Blog Posts – AUTICULTURE

Band of Brothers: Another Jonathan Lethem Exegesis + Podcast with James Howard Kunstler

KunstlerCast 308 — Chatting with Jasun Horsley About the Sexual Hysteria of Our Time Exegesis of Jonathan Lethem’s The Feral Detective at Conatus News: The Monster in the Mirror: Donald Trump and the Disease of Confidence It’s been an exciting couple of weeks since completing the Dave Oshana podcast and talking to original cohort Cary McCoy …

When Surrender Happens (2012 Oshana Report # 4)

One-to-One in Botanical Gardens, Helsinki, June 27th One of the most striking things about this one-to-one, in retrospect, was how casual and ordinary it seemed. I thought afterwards about what John de Ruiter used to say about not trying to make the shallow deep. Despite his words, my experience of de Ruiter was that he …

Forsaking the Kephas Crown (2012 Oshana Report # 3)

Helsinki, Midsummer, June 19th 2012 The Sorcerers’ Dead-End Path The task of writing these reports is getting harder. Or there is more resistance in me to doing so. I may be nearing a corner, or even in the process of turning it. Jed McKenna talks about becoming an enlightenment machine. He uses the metaphor of …

Is There a Way Out?/ Questioning Enlightenment (Oshana 2012 Report # 2)

Tallinn Intensive, June 9th, 2012 We began the Tallinn intensive with energy work and kept it up for about two hours. It felt like twice that. For the first hour or so, I was enjoying it and noticing effects in my awareness, a lightening and a clearing out. Dave’s advice began to seem doable, and …

The Body-Beloved: 2012 Oshana Report # 1

“Testifying to Love” was my attempt to sum up and convey the benefits received via my relationship with Dave Oshana. After publishing it, I went back to some older pieces I had written about our time together, including a series of reports I wrote during the summer of 2012, when I was living in Tallinn, …

Testifying to Love: How Dave Oshana & the Enlightenment Transmission Allowed for an Experience of My Soul

When the counterfeit becomes more widely distributed than the genuine article, inflation occurs and currency loses value. So it is with love, truth, and spirituality: what we generally refer to by these names no longer amounts to much. The good that can be named is not the true good. Words have been coopted by commerce. …

Reverence or Revolt: On Paul Schrader's First Reformed

(Spoiler alert: this piece refers to the film’s ending and is ideally meant for readers who have already seen the film. It is not a review but a brief exegesis into the film’s schemata and the director’s spiritual dilemma which it maps and mirrors.) “Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our minds simultaneously. Hope …

The Age of Advanced Incoherence 4: Escape from Body & Into Image

Gender Reversal While schools and other social programs are pushing for the need to encourage gender fluidity and direct it down pre-existing corporate and medical channels of hormones and surgery, the fact that many individuals desist in different-sex-identification with time—and the growing number of people who are choosing to reverse-transition back to their original gender—is …

The Age of Advanced Incoherence 3: Desistance & Mythmaking

One thing that needs emphasizing is that the whole pro- vs. anti-transgender dichotomy may be largely imaginary, because there’s no clarification about what, exactly, one is supposed to be for or against. Or rather, since there’s no room for questioning the premises, “pro-trans” becomes about fully supporting individuals in their choices, regardless of their age, …

The Art of De-Creation and Why "Revolution Is the Opium of the People" (Guest Post by Gustave Thibon & Simone Weil)

The following passage is from Gustave Thibon’s introduction to Simon Weil’s Gravity & Grace (full PDF here). It beautifully articulates many of my current perspectives and I’m sharing it here in the hope others will find it equally meaningful. Fittingly, it came to me via the purest combination of chance and good will: a donation …

Answer to Jordan # 4: Jordan Peterson's Leaky Ark

Jordan Peterson is raising ultimate questions about the meaning of life in a culture starved for meaning. “A Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist. I feel a strong desire to tell you—and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me—which of these two errors is worse. That is the …

The Evocation of Dragons (Answer to Jordan # 3)

Jordan Peterson is Mapping and Modeling the Masculine to Multitudes of Men (This is a condensed version of a longer essay. For the full version, go here.) As with all my criticisms of Peterson, what follows is not a reaction against his political incorrectness or his challenge to current ideological givens, almost all of which …