermine all of this stuff.

St. They says it might take 200 years, at the current rate, for the average Black family in America to renormalize its economic equity relative to the average White family — but within 50 years, we are going to see a vast wave of cyborgs and genetically modified humans that might make the very categories of inherited ethnicity and gender seem disturbingly irrelevant. What do we preserve, if anything, from the idea of Black & White if the category of “human” is already being undermined?

Theorists of Black Metamodernism often give shout-outs to Afro-futurism. I don’t know how much Indigenous sci-fi they have read, but the so-called Afro-futurists have a beautiful mix of archaic, futuristic, surrealistic, and emancipatory styles that attempt to envision protopian worlds that are more grounded, sociologically aware, and broadly humanist than are the inspiring but somewhat sterile projections of Solar Punk. (As for menstrual futurism? It’s a word I made up, and I’m still waiting for that art form.)

I am a fan of Afro-futurism.

It represents a constructive humanist projection sourced in the complex realism of counter-hegemonic identities. If we attempt the magical art of envisioning futures without a solid grounding in those important human and natural qualities that tend to get suppressed by pro-light, anti-dark sensibilities… then we are probably inching toward another dystopian utopia.

And yet, a racially-aware metamodernist futurism places this important trend into circulation with both the plural futurism of all kinds of groups AND a trans-ethnic, even a trans-species, futurism. Holding all that with a constructive rather than destructive diunality will be a challenge.

Let’s practice with a complex deep dive into holding a serious Both/And about Blackness, Whiteness, and the gradations between them…

III. The Conceptual Whale of Whiteness

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous - why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaningful symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

-Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

If you have not read Moby Dick, do so. I’ll wait. That book is far weirder, more multidimensional, and ironic than you think. An entire chapter is devoted to why whiteness is the most terrifying color. True or not, modern thinking is definitely haunted by the spectre of whiteness<>blackness (or lightness vs. darkness).

In the intriguing 2025 film Eddington, a young white boy, who has recently taken up the tropes of the Black Lives Matter movement to impress a superficially woke white girl that he wants to sleep with, explains to his parents at dinner about the long road ahead to “dismantling” whiteness.

“Are you fucking retarded???” says his father. “You’re white!”

There is a cynical humor involved in our inspection of this boy’s superficiality, ignorance, and selfish motives. He is a dummy. There is also, perhaps, a parental complaint that he is failing to realize and support his own identity group. More fundamentally, however, we might want to ask:

Is he white?

What is “white?”

Personally, I have not seen roving gangs of albino supremacists violently attacking the pink-beige people of European descent, yelling, “You ain’t white!” Actual coloration seems to be a secondary consideration. Whiteness is, somehow, very serious but also very abstract, misleading, and flexible.

The fantasized qualities of whiteness often lend themselves to purity (virgin snow), wisdom (the white hair of elders), illumination (white light), and the celestial realm (mountain tops & clouds). Here’s a picture of Gandalf the White if he were Black:

I get it. Dark things are harder to see. Not just shadowy caves and moonless nights, but any visually dark entity reflects fewer photons and therefore takes the brain an extra few nanoseconds to process the relevant details. And brains hate extra work! I’ve often said that if prejudice had to be based on something hard to see, like pancreas shape (rather than skin tone, hair style, or breasts), then it would never have become popular.

So visibilist and lazy.

Contracted hearts are an important factor, but if folks cannot categorize it easily “at a glance,” then it probably will not become one of the more popular forms of bias.

This same laziness of the human mind applies to how we think about our analyses of “race.” Consider the underlying ambiguity of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Does it suggest that we should criticize society based on our pre-existing notions of race — anchored as they are in hasty judgments, ideological categories, and lazy perceptions?

OR does this theory propose that we critique the concept of race itself and its use as a social organizing principle? That last option would certainly take more psychological effort. The amount of cognitive labor we are willing to put into the analysis often determines our interpretation of the theory itself.

Another piece of CRT is the notion of intersectionality. Here, we can also ask whether this means the (hasty, quickly felt) idea that those people who belong to multiple conventional categories of marginalization need to be proactively valorized and preferenced… or whether we are (more slowly) trying to make the multiplicity of human identity categories into the new minimum form of useful discourse?

You will notice that my bias is reflected in how I frame these questions. I am creating a polarization that I believe is aligned with metamodern, integrative, and developmental sociology. I am suggesting that there is a more complex, healthy, and multiperspectival definition of CRT that requires more nuance and presents a deeper challenge to our popular categories. Conversely, there is a more simplistic, faster, and narrower way of holding exactly the same principles, as if they were simply commentaries on the unquestioned status of assumed cultural designations.

The kind of “discriminating intelligence” (which is both a Buddhist and a racist joke) that I am invoking seems pertinent to evaluating a specifically metamodern set of approaches to a politicized concept such as CRT.

The generalized intra-metamodern discussion is not between pro-CRT and anti-CRT attitudes but, rather, between the more nuanced, critical, and developmental forms of both pro & con. In contrast to the shallower, cruder, and hastier forms of both pro-CRT and anti-CRT.

However, there is a caveat:

While we must expect that meta-sensibilities refer to the way these ideas are held rather than which “side” one is on, there is another relevant consideration about the ideological role of Critical Race Theory in contemporary North America.

The popular anti-CRT rhetoric typically betrays a level of fervor and organization that suggests a reactionary and oppressive (anti-humanist) orientation. Although I personally have enormous skepticism about weakly implemented and narrowly idealistic forms of social dogma, such as we find with many real-world examples of the institutional enactment of CRT training, I nonetheless have much more concern about the rabid flare-up of decadent social forces reacting instinctively against these theories. Methinks they doth protest too much.

Whatever CRT “is,” the anti-CRT appears to be a symptom of lurking and organized networks of regressives cultivating and leveraging widespread peripheral distress (up to and including sensible pseudo-metamodern critiques about “imbalanced” CRT implementations).

For me, the most honest and interesting reason to be pro-CRT is simply an objective evaluation of which groups are the most anti-CRT. As with many things, it is the social pushback that reveals where the constructive evolutionary forces might be active.

Taking that caveat on board, we nonetheless expect that a metamodern approach to CRT is critical of that model whenever it exhibits merely postmodern attitudes. We would like to critique those attitudes, yes, yes, but only as an extension of the critical insights that power those attitudes themselves. This is analogous to the well-known metamodern criticism of Relativism as an absolutism that must itself be relativized.

Postmodern critical and political commentary on race seems to be very good at pointing out how modernized traditionalists reify the concept of race as an essential, God-given, hereditary identity whose purity must be defended at all costs. And it is also very good at finding subtler versions of this reification hidden within the systemic organization of modern neo-liberal “progress.” (And some progress indeed was made!)

Yet this level of critical theory itself tends to reify races by treating them as essential categories that are privileged as unique revealers of the subtle and systemic injustice of modern hegemonies. And what could be more obvious than such a sentence!

My apologies.

One of our challenges, then, is to be able to apply postmodern ethical, sociological, and revolutionary critiques back upon themselves without losing touch with the deeply humane insights that provoke the best versions of those critiques. And to make those distinctions, we probably have to think and feel (with more nuance) about the significance of revolutionary and progressive sentiments in general…

IV. Fascist Revolutionaries?

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 film One Battle After Another, we meet the beautiful black political revolutionary named Profidia Beverly Hills. Very inspiring.

However, her revolutionary zeal is soon revealed to have strong narcissistic and erotic dimensions that trump her commitment to social ideals & family relationships. Her actions leave her allied with a terrible man who represents the very symbol of oppressive social forces. Yet he, too, does not really care about his “side.” They bond over some shared perverse drive that possesses both the White hegemonic enforcer and the Black insurrectionist.

Metamodern politics must reckon with the psychoanalytic possibility of a subterranean collusion between champions of change & the gatekeepers of the status quo. Under what conditions do systems-of-oppression run on the same inner fuel as the emancipatory forces? And to what degree do apparent and aspirational emancipators operate unintentionally as part of the overall regime?

Meta-progressives (and, of course, meta-conservatives deserve a whole essay of their own!) often side with some version of a progress movement struggling against reactionary impediments; challenging the lower-level virtue claims of people whose actions support a default condition that impedes humane upgrades to the technosocial order. Good. Yet we must supplement this general orientation with a careful investigation into the Spirit of Change itself.

Revolutionary and transformative feelings may suffer (at least) three faults:

1. a tendency to ignore the evolutionary complementarity and simultaneous need for progress-liberation (left) & conservation-restoration (right) principles.

2. a blindness to the manipulative role that the revolutionary feeling can play in the motivation of fascists, authoritarians, and the defenders of a decadent status quo.

3. a failure to deeply grapple with the deluding effects of the very traumas and imbalances that make people sensitive to perceiving real “injustice.”

Those three, taken together, represent the main cluster of points that I hear most often from post-postmodernists who are wary of revolutionaries. There are, of course, counter-critiques that problematize that very wariness, but we are looking from one particular side in this section of the essay.

I would ideally take a playful deep dive into each of them, but for the reader’s sake, I will just do the second point. This essay is already quite long and I have cut several important sections out.

The story goes like this:

Once upon a time, quite innocuously, I was seated outside a Starbucks cafe in Victoria, BC. Idly, sipping an espresso, I perused a sign affixed to the front window. It indicated one of those temporary, excitement-boosting “campaigns” that franchise restaurants are endlessly devising. It read:

“Who Says Mocha Can’t Have a Summer Sidekick?”

Clearly, some kind of caffeinated sugar-milk drink was being added to the summer menu as an alternative or complement to their Mocha drink. Obvious. Not worth thinking about. Or was it? I started to take the question seriously. Who, I wondered, does actually say that Mocha cannot have a Summer sidekick? Then it hit me — no one.

Nobody says that! It is like clickbait that tries to sucker you into their scam by offering to reveal what THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW! Why isn’t the mainstream media covering this??? It stirs up a feeling of rebellion against an abstract authority. And it does this to manipulate you.

Not only does No One stipulate that Mocha is not allowed to have a summer sidekick, but the real purpose of the revolutionary counter-impulse stirred up by the slogan is that I should give money to this multinational corporation.

So: How much hegemony and manipulation is stimulated by the feeling of a revolutionary counter-impulse?

How often have you heard from Christians (still, by far, the dominant religious group in the Americas) that they are only valiantly fighting back against unfair suppression? Did they become dominant by endlessly pushing back and rising up? Do dominators always feel like underdogs? Can the enforcement of a biased normalcy ultimately be separated from the moral emotion that resists and rebels? Does oppression result from, or feed upon, the very desire to reassert freedom? Is that what happened to the French Revolution? Etc.

We know very well how reactionary authorities assert further control by pushing back against putative insurrectionists, okay, but how often are the agents of hegemony themselves motivated by a feeling of ethical insurrection?

We have all known youthful radicals and anarchists who were the first get bourgeois homes and families. Was their conventional rebellion a sign of their secret conventionalism? Perhaps all rebellion is secretly conventional.

Remember when those ancient ethnic-national kingdoms started to take over the tribal/regional groups? The instinct of unique tribes to resist incorporation into large, mythic peoples had to be redirected. That same energy still existed in bodies and communities, but now it was rebranded as patriotism, loyalty-to-symbols, and an aggrieved readiness to “rebel” by enforcing the new norms on any deviants or rivals.

Quickly! We must keep THEM from destroying y/our way of life! Just sign here…

These are interesting ideas. They do not mean that we give up the struggle for humane and ecological thriving, but it does mean that we cannot do this well — certainly not at a metamodern level of cultural complexity — without a diunital awareness of the hidden duality of revolutionary impulses.

In/Conclusion

This article has been about the potential complementarity between the main metamodern political attitudes. We have explored it through the lens of Race. That can provoke a lot of anxiety. Real people are attacked every day by people who act as though they believe in racial distinctions. These attacks can be symbolic, economic, or physical. Those are not equal kinds of attack, but they are all real.

Talking, thinking, and feeling through the lens of Race is a skill. We can all get better at our own version of it. I probably still have a long way to go. But I believe this skill involves, among other things, an increasing appreciation of context.

Context is the niche into which your facts fit. A big city like New York could have the highest number of violent crime deaths annually, but it might also be the safest city in America. Howso? Well, what if it had the lowest violent crime rate relative to its population? That is a context question.

Maybe the greatest number of people killed each year by American police are White men, but, at the same time, a much higher percentage of Black men are killed by those same cops. Context makes all the difference. Postmodern critical sociology starts to take contexts into account, but metamodern sociology must find ways to do this more powerfully and gracefully.

Regular subscribers will know that I routinely think in terms of three other social contexts — exoteric, mesoteric & esoteric. Each of them provides a different style of relating to racial discourse.

For example, “exoteric” communication responds to normative social habits. Today it sounds fine to say Black, but rather outdated (or poetic) to say Negro. And intolerably upsetting to say the so-called N-word. The favored and disfavored words have shifted many times and, at some point, will shift yet again. Society is constantly negotiating its language and official attitudes.

Often, that negotiation is downstream from the repeated conclusions of smaller avant-garde networks. These “mesoteric” groups need to feel into the deep, leading-edge realities of the moment to collaboratively work out the language we need in order to inspect, validate and/or transform culture. Their job is to experimentally figure out how we should talk relative to our values, histories, and the worlds we wish to create.

And then, of course, there are “esoteric” spaces in which people are training to see and feel beyond the implications of socialized language and symbols. Spaces of sacred transgression in which the most offensive and regressive thing we can do is to reinforce the superficial dehumanizing power of common emotional assumptions about patterns of letters. These people wish to fuck with the social charge, positive or negative, associated with human speech.

Context.

But how anybody know if they is doing context good???

Excellent question.

Metamodern & metacontextual approaches to politics in general, and racialization in particular, need principles by which to evaluate and improve themselves. And to become more real and useful than just some abstract multiperspectivalism.

Nassim Taleb talks about skin in the game. There is a layer of embodied human intelligence that we cannot access if we are insulated from the consequences of our decisions. If you can crash the economy, get paid out, and jump to an even higher-paying job, then you do NOT become a better banker.

Meritocracy fails if the “merit” we are rewarding is simply the ability to convince people to pay you elite sums of money, whether you succeed or fail. This is part of the meaning of “privilege.” It is a combination of luck & insulation.

You can do psychological studies on people playing a game like Monopoly. Rig the game in their favor and they immediately start believing that victory was the result of their superior skill or intrinsic virtuous identity. They normalize luck and do not consider hidden systemic factors. We can all get high on fluke outcomes. Ethnicity, gender, history, neurodiversity — these are fluke outcomes. They are not the result of our efforts.

Certain circumstances give you certain advantages and disadvantages in certain contexts. Obviously. It is not always a privilege to be White or male or from a wealthy family. But it often is. As someone with two of those traits, my opinion is that there is enormous room for a metamodern inter-privilege discourse.

That means learning to trust each other enough, and to be curious enough, to explore the forms of luck and insulation that we each have normalized. No one has all the privilege. No one has none of the privilege. And not all privileges are equal in importance. Intersectionality is a great way to begin to explore that, but it starts to fail, and to reveal its merely postmodern sensibility, as soon as it is weaponized against an assumed class of easily-recognized, homogenous people upon whom we project all the privilege. This weaponization inhibits the ability of these discussions to provide a stabilizing and challenging form of feedback.

Or maybe that’s just my racism talking.

I would have loved, in this essay, to explore the contrast between “systemic bias” and “intersystemic bias,” between equity of opportunity and a hystericized anxiety about enforced equality of outcomes, between mean average wealth & median average wealth as the driving economic metric relative to trans-ethnic humanitarian thriving, etc. I cut all that out. This article is already long enough.

Let’s just say that the interrelated cluster of socio-economic and political positions espoused within metamodern communities requires, yes, that we flesh out an ethical position on matters such as “race,” in a way that both conserves and transcends postmodern positions, not only as knowlege but as our embodied way of being in the world, which we can only do with a combination of developmental nuance and constructive interpersonal challenge, BUT that we also have to couple that to proposed and enacted changes in the actual systems by which wealth, health, meaning and power are re/generated in our societies.

Admittedly, that’s kinda hard to say.

And, even more admittedly, saying it isn’t enough.

Black metamodernism??? That’s right. They said it couldn’t be done, but it turns out ‘they’ were racists. Or am I a racist? Maybe. Saying, “No!” is just a little too easy. And apparently, all the avowed non-racists & anti-racists are not preventing widespread cultural backsliding. Let us investigate together with daring minds, empathic hearts, se…

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Here are two upcoming things.

I. APOCALYPTARIAN ACCELERATIONISM

I will be on Cadell’s Last’s para-academic Philosophy Portal for four Sundays in January — exploring what he calls apocalyptarian accelerationism.

You might remember that Bruce Alderman & I helped initiate their new format last January with a series of deep dives into the mission of The Integral Stage. This time I will be joined by the terribly clever, well-connected philosopher-activist and “hyperhumanist” Carl H. Smith.

We are looking at —

• organic, shamanic, and multidimensional alternatives to the transhumanist movement,

• the role of the inhuman in future humanism,

• ecological engagements with the technological singularity,

• transforming the libido of hypermodernity,

• the role of ordeal, destabilization, and re-wilding in the emergence of a post-tragic post-humanism that is not merely ethnocentric regression, neo-liberal “soft fascism,” or the trivializing leap into digital fantasies.

• etc.

You have to sign up to Philosophy Portal for the month, and if you do it through my website then I get the money. I think all of it. Conversely, I get a little of the money from this much bigger thing…

II. ICON 2026

The second Integral Conference of North America will be in Denver, Colorado, in late May of 2026. Immediately before the Spring Metamodern Spirituality Lab in Vermont. I will be there to present my “INTEGRAL IS A UFO SEX CULT!” Finally, the truth comes out! Learn the disturbing secret history of this movement and its diabolical principles. Plus some charming multidimensional sea shanties that I am crafting. The link is for the whole event.

I will be there creating liminal portals. And until then, I’ll be working behind the scenes to get as many lively, interesting, leading-edge cultivators as we can to infiltrate the space.

Goes without saying that this is not just for self-described Integral folks. And the organizers are very much aware that vibes, improv, peripheral encounters, hot tubs, and energy are needed if there is any hope of building coherence-oriented, high-trust alliances to help us thrive in the post-tragic epoch. Are we the solution to the fragmenting social ethos, technological upheavals, and nihilism of this historical moment? Sure. Let’s say that. It might be true.

This is a big, evolving event with a lot of the right people. Even the cheap versions are expensive for a guy in my situation, so I will be using the early bird discount. And, apparently, if enough people book their tickets through my specific affiliate link, then I win a giant foam hat that depicts a topless Ken Wilber mudwrestling an alligator. And I’ll let everyone wear it at least once.

Also they gave me this QR code to use — so you know it’s legit.

(This is also coming up soon but it’s free and not ready yet. Don’t click on it. :)

(This article is unusually straightforward. Some of the ideas in this article will be familiar to regular readers but I receive so many requests for a “short overview” of my thoughts on the shamanic that I have written this succinct and general introduction. Although the text is relatively short — as promised — I have taken this opportunity to supplement it with way too many images whose slightly disorienting overlays offer a visual flavoring corresponding to these concepts. As usual, paying subscribers receive early versions, audio versions by the author, and occasional bonus essays.)

I have never called myself a shaman. People occasionally refer to me that way either because they are being playful or perhaps because they want me to talk about the shamanic turn in spirituality, philosophy, and developmental psychology.

Usually, I say “shamanism” in quotes. Or else I say “something-like-shamanism” or I say, “whatever we want to call it.” My own interest revolves around a study (that I made up) called metashamanics.

What does the endlessly obtuse prefix meta- add to our discussion? It points to three things. Firstly, that we are viewing the shamanic dimensions through a metamodern, coherent pluralist, integrative, or post-postmodern lens. Secondly, the skill sets associated with shamanic training correspond closely to the cluster of problems that define our collective “metacrisis.” And thirdly, that we are not primarily interested in people who are culturally or personally identified as shamans but rather in the whole category of people from whom diverse shamanic traditions are generated, regenerated, and evolved.

Two kinds of people typically call themselves shamans:

The first are individuals of varying skill, morality, and sensitivity who are symbolically empowered as practical medicine workers in specific ethnic or tribal modalities. These folks are often, but not necessarily, associated with entheogens, therapeutic imaginal journeying, dancing, drumming, and chanting.

The other kind of person is a fairly naive contemporary individual who just spent a weekend in San Francisco to get a dubious shamanism certificate, or who plays a colorful didgeridoo on the sidewalk, or who has an exaggerated view of their own profound authenticity and intuitive capacity to inspect magical dream worlds.

The study of Metashamanics deals instead with shamanoids. This is a speculative set of neurodiversities that would predispose a person to be selected for esoteric training and community wisdom service in a healthy tribal context. They are defined by a cluster of capacities and predilections that overlap with, but are not identical to, mysticism, spirituality, or inner developmental complexification.

In theories of developmental psychology, it is commonly asserted that human beings, in fortunate circumstances, grow through phases of sensibility and cognitive skill development that are characterized by increasing nuance, depth, expansiveness, and the integration of diverse perspectives. Such growth would increasingly enfold the apprehensions and intuitions associated with the organic hierophantic caste (“shamans”). Conversely, the attitudes and drives of the natural esoteric percentage of the population typically place them in circumstances that make developmental inner growth more likely. Both these factors create a large zone of overlap between shamanism and developmentalism, but there is no necessary identity between this typology and the general concept of vertical cognitive enrichment.

Nor is there any necessity to use the word shaman. We are describing a socially and evolutionarily conserved range of human sensemaking. If the word sounds too masculine, we could say witch. If that sounds too magical, we could say gnostic intermediary. If that still sounds too pagan or heretical, we could say natural priest or organic imam or embodied theologian.

The terminology is not terribly significant. What matters is a higher-than-average presentation of several of the following normal human inclinations: attempt to access trance states, generative critique of social rituals, allurement to thresholds and liminal states, assumption that the sacred & the natural coincide, experimental relationships with imaginal entities, training of subconscious intelligence, perception of subjectivity as plural, playful indifference to social and gender roles, obsession with intersubjective praxis, study of ordeals, competence in somatic interoception, creative production of religious forms, endless curiosity about the coherence of nonlinear patterns, strong emotional responses to human-nature interactions, experience of Self as Other, peculiarity or hyperindividuation, bioregional and place-based thinking, surrealism, fluid transformations between moods and roles, penchant for inter-tribal diplomacy, deep interest in the anomalous, paradoxical, absurd or weird, etc.

That’s a big “etc.” Such a list could be significantly expanded. These attributes and inclinations are widely distributed across human beings, but they predominate in individuals whom we might describe as esoteric in their behavior, regardless of their local social training.

They might show up in any culture or any profession. However, we can identify several social genres that are frequently cited as being “downstream” from the archaic wisdom specialist: psychologist, yogi, performance artist, philosopher, horror filmmaker, fantasy author, ecologist, complexity scientist, UAP researcher, parapsychologist, herbalist, archetypologist, trance musician, somatic worker, tantrika, intuitive healer, participatory anthropologist, etc. That’s an even bigger “etc.” A good chunk of people in these and related domains share a common personal history, natural sensibility, and cosmic outlook that is as much typological as developmental.

A neurogenetic category crosses these social designations in a non-trivial manner. It is an identity and/or role that may be as pertinent to personal self-actualization and community flourishing as are designations based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, neurodivergence, etc. In the absence of this identity concept, the relevant data to study them is currently distributed across other categories. There are existing studies on schizotypal genetics, ufo abductees, right-brained sensemaking, visionary experience, differential processing of psychedelics, and people high in trait openness, among others, that may contain much of the basis for an emerging statistical examination of this subpopulation.

Relatively consistent subtypes or specializations may exist within this class of people. For example, the use of entheogens and “plant medicine” is common but not ubiquitous among shamans. Likewise, drumming and rhythmic trance, imaginal therapeutic journeying, public performance, esoteric sexuality, philosophical training, channeling, working with animals, etc., represent potential subcategories that would be (a) perpendicular to developmental maturation and psychological health, and (b) necessary inclusions within a broadly self-aware community of contemporary shamanoids.

One proposal from metashamanics is that curated gatherings of shamanoids would allow a bottom-up educational approach to sharing lore about successful methods, dangers, and needs for this population in the contemporary environment. It would likely also encourage an expanding sense of self-recognition and social worth, along with a richer awareness of internal diversity and subtypes than may have been available under archaic and indigenous conditions. This inter-subtype socializing would help emotionally and socially stabilize such individuals by providing a broader notion of where their own inclinations fit into a more diverse context. Such an idea represents one approach to interpersonally extending the personal notion of an endo-sourced wisdom.

While shamanoids have both generated and been drawn to various wisdom lineages over the course of history, there is also an important way in which they demonstrate an internal pedagogy. Many of their predilections (such as a drive to occupy threshold, ambiguous, and contradictory positions) may indicate a healthy instinct for the circumstances that catalyze and evoke an inborn neurogenetic algorithm for shamanic development. It is as if they contain the seeds of their own curriculum. The importance of mentorship, community, and general education is crucial, but the basic orientation of those set-ups is toward providing the situations, templates, encouragements, and challenges necessary for such people to unfold a “dharma” from their own sensibility and experimental interactions with ecosystems, entities, and altered states.

We must study not only the intra-relations within this category but also the social interrelations between these characters and the general “village.” Shaman is not a status or rank. Nor does it represent a set of capacities that are utterly absent from the common population. These are specialists within the communal context who both prioritize particular types of sensemaking and elicit, garden, and harvest that kind of intelligence from others.

Insofar as we might think of shamanoids as potentially playing a critical role in the cultivation of collective intelligence and collective sapience, we must examine the contemporary broken circuit between the natural esoteric and exoteric demographics of local and global villages.

The periodically abusive and persecuting stance of dogmatic and bureaucratic monotheists toward natural priests and priestesses, as well as the modern disregard, marginalization, and psychiatrization of shamanoids, has led to a contemporary situation in which these tendencies are ignored and demeaned in everyday socio-economic and political affairs. That failure on the part of the exoteric population to recognize and appreciate the necessity of these characters is reciprocated by a frequently occurring defiant, reactive, and judgmental attitude within shamanoid communities. That attitude could be characterized as gnostic dismissiveness. We (the esoteric subset) are uniquely awakened and conscious and authentically attuned to living reality while “they” are sleeping, ignorant, deluded, egoic, et al. They have all our same capacities but stupidly fail to engage them. Thus, they can be either disregarded, manipulated, or taught to experience reality the same way that we do. This represents the other side of the broken circuit between esoteric and exoteric natural populations.

To heal this rift requires three things. Firstly, there must be conceptual recognition and social valorization of the mature and benign shamanoid type as a crucial component of organizational and social wisdom. Secondly, there must be a cultivation of communal participation, human maturation, and collective service among the esoterics. Thirdly, there must be a profound recognition of the need for mesoteric people who are drawn in both directions and can operate as institutional and populist translators involved in the ongoing establishment of functional infrastructures between the shamanoids and the other necessary types within a functional human social field.

Under normal (i.e., relatively healthy and unchanging) human social conditions, the shamanoids, if successfully enabled to self-train in effective relationships, are specialized gardeners of the sacred production of civic intelligence through special contexts, ideas, and ritual ordeals. They are needed for the ordinary production of healthy and meaningful multi-epistemic human cultural fields. However, the contemporary global situation poses a unique set of challenges that also require a new orientation among shamanoids.

In our “global village,” we face a cluster of interrelated crises operating at transpersonal scales. In particular, there is a disregulation of general human activity with respect to the planetary biosphere. There is also the introduction of new quasi-sentient nonhuman intelligence (e.g. AIs), a massive drug crisis and the normalization of psychedelics, a mental illness epidemic, a wisdom famine, lack of sacred shared civic identity, the inadequacy of our maturational rituals, blindness to nonlinear sensemaking, a socio-economic indifference to affective, subconscious and inuitive complexity, a neo-liberal inablity to alilgn libido toward depth-oriented culture production, an anxious unreadiess for the high strangeness that new technologies are wreaking upon the world, a need to prepare for the cosmic extension of humanity and the biosphere through trans-planetary technologies, a social crisis around gender transformations, a technologically-incepted need for naturalized attention training, digitally-mediated retribalization dangers, strong need to produce coherent intersubecitve fields, etc. We require a healthy, mature, complex, interlinked, and updated subculture of shamanoids to play a central role in leveraging their ancient instincts and skill sets toward the correlated contemporary crises that strongly suggest that a planetary-scale shamanic mobilization is necessary.

This does not mean that all wisdom traditions should be sacrificed in favor of shamanism, but rather that a shamanic turn is necessary within all traditions. From Buddhism to Christianity, from Secularism to Islam, from Hinduism to Agnosticism to Scientology, the “soul-training” and “sacred production” activities of human civilization must prioritize (a) ecology (b) trans-rational states c) integration of subconscious intelligence (d) unfolding natural complexity, (e) new ritual and ordeal production, and (f) organic rather than dogmatic selection of hierophatic workers.

It would be a mistake to think of people with these organic hierophatic dispositions as being solely involved in “nature mysticism” or the “subtle realm.” Just as shamanoids represent a typology that is orthogonal to developmental cognition, they also operate across all kinds of state-domains. Thus, the broad categories of state experiences that we often classify as gross, subtle, causal, and nondual, may all show up as particular specializations among diverse shamanoid populations.

There is also a political dimension to the consideration of human strangeness workers. Using a semi-mythologized description of anthropological history, we could say that under normal, relatively invariant conditions, the political organization of the collective intelligence and operations of the tribe, village, or civilization, can be well handled by healthy, experienced, informed, and relational chieftains and matriarchs. However, under unsettled, peculiar, or rapidly changing conditions, the collective unconscious of the population may naturally turn toward charismatic shamanoids as political agents who suggest a capacity to operate within-and-beyond our traditions and normative protocols. Someone who can utilize coincidences, subconscious sensemaking, astonishment, weird alliances, etc., as forms of collective adaptation and reorganization.

Since the contemporary environment shows many signs of being in exactly that kind of condition, we would expect that a strong trans-rational instinct would arise in human populations seeking shamanic leadership. And if the population is deprived, through seemingly sensible bureaucratic and procedural mechanisms, of healthy shamanic weirdos willing to play at the political level, the people may default to the closest approximation — even to potentially wounded, untrained, narrowly functional, regressive, charismatic shamanoids.

Although it would be reductive to think in terms of “good” and “bad” shamans, we must be open to exploring risky and unsettling versions of shamanic development on a continuum alongside benign and idealized variants. It is certainly possible to have truncated, pathological, or ideologically captured versions of this type of sensemaking.

In the early anthropological studies of shamans by people such as Mircea Eliade, it was common to cite a saying that medicine people were those who had cured themselves of a sickness and could then cure others. We must treat the nature of this sickness quite flexibly such that it could potentially incorporate social anxiety, hypersensitivity, apophenia, paranoia, standard social narcissism, excessive suggestibility, ADHD, somatic intensities, etc. And the nature of the pertinent self-healing or recovery must also be thought broadly, such that it could include effective and self-empowering “solutions” that may deviate not only from common psychiatric renormalization procedures but also potentially from socially received assumptions about spiritual and psycho-emotional well-being.

Speaking in terms of an archaic futurist mythology, we might imagine healthy shamanoid networks involved in a benign collective project such as the ongoing tending of a cosmocentric imaginal biosphere. Or the intersubjective work of producing a naturalized trans-noospheric humanity that intelligently serves and transforms the Gaian system of which it is an important organ.

We might also use new science, cognitive theory, and developmental orientations to specify shamanic functions. For example, a new practical animism could serve as the evocative interpersonal psychology described by 4E cognitive science. Here we can begin to ask questions concerning, for example, the metaphor of “spirits” as an efficient participatory framing for extended and embedded parts work.

Certainly, we do not and perhaps cannot know the role that actual Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) — biospheric, cybernetic, and anomalous — might play in the unfolding of our species but we can say that there is a historically prominent subset of the population that is instinctively inclined toward such problems and the development of skills oriented toward maximizing benign outcomes.

It is almost certain that there will be a tremendous need in the near future for “esoteric diplomats” who can handle the subtle and sacred complexity between different human groups, different value orientations, and seemingly incommensurable worldviews and languages. These same kinds of people, who are dispositionally oriented to help produce a shared civic sacrality across different polarized tribal contexts, may also be able to extend those same skills to deal productively with various NHIs such as animals, plants, ecosystems, subtle beings, aliens, computational intelligences, irreducible algorithms, etc.

Metashamanics must be able to incorporate emerging cultural factors as well as the evocative narrative and memetic concepts that connect shamanoids, general populations, and complex phenomena. However, it must also begin a more rigorous statistical, behavioral, and neurological probe into this typology. Suggestions have been made concerning the neuropsychological traits of this type. It has been postulated, for example, that they are relatively likely to maintain clarity of function during intense psychedelic and analogous perturbations of brain chemistry. We would probably want to supplement such notions with the idea that these individuals may also exhibit hypersensitivity and more-than-normal disorientation relative to even small stimuli.

Another proposal about the shamanoid brain is that it may exhibit unusual interconnection between different sensemaking modules. A disposition toward moderate synaesthia, across sensory systems but also across cognitive systems, may be one of many ways in which particular individuals are born tilted toward blended and synergetic capacities. This tilt might also explain the tendency to seek out and practice certain kinds of esoteric training systems. The suggestions derived from “integral” philosophies, and from spiritual systems such as the Gurdjieffian Fourth Way, hint at a significant role played by the intentional interweaving of different intelligences and behavioral-affective tendencies within individuals. It is worth exploring whether a pre-existing amplification of intersystemic neural circulation predisposes people toward a “path” that pursues such blending as an intentional goal.

The collection of existing data and hypotheses, as well as the encouragement and organizing of new research in this area, would likely be a key element of metashamanics.

If we, as the European philosophers Bard and Soderqvist do, divide the inherited human discourse into logos, mythos, and pathos, we may tend to distinguish shamanoids along these lines. While some human subpopulations tend to emphasize the laws of technical mastery and pragmatic survival, other groups (or moments) orient toward sensemaking through mythologized and dramaturgical socio-emotional cartoons concerning relationship dynamics. Shamanoids are likely to have critiques of both these trends. Finding themselves not only shapeshifting between them but also rejecting both in favor of frequent attunement to pathic intensities such as nonconceptual experience, complex antagonism, and the phenomenological “eternalization” of somatic and imaginal sensemaking.

Another interesting sociological feature is the possibility of shaman envy — or the generalized capitalist utilization of shamanoids to create an ever-unfolding commercial appetite for hyperindividualism, altered states, nonlinear flows, etc. This subsequently becomes idealized and simulated by non-shamanic consumer populations.

Baz Lurhmans’s film Elvis graphically depicts a unique individual who was naturally obsessed with costume changes, rhythmic trance induction, cultural transformation, the intersection between the sacred & erotic, indifference to standard identity boundaries, and the experimental psychology of drug experience, and who also specialized in the production of subtle energy transmission fields. Lacking any mature mentorship in these skill sets, he is captured, and slowly degraded, by a traumatized commercial culture worker who sells him to people who want to duplicate his style without being personally oriented in that direction. Pseudo-shamanic consumer populism. Maybe bad for everyone in the end?

Even though I do not claim to be a shaman, I am clearly invested in clarifying and supporting these people, and obviously, I relate to their suggested characteristics.

Years ago, I visited my mother at her new home in the mountains of Puerto Rico. Climbing up the sloped yard toward the back of the property, I found myself weaving between strange holes dug by some ungodly tropical varmint in the soft, wet earth. Mother pointed out a clear path along the side of the field that she had built from large flat stones. I remember what I said:

“I don't want to know where the path is, I want to be better at instinctively avoiding holes.”

For me, the shamanic dimension largely involves the trust that we can get better at not knowing. That our unjustified guesses are not all equal, but rather they can become more intelligent and more effective. This is a sensibility that I have borne with me through many developmental, spiritual, and moral teachings. It has added an extra flavor to all of them. It is not merely the idea of intuition. There is a language of mystery.

More than this, more than my own temperament and conclusions, I feel deeply protective of these people and utterly convinced that we cannot solve our collective crises without a new recognition, interweaving, study, and social valorization of this special role within (and without) human communities.

Metashamanics.

(This article is unusually straightforward. Some of the ideas in this article will be familiar to regular readers but I receive so many requests for a “short overview” of my thoughts on the shamanic that I have written this succinct and general introduction. Although the text is relatively short — as promised — I have taken this opportunity to supplem…

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As you know, there are early access, audio versions, and other perks for paying subscribers. This article particularly benefits from the vocal emphasis. And to help you frame the philosophical forest hike that is coming, here are the section headings:

I. An Introduction to Ambivalence

II. Platforming Manipulators or “The Content Problem”

III. The Flaw in Normal

IV. Les Non-Dupes

V. The Postures of Transmission

VI. The Girls of KINO

VII. Serial Killers and Cognitive Biases

IX. The AI Hole & CultworldTM.

I. AN INTRODUCTION TO AMBIVALENCE

We do not like to be deceived.

Or do we?

How often do our complaints about “seducers” boil down to the fact that they were insufficiently seductive? Are we agitated that they attempted to trick us, or are we irked to have seen so readily through their tricks? After all, we are the kinds of beings who will pay to be enchanted by a stage magician and then feel vaguely out of sorts if she reveals how the trick was done. And we do, sort of, like the way that our eyes and brains (and value systems) are constantly (falsely) simplifying the world for us. It feels empowering. Perhaps too much truth would disturb, destroy us, or paralyze our capacity for creative action.

• We do not want to be dangerously tricked. That much seems clear. Yet our hearts seem to yearnj for a simplifying grand narrative that will set us in motion.

• We even feel enthusiastic about any emotive pop song that is potent enough to hack our suspicious hearts — even though they are performing, pretending and embellishing.

• We speak highly of any philosopher, saint, or political leader who makes the complications of life seem straightforward enough that we can take satisfaction in having heard a “convincing” explanation. Convictions, they say, make convicts. Yet would we still like someone to convince us…

Our relationship to the whole situation of manipulators, seducers, and deceivers is deeply ambiguous. We both love & hate manipulation. On the one hand (which is a joke about the etymological prefix in the word mani-pulation), we get to talk ourselves into delightful or dangerous foolishness by having an external “charismatic agent” to blame it on. The cult leader made me do it! We exploit the idea of exploiters to meet our own needs. And yet, on the other hand, exploiters bear responsibility not only for their influence upon others but also for their desire to influence.

Internal and external causality are both in play. It’s complex. And I’m going to make it even worse.

The whole “liminal web” of overlapping transformational, developmental, and regenerative networks is plagued by a two-headed monster. One head consists of narcissists, sociopaths, subtle abusers, appropriators, cult-like dynamics, etc.

The other head consists of the narcissists-who-denounce-others-as-narcissists, the fragility worshippers, guru-phobic pseudo-egalitarians, self-important “protectors,” and various neurotics who experience free-floating anxiety about the very possibility of manipulation, gaslighting, and insensitivity.

All of that, all together, forms the situation. In a sense, we are not yet even inquiring about it until we feel comfortable (or appropriately uncomfortable) asking questions such as:

“When are people detecting the possibility of inappropriate influence, and when are those ‘detections’ actually a projection of the detector’s own unacknowledged desire to inappropriately influence others?”

And even that does not go far enough.

Sociopathy is a spectrum. Influence is all-pervasive. Narcissism can be contextual. And we are all co-enacting realities with each other in ways that make ‘blame’ blurry and make the attribution of danger into a much more nuanced affair. (Plus, do we really think that there are no undercover intelligence agents at our weird gatherings?)

Then add in the even weirder dynamics of postmodernism hypermodernism that K. Wilber explored years ago in Trump and Post-Truth World. Plus the technology-driven elimination of the consensus-based public square, coupled with the rise of deep fakes, non-human cultural agents, and the general erosion of trust in information.

What would it take for us to be better meta-participants in all of this?

I’ll start from a very personal position…

II. PLATFORMING MANIPULATORS, or “The Content Problem”

I do not believe in platforming people. That’s probably an ambiguous statement. Who really knows what it means to “believe?” And it probably sounds like I am against platforming problematic persons and dangerous ideas. Actually, it is that very concept that I am skeptical about.

I remain half-seriously unconvinced that memetic contagion is a significant driver of world events. Yes, we are impacted by ideas and the content of media, but there are soooooooo many other mitigating and additional factors. And as a good McLuhanist, I tend to think that the medium is the message. That means that our major psychological, social, and moral influences come from the communication technology itself — rather than from the particular people or specific content that we are exposed to via that technology.

Our family life, behavioral habits, paychecks, subconscious desires, and the hidden dynamics of collective intelligence and deep neurobiology could exert considerably more persuasion upon our attitudes than the relatively trivial matter of who appears on what stage. I also suspect that our deep anxiety about “exposure to the wrong people and ideas” is part of the ideological mechanism by which the dominant social control system, with both its left and right hands, keeps us reactively plugged into the relatively impotent engagement layer of the surface chatter world.

Don’t THEY want you to worry about everyone’s exposure to misleading material?

This kind of arch-skeptical attitude informs my work as a (mostly amateur) podcast host and frontline interviewer in the liminal networks. I have frequently faced, socially and personally, the question of whether or not I am amplifying or legitimating people by simply talking convivially with them, exploring their worldviews, being humanly kind, or tracking their perspectival journeys with curiosity. And although I listen closely to counterarguments, my own hard-won conclusion, over and over again, is: No. Obviously, that is pretty self-serving. Would I talk with despots and mass murderers if they had an informed opinion about Metatheory? Almost certainly.

However, this does not mean that I do not worry about cultural contamination, deception, manipulation, and bad faith. These problems perturb me intensely. It is simply that I do not see that leverage over these issues operates primarily at the level of controlling the possibility of manipulative “exposure.”

It seems to me that our tools, our homes, and our schools are either cultivating children with organic self-esteem, mutual sensitivity, high skepticism, and self-critique of their own responses to fads, authorities, and hasty interpretations — OR we are not. In the former case, “content” is not that dangerous. In the latter case, even seemingly benign content can generate bad outcomes.

The human brain is an exquisite imitation machine that largely operates by sampling reality through performative duplication. Do you know anyone who starts tapping their toe to a piece of music before determining whether they approve of it? We are duplicators but that fact can mean many different things. For example, we might imitate something in order to refuse it. Many developmental theories suggest that we model various phenomena in our nervous system in order to externalize them. By performing it we might turn it into an object of inspection rather than part of our subjectivity. Yet we collaboratively generate a cultural attitude of anxiety that behaves as though we are all constantly at risk of becoming any bad thing to which we are occasionally exposed. Although there may be some truth and some falsehood to this attitude, it also clearly serves the Empire of Marketing. The sociological regime that wants you to keep participating breathlessly in a world of persuasion dynamics that never cease to obsessively inspect the current cultural surface.

Remember Ghostbusters?

At the climax of the film, instead of metacognitively emptying his mind, Dan Akroyd tried to think of the safest and nicest possible idea. But then the Sumerian demon Gozer the Destructor simply uses that same benevolent image (the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man) to begin destroying New York. He should have been working on the skill of emptying his mind, but instead, he focused on trying to choose good content over bad content.

III. THE FLAW IN NORMAL

And remember Charles Manson? Sure you do. He was a high-powered, emotionally broken manipulator (potentially backed by even larger networks of manipulators) at the center of a malignant 1960s American whirlwind. A pretty unreliable narrator. Yet we cannot blithely dismiss his comments, at trial, and afterwards, about the preconditions that enabled his murderous criminal sex-cult to thrive. The whole tragic enterprise, he said, would not have worked even slightly if the conventional American family were not already producing large numbers of needy, traumatized, unheard & gullible children. Normal was breaking people. The monster was just exploiting their brokenness.

Normal has a deep flaw.

That flaw conditions the way we emotionally approach the problems of manipulation, seduction, and deception. Without neglecting the problem of real predators, we must also recognize that we are a profoundly scapegoating species.

Under distress, all things being equal, we tend to lynch the stranger. The aggrieved and bereaved often gather together to target whomever is “easy to detect” rather than waiting for the results of a nuanced investigation.

This is often tragic. It is also heartbreakingly understandable. But what it prevents is not only the cold rationality of slow justice but also any real critique of the role played by the background structure of our normal social patterns.

In village life, as well as in the global village of social media and “the news,” we tend to viscerally blame the person who is on stage — rather than the whole community that taught us to think that people on stages are significant.

That too is tragic but heartbreakingly understandable. Conventional culture cannot function without irrationally valuing people who seem either prominent or official. That is how its internal self-organization operates. It needs to raise unnecessarily gullible, unwise, and seducible children to become self-sacrificial believers and obedient post-tribal cooperators who perform the potency of official symbolism.

People who feel that something is being encouraged if it is acknowledged. If that mythical entity known as the “Government” officially recognizes gay marriage, then we all will be forced to get gay married! Any fairness protection applied to a particular group is helping them overcome the rest of us!

Notices = Confirms = Promotes. This is the profound anxiety within the conventional layer of our own hearts. These feelings, which are deeply entangled with a social system that has predominated on the Earth for several thousand years, inform our old-fashioned anxiety that “platforming” is a way of “endorsing and encouraging.” It feels like a failure to lock the mythic gate.

Conventional culture has its appropriate place historically and psychologically. It is a particular kind of social operating system that works in tandem with symbolic thinking (what the dandy fops call “concrete operational cognition”). And for this symbiotic psycho/social system to function properly, it needs several things:

• a viable life world; if the farms are absorbed by multinationals, the local habit food is poisoned and addictive, the churches are predatory, the town gossip is algorithmically mediated manipulation, then traditionalism curdles

• a good war; conventional culture uses the idea of a moral battle against “evil” rivals in order to invest their collective libido in re/creating the great ethnic and hereditary pyramid; our team has all good attributes (at least in public) and our rivals have all negative qualities

• overcoming subcultures; the “people” or the “nation” must constantly prevent its natural regression into regional tribes by fighting against gangs, denouncing cults, shaming minority communities; and teaching the doctrine of patriotism — the pleasure of suppressing yourself in favor of the imposed symbols and caricatures of the mass.

• lastly, of course, it requires raising gullible children…

This need is why conventional systems must be reactively focused on rogue manipulators. They are a threat to the standard manipulation. Sociopaths, actors, foreign spies, cult leaders, etc., take advantage of the very mechanism by which conventional culture reproduces its family loyalties, church beliefs, and political identities. These unauthorized seducers exploit the fact that people are trained to ignore contradictory feelings and avoid critiquing their own moralistic emotions. Without this kind of training, the whole thing erodes.

Of course, real spies, sociopaths, narcissists, and dangerous cult leaders exist, but to what degree can we organically trust our quick and strong feelings about these possibilities? And to what degree are feelings enslaved to the reproduction of a particular social regime whose other forms (racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, illiteracy, etc.) we might strongly condemn?

There is truth. There is goodness. However, that does not mean that our strongest and most convincing emotions about protecting truth & goodness have actually evolved to perform that function.

We are aware that our passionate feelings of righteous retribution cannot serve as the basis of a moral and pragmatic criminal justice system. The ethics of justice must exceed and constrain the moral fire of retribution IF we want a society that does more than just regenerate tribalism. Likewise, we might need to undermine some very natural anxieties about “bad influence,” if we are to grow beyond the socially encouraged gullibility that reproduces mass mythic ethnocentrism.

Think about Santa Claus.

Left to their own devices, young kids naturally start shrugging off the Santa Claus myth after a few years. It is not because they are philosophically persuaded toward a different view. It happens as part of their standard cognitive, social, and emotional growth. We end up with no large populations of Santa Claus believers. However, we do have large adult populations that perform “certainty” about Muhammed, Buddha, Jesus, the Left, the Right, Race, Gender, Identity, etc.

Would most of these also erode naturally if it were not for a special form of widely distributed cultural training that both creates general gullibility and cultivates a consensus around which to deploy it? Could “normal” or “conventional” or “mythic” or “folksy” or “ethnocentric” societies function without securing a population that can readily fall under the sway? And doesn’t our so-called Modernity need the same thing in order to get people to work in the factories, believe in political propaganda, or be moved by commercial marketing?

My contention throughout this essay is that the problem of manipulators and deceivers, even in apparently advanced cultural networks, cannot be sanely investigated without a deep challenge to the hereditary instincts that have been bred into us. Instincts which automatically seek out and react anxiously or righteously toward unauthorized sources of seduction to secure the influence of authorized sources of seduction.

Here’s what part of that general background cultural training looks like:

• A lack of the cognitive practice of doubting things without recoiling.

• Lack of casual awareness that there is a seduction, marketing, and propaganda element to every interaction. The Influence Matrix.

• Naive identification with the impulse to “be good” or to “get rewarded” as a result of believing.

• Not taking seriously the possibility that our enthusiasms might conceal a self-sabotaging or nihilistic urge to throw ourselves away.

• Presence of unmet emotional needs connected to pleasing authority, joining a group, conforming, or even rebelling.

Rebelling?

IV. LES NON-DUPES

I often quote my own translation of a phrase from the weird French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan, “The non-dupes go astray.” Regular readers will recognize it. If that is you — give yourself ten fictional points and a little shot of dopamine. Confetti and colorful balloons drop from the ceiling. Today, I just want to mention it briefly as a specific form of manipulation: anti-gullible gullibility.

Have you ever automatically believed someone who told you that someone else was lying? Have you ever felt the seduction of a worldview that just happens to explain why the “masses” are brainwashed dupes? Ever found yourself nodding along to a video that explains a dark conspiracy, government cover-up, insidious ideology or the utter toxicity and ignorance of half the population?

Most smart people are vulnerable to this. We typically and unthinkingly trust anything that explains how not to be one of the dupes. It is easy to get clicks by promising to reveal what THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!

Rebelling against normative authority strikes our adolescent emotions as a very viable alternative to our low opinion of our fellow citizens. It is only when we notice that the entire authoritarian hegemony believes it is a persecuted minority in rebellion against a dominant social ideology that we must begin to suspect that our own counter-impulse might be part of the way that power structures reproduce themselves — by making us gullible.

That’s a big idea. Let’s repeat it:

It is only when we notice that the entire authoritarian hegemony believes it is a persecuted minority in rebellion against a dominant social ideology that we must begin to suspect that our own counter-impulse might be part of the way that power structures reproduce themselves — by making us gullible through the promise of an informed contrarianism.

The exploitative hegemony consists almost entirely of people who think they are fighting back against the exploitative hegemony. Rebellion is a kind of conformity. It is a kind of conformity that can sell almost any candidate, product or idea. We should not forget about this when we feel a strong defiant surge of emotion to protect other people from a “dangerous influence.”

Every conspiracy theory begins with the feeling that you have (suspiciously easily) seen through the trickery that is duping everyone else. Dismissing conspiracy theorists as foolish dupes operates in pretty much the same way. And it is, to some non-trivial degree, our feeling of wanting to save people from deception that makes us ready to buy into almost anything. Our easiest moral emotions are a profound gateway to manipulation. Both unauthorized and authorized influence-peddlers tend to lean into moral messaging.

The weaponization of “ought.”

Have you ever been in a situation where Person A suggests it would be immoral NOT to side with them, and a little later Person B insists that it would be deeply out of integrity for you to side with Person A?

Happens to me all the time. Regardless of the situation, both parties act like they are uniquely sensitive, moral agents who have seen through a popular deception and wish to take a stand against it. Gives the whole thing a bad name. And none of them seem to notice how unpleasant and exhausting it is to have someone trying to persuade you.

Although we must find moral clarity and utilize our influence in particular directions, we ALSO cannot neglect that it is often deeply disrespectful, unproductive, and soul-wearying to “try to convince or influence.”

Once, in my late teens, I lost a last-night chess game (in which I initially had a significant advantage) to a megalomaniacal drug dealer who kept trying to “psych me out.” Although I could see him doing this in a very clumsy way, I was also so wearied by the unpalatable process of persuasion (alliteration!) that I stopped caring about the game at all. He probably thinks it worked. Maybe he’s right. How many of us buy things just to shut the salesman up?

This draining quality is common in encounters with narcissists, psychic vampires, cognitively impaired persons, and concerned moral parties who want to “help you” and “prevent public deception.”

For example, as much as we need to solve the problem of a degraded information landscape in which misinformation flourishes, the answer cannot be that governments and corporations are constantly intervening in our information to protect us from their definition of wrong and bad ideas. They have too often been wrong about what is wrong and frequently badly intentioned in their attempt to keep our fragile little minds safe from the toxic, bad people.

Who watches the Watchmen? And who watches the people (like me, just now) who say, “Who watches the Watchmen?” What are those weirdos up to? I mean to say only that the risk of manipulation does not decrease with the presence of those who purport to help us avoid being manipulated.

It has even become a popular contemporary joke that those who tell you to “do your own research,” “think for yourself,” and “question everything” are usually trying to reinforce simplistic emotions that lead you toward gullibility and indoctrination into that person’s preferred reality tunnel.

It is not that there is no difference between liberation and deception, but that such an important difference is largely unrelated to whether or not people are regarded as liberators or deceivers. It is certainly not strongly coupled to how hard people try to convince you that they are liberators rather than deceivers. Beyond a certain threshold, such claims invert their own significance.

V. THE POSTURES OF TRANSMISSION

I grew up fascinated by (apparently) “transformed” spiritual leaders. Wonderfully, I have gotten to meet and hang out with lots of these people — even sometimes in a peer-to-peer kind of way. So clearly I like them. Different ones in different ways. But the whole scene of gurus, teachers, satsang, communion, existential contagion, aura, etc., is filled with deep transmission ambiguity.

Suppose you take seriously the possibility that, by attunement to another human being, you may be able to resonantly absorb some of their being, consciousness, or subtle conductivity. AND ALSO SUPPOSE that during this process, you observe that they deploy the manners of trance induction, rapport building, suggestive excitement, and deliberate bonding. What is going on?

Here are some possibilities:

(a) They are tricking you into feeling “transmission” by the intentional use of attention-controlling language, evocative ideas, micro gestures, etc.

(b) They are unintentionally tricking you because their own traumas and habits produce these same seductive maneuvers without their conscious knowledge.

(c) They really are transmitting something interesting (that could be good or bad for you, regardless of how it feels in the moment), and their body, in spontaneous relational flow, automatically exhibits gestures of conductivity that superficially resemble manipulation tactics.

(d) You, and or the community, generate a real transformative energy, but you do so by tricking yourselves into believing that it is being transmitted to you.

If we want a scene in which people are free to experimentally participate in kinds of transformational communion that are highly praised by the esoteric traditions of our ancestors, then we cannot simply wait until all purported “transmitters” are verified as perfectly true, honest, and safe.

We have to simultaneously build a community ethos in which spiritual leaders are generally more respectful and open, yes, but also in which people take intelligent agentic risks framed by their awareness of a range of interpretive possibilities applicable to events of phenomenological resonance.

Personally, I have more trust in people whose energies, or even their “general condition of being,” give me lots of space to have my own experience and my own ideas about that experience. Trying to get me to agree with them, or their tradition, about the phenomena I am experiencing, feels hasty, desperate, unreliable.

Of course, there is a counterargument that suggests that the performance, intensity, and urgency of the teacher are necessary to help overcome the egoic resistance of the self-serving personality. Let yourself be manipulated or seduced beyond your own self-imposed boundary! That too is something people should be able to explore (as safely as possible) if they are moved non-naively toward it, but, in general, we should be skeptical about whether it is a standard necessary component of even transcendental spiritual work.

I call the 20th century the Age of Tantric Patriarchs. Eastern-informed, educated, nondual spiritual teachers (mostly but not exclusively male) known for tremendously powerful shaktipat or intense transmission energy. Today, in a more therapeutically informed and intersubjective era, people sometimes ask me why we do not see as many of these overwhelming flow events.

Perhaps those guys were adding a little something extra into the flow? Perhaps their own conscious or subconscious desire to “penetrate and overwhelm” gave an extra kick to the process? And, if so, was that a useful way to provide a radical intensity or a dubious additive that might even end up traumatizing people with its wondrousness?

There are many natural, and a few seemingly supernatural, ways to be charismatic, but the problem with “deliberately charismatic individuals” (those who believe in the importance of persuasion) is that it becomes almost impossible for them to discern between healthy spiritual transmission & compulsive, tactical, interpersonal gameplaying.

PRO-TIP - Edging.

We are all always vulnerable to, and perhaps even needful of, certain kinds of deception and suggestion. Nonetheless, we can increase our intelligence, integrity, and tolerance to unnecessary manipulation by experiencing it at threshold conditions. Both “being persuaded” and “avoiding persuasion” might limit our ability to see, understand, and participatorily feel the dynamics that are involved. A solution is to spend more time intentionally in the space between. An immune system is weak if it experiences no invaders. It is even weaker if it is damaged by too many or too strong an invader. Our bodies grow stronger and smarter under partial conditions of activation. Thus, we might seek out opportunities at the edge of persuasive ideas or individuals. Not too close, not too far away. Feel the condition of being pulled, sold, entranced, etc., without going fully in. An entire organic curriculum may be produced, bit by bit, in this manner.

VII. THE GIRLS OF KINO

“Kino” refers to the process of safe touch & escalation. “Peacocking” refers to making a distinct visual impression. “Negging” involves a combination of compliments and verbal undermining so that a person feels that the value of your attention is greater than their own objective value. And speaking of value… demonstrate any capacity, competence or ability to provide worth.

These are standard (i.e., extremely well-known) parts of the PUA. The Pick-Up Artist community. It is a masculinist, sex-oriented cousin of other subtle manipulation communities, such as Neuro-Associative Conditioning and Conversational Hypnosis. If you have any children, perhaps especially if you have daughters, make sure there is an open conversation about discourses devoted to tricking their intuitions with behavior, speech, and even chemicals. People were putting “willingness drugs” in drinks and “trust hormones” in body spray decades ago already. What do you suppose they are doing now?

Of course, many people on dates actively want to be seduced, but the possibility of abuse is rampant. And it cannot be controlled merely by denouncing and forbidding manipulators. That must be supplemented by a good-natured skepticism toward one’s own intuitive judgments.

In an environment that clearly contains external practices meant specifically to hack your “gut feelings,” there must be counter-practices just to even the playing field. But this would require an attitude and a training that replaces belief in our own gut feelings and moral emotions with a kind of good-humored participatory skepticism.

And this is not just about protecting girls from bad sex guys. Last night, I saw a Google News article suggesting that Canadians in 2024 alone reported almost $700 million in losses to scams, impersonations, tricks, bad links, etc. The article said (and I just believed it) that authorities estimate that only 10% of these embarrassing events get reported. So multiply $700 000 000 by ten. Just in Canada. Just in 2024. That’s a lot.

Hard to believe that someone would respond to an “urgent warning” about their computer security by giving unknown-but-official-sounding people access to their computer. Actual officials always say not to do that. Purporting to protect you from the virus is how you get the virus.

Often, the elderly are targeted. Not just because of their undiagnosed brain plaque and notorious lack of internet savvy, but because they have spent an entire lifetime practicing being socially gullible. Their whole life was spent assuming that what was said-or-read was probably the truth. And if the person who scammed them gets caught, if people are not getting exposed to that one bad manipulator, then they might happily return to simply believing.

That is how most cultures have been run since the establishment of the Mesopotamian city-states.

PRO-TIP. Cool it down.

Anxious haste activates parts of the brain much simpler than our critical reasoning. Slow down. Maybe you get an email telling you to click on a link, or a text asking you to respond to a number that seems like it’s from the police, the tax department, etc. Maybe you even get a phone call from a voice you recognize. Do not act immediately. Check it with your own search first. Take some time. Cross-reference it with something else. Tell yourself it’s okay to decide about this in a little while. There is a risk in hesitating, but often a greater risk in not hesitating. And you're really getting excited at how amazing your date smells… wait till the second date before doing anything about it.

VIII. COGNITIVE BIAS & SERIAL KILLERS

I have been casually studying the pathology of serial killers since I was an adolescent. In the 1990s, there was a wild chasm between the data collected in interviews with these monsters and the general psychological assessments of “experts” like Dr. Robert Hare. Today, there are many richer, saner, and more daring books like My Life Among the Serial Killers and The Wisdom of Psychopaths. Generally speaking, I would distinguish a specific pathological condition of serial killers (whom I sometimes call necromancers) that is not the same as psychopathy or sociopathy, although these may frequently overlap.

The key feature of the serial killer, for me, is a kind of limbic fusion. What I mean is their brain’s inability to clearly distinguish between different basic animal drives. The impulses to attack, eat, fuck, flee, skulk, and hoard are activated as a single mass. A trigger in one circuit brings all the others along.

A healthy brain has layers of delicate capacity that can distinguish between these different drives. We typically do not copulate with corpses nor cause our sexual partners to become corpses and then eat bits of them. We do not lurk around crime scenes, hoard sadistic trophies, or interpret pornography as permission to rape and murder. These are signs that something has gone terribly wrong.

And at the heart of this terribly wrong thing is an inability to viscerally distinguish between distinct valuable functions. If we extend the basic architecture of that problem, we find something very interesting about our naive minds...

In Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, System 1 is a name given to an old form of consciousness that does very fast, very calorie-efficient thinking. It just throws you a convincing idea for free. In some areas of life, this is great. Gladwell’s book Blink explores situations in which this quick knowing is excellent.

When circumstances remain fairly constant and you have had lots of experiences in which you got immediate feedback about success or failure, you probably have a finely tuned System 1. A skateboarder, sculptor, or automobile driver develops fast and mostly accurate responses that do not require any pondering. But novel situations, delayed feedback, and complicated sequences reveal horrible flaws in System 1.

Here’s the classic example:

If a bat and a ball together cost $1.10 and the bat itself costs one dollar more than the ball, then what does the ball cost?

10 cents?

Of course not. If the ball costs 10 cents, then the bat (which costs one dollar more than the ball) would cost $1.10 on its own. The ball has to cost 5 cents. But why do most of our brains quickly and easily get the wrong answer?

Actually, in my opinion, we do not get the wrong answer. We get the correct answer to the wrong question. Our old, fast thinking interprets the problem incorrectly. It accurately answered the question, “What is the difference between $1.10 and a dollar?” It produces the correct answer: $0.10. But why did it answer the wrong question?

Why — given a jar containing an unknown number of jellybeans — would your brain ignore the prompt to “guess the number of beans” and instead answer the question, “What number have you seen recently?” This is the anchoring fallacy and the recency bias. We tend to assume that any complex, unknown situation is probably pretty close to the last specific amount we heard about. Dumb. Weird. Natural.

All of these cognitive biases, which neuropsychology has now mapped out in a pretty thorough way, seem to rely on a shared assumption that leads to misinterpreting the task. The assumption is that all values are the same value. True. Good. Recent. Easy. Familiar. Famous. Tall. Official.

The old mind does not know the difference.

A piece of information that is easier for the brain to find feels more true. Taller people, on average, get higher salaries when they are clearly not more competent. We think food falling on our own kitchen floor is safer to eat than food falling on someone else’s floor. It is more familiar. Local. We also act like a person who “looks presidential” is more qualified to be president. Rationally, these variables are not related. Yet our old brain treats all these different values as if they were just versions of the same One Value. A hit in one zone translates to a hit in every other zone.

This is the opposite of what Integral Philosophy calls the “different lines of intelligence” (an attempt to separate types of value and capacity) but, interestingly, it IS very similar to the pathological brains of serial killers.

Trusting and respecting someone who is famous (i.e., easy to think of) is analogous to killing and eating someone to whom you are sexually attracted. It is a disgusting conflation of variables that have nothing to do with each other. It is a failure of the meta-intelligence that is supposed to exert energy to differentiate these spheres of value.

How could Marianne be a serial killer? She was so nice, quiet, familiar, well-dressed, etc. Well, these variables are NOT related. Beautiful things can be false. Good things can be ugly. True things can be bad for us. This was Nietzsche’s critique of populist Platonism. While there is contemplative value in attuning to the phenomenological quality of valuableness itself, we cannot treat the types of value as interchangeable or mutually validating. If we do, that counts as “cognitive bias.”

And just as we can be manipulated by serial killers and psychopaths, we manipulate ourselves by answering one kind of value question in place of another. Instead of solving the problem, “Is this safe?” our brain solved the problem, “Is this person flattering me?” Why not? After all, safety and praise are both… good things.

IX. THE AI HOLE & CULTWORLD TM

People fall off the social chessboard. In the 1960s, my dad had a friend who got into Scientology. He vanished. Nobody from his hometown ever heard from him again. This is pretty common. Especially with communities that urge you to cut ties with “problematic people” in your life. “Problematic” often includes family and friends. Just ask around. But this is not just about cults.

As the great Radiohead song told us, “We do it to ourselves. That’s why it really hurts.” We now have terminology for people who go down rabbitholes. People who get radicalized by their own YouTube algorithm or drop out of human space through obsessive interaction with the pseudo-linguistic responses of an AI interface. Headlines about people falling in love with an automated app or getting brainwashed into a religion that their responsive chatbot just invented are going to get way more frequent.

This is a tricky problem.

It clearly requires a finessed form of mutual concern and awareness. We have to be able to intervene when people are sliding into a place of no return, or in which their temporary dalliance might destroy their relationships, resources, and integrity. Yet this has to be done with the realization that people have the inalienable right to explore strange material, take cultural and emotional risks, and even to place themselves in jeopardy.

With some legal and moral constraints, we are ethically obligated to honor the sovereign agency of adult citizens by allowing them to make bad decisions. And despite our strong feelings on the subject, we honestly do not know all the relevant factors in a complex world, nor do we clearly grasp the effects of things over longer ranges of time. We congratulate ourselves on giving desert or bread to hungry children with no thought about the long-term effects of processed carbohydrates or the function of fasting.

We can and should tell people our concerns about their behavior, if they are willing to listen, but we also have to let them do things we think might doom them or disgrace them. In addition to asking whether they are joining a good or bad cult, we might also need to ask whether it is or is not okay for them to throw themselves away. This is akin to the problem of deception, seduction, and manipulation in ourselves. Is it okay that we get duped or misled or drawn into something?

This is where it gets personal for me again.

I have said many things in this article about the need to produce a more benignly suspicious education because we cannot solve the “manipulation and bad exposure” problem merely by denouncing and blocking the bad people and bad ideas. The whole thrust of this piece is an invitation to wander around attentively in the complexity of our own complicity with persuasion and suggestion. This piece attempts to playfully and philosophically normalize a stronger awareness of manipulative tactics, INCLUDING the tactics that our own minds use against us.

We have to be less suggestible. That makes sense to me. I have often been unsurprised by subtle manipulation tactics. I have also grown a better conscience, on purpose, about being misled, misunderstood, seduced, and deceived. It does not have to be as threatening as it initially seems. Okay. But why am I like this?

Perhaps I grew up with a mindful distance from the assumed value of social communication around me, but perhaps I also had a deep anxiety about being led, misled, and deceived.

Can I treat myself as a responsible agent who might want to be misled? As one who enjoys the simplicity of trust? Who has sometimes taken a risky human pleasure in jumping to conclusions, or blaming the obvious, or not questioning the context of a piece of information, or welcoming the deceiver into my heart? What kind of self-compassion does that point toward?

In our journey toward personal and collective sensemaking, in a field that will inevitably be entangled with various degrees of acceptable and unacceptable manipulations, can we — without ceding our vigilance, protective instincts and increasing casual knowledge of suggestive tactics — still honor each other and ourselves as beings who make dangerous cognitive gambles to live in a world simple enough to get turned on by and take action within?

Let us be curious about, astonished by, and kind toward minds and hearts that do not always opt for accuracy and security.

And, in conclusion, to quote Nietzsche from his Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future:

O sancta simplicitas! In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has got eyes for beholding this marvel! How we have made everything around us clear and free and easy and simple! How we have been able to give our senses a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a godlike desire for wanton pranks and wrong inferences! How from the beginning, we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety—in order to enjoy life! And only on this solidified, granite-like foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its refinement!

It is to be hoped, indeed, that LANGUAGE, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and that it will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many refinements of gradation; it is equally to be hoped that the incarnated Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable "flesh and blood," will turn the words round in the mouths of us discerning ones. Here and there we understand it, and laugh at the way in which precisely the best knowledge seeks most to retain us in this SIMPLIFIED, thoroughly artificial, suitably imagined, and suitably falsified world: at the way in which, whether it will or not, it loves error, because, as living itself, it loves life!

After such a cheerful commencement, a serious word would fain be heard…

I. An Introduction to Ambi…

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I’m just putting the so-called “finishing touches” on an article about deception, manipulation, and seduction in our overlapping developmental, transformational & regenerative networks. Coming soon. But in the meanwhiles, you might want to know what’s coming up in-person:

LOVE.

That’s what’s coming up.

Metamodern Love. Etc.

This is especially important if you feel that fragmentation, polarization, regression, and fear are becoming prominent, unhealthy parts of our broader cultural field.

We have to become heart-awake coherence activists in our personal lives and our collective lives. I know, I know. You hear a lot of that shit from traditional and postmodern spirituality, but this comes from a different level of thinking and feeling. Sincere Irony. Big Picture. Simplexity. You get it.

So the October Metamodern Spirituality Lab will be the weekend of Oct. 24th. Or else October 21st if you want to risk the deeper immersion of the pre-retreat experience. We will be at the Sky Meadow Institute in Vermont, collectively exploring love, devotion, eros, philia, bhakti, family, intimacy, etc.

As you know, the MSL phenomenon is half monastery, half bacchanalia, half think-tank, half nature hike. It’s an elite global hangout, but “elite” does not just mean big names, philosophers, and teachers; it also means everyone (and their families) attuned to the spirit of the post-postmodern cultural shift. One of our most important functions is to welcome & recognize people who have been doing this work alone — or in small outlier groups.

We have locally-sourced catered meals, contemplative practice sessions, meditation instruction, collaborative liminal ritual improvisation, physical exercise, potluck meals, dance and music, emotional solidarity, feedback on your projects from high calibre peers, useful farm work, gorgeous natural surroundings, but most of all the Vibe (!) and all the important discussions.

I’ve been saying lately that this is where you “live the conversation.”

Each MSL has a specific theme. We collectively inquire into one of the key functional elements of human spirituality and religion through a “metamodern” lens. This time: Love. What does that mean? Here are discussions that I am looking forward to in October:

• Cosmic Love: Un/Believing a story of Evolutionary and Primordial Love as Nature, Cosmos, and Basic Reality

• The Problem (and Non-Problem) of Eros: The Creative Urge, the Quivering Edge, the appropriate and inappropriate sexualization of wisdom and development.

• Bhakti 101: Making sense of the practices and attitudes of devotional nonduality, guru-yoga, loving surrendering, and kindness.

• Neuro-Cardio Coherence: Meta-emotions & the body; the neurophysiology of coherent feeling states; the organismic basis of the “loving” experience. Heart-mind synchrony.

• Intimate Partners & Meta Romance: Establishing, protecting, and deepening our private partnerships and intimacies is a top human priority. It needs to be explored thematically by intelligent and responsible metamodern communities, as well as being understood as an alchemical chamber for mutual spiritualization.

• Domestic Love: What is the meta family life? Parents, children, intergenerational viability, the heart and hearth of the home.

• Philosophy & Friendship: The circle of wise conviviality across eras, cultures, and identities must continue through the metamodern or integrative mode. How do we become better friends to each other (and to wisdom)? How do we assimilate the sacredness of this in the epoch of the ‘friendship crisis?’

• Love as Ethical and Political Action - Healing the Role of Love as Work. Provide, deserve. Doing our knowing. Who cares how you feel — love is what you do for people and the world.

That’s already awesome. We are also planning to do a “Plato’s Symposium.” That means a festive meal and drinking game where the participants each must deliver an improvised definition or sermon on love. If you haven’t read Plato’s original, check it out. I might bring an idiosyncratic translation of that text I made about ten years ago.

Anything else? We want to do amateur choral music and start building up some metamodern hymns. I would like to do the preliminary work toward some Gurdjieffian dances. We will deepen our Zen koan work. And my hope is that the collective of pre-retreat participants can work out a shared understanding of the basic principles of love (whatever we think that means) to use as the “stations” of the opening ritual procession. Plus, the “field” will also have its say. Our accumulated intersubjectivity is also a player in this game. Watch out.

Personally, beyond the practice sessions, sacred collective work, and collective inquiry, I have two favorite things. (Well, maybe three if you count just getting to hang out on a beautiful property and let the landscape whisper into your soul.)

My first favorite thing is getting the real news.

I cannot trust most of what I see online, no matter who it comes from. My own sensemaking depends on getting “personal experiential information” from people who strike me as being intellectually and emotionally capable of “meta-level” discrimination. We are each other’s most reliable probes into different facets of the world. The conversations you have at MSL are part of your basic way of figuring out what’s really going on.

My second favorite thing — now that we’ve done a few of these — is seeing people grow and change. Newcomers are welcome, and necessary (and you will be surprised how easy it is for you to fit in), but as people return to these events, I see something changing in their faces, tones & “beingness.” They are growing stronger, clearer, more nourished by community, more confident in their ways of being in the world, more capable of agency, mutuality, and embodied value.

Space is limited, but we’d love to have the right people join us at Sky Meadow.

P.S.

We recorded (thanks Shane!) the final episode of the Realizing the Biosphere podcast series live at the Eco-Spirituality MSL at Eudaimonia in California. Brendan posted it and included the previous episodes here.

Sure. We’re doing a special “Metamodern Spirituality Lab” at the Eudaimonia Institute in California in a few weeks. They usually only happen on the East Coast. The theme (or pretext) is Sacred Ecology.

This video about it just became available:

You can access it here or via laymanpascal.com. We’re not looking to be flooded with people, but there are a few spots left (cabins, tents) for the right folks. There are people expected from Sky Meadow Institute, CIIS/Blue Sky, IAM, Process Philosophy, European Metamodernism, etc., but the vibe is as much about fun-in-the-woods & making contact with the living ground as it is about the intellectual or social situation of our new community networks.

Metamodern Spirituality provides a pretty flexible context to draw people in who are oriented toward a multiperspectival/regenerative vision & also interested in experimental spiritual praxis.

And if you’re stuck on the Eastern side of North America, or have some weird grievance against California, we’ll still be having an MSL in Vermont in late October on love. Love as coherent emotion, ethical enactment, spiritual transfiguration, devotional gesture, integrative commitment, and maybe even… cosmology?

Maybe.