Buddhism
The Empty Throne
On Nagarjuna, the Middle Way, and the Two Truths That Dissolve the Floor
The Cartographer
Illich
Deschooling Society
On the hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling, the institutionalization of learning as a product delivered by credentialed specialists, and Illich's alternative vision of learning webs
McKenna
The Machine Elves
On McKenna's phenomenology of the DMT state, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace, and what the consistency of the encounter across subjects suggests about the nature of the Other
The Films
The Descent Without a Map
On 2001: A Space Odyssey, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life as katabatic films — works that take the viewer through a genuine descent and offer no guarantee of return
The Writers
The Poet in the Underworld
On Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Federico García Lorca as katabatic poets — writers who descended into darkness and returned, or did not return, with what they found
Flow and Peak Experience
Peak Experience
On Abraham Maslow's discovery that ordinary people have extraordinary moments, the B-values that characterize transcendence, and what the hierarchy of needs looks like when you take the top seriously
The Architecture of Experience
Global Workspace Theory
On Bernard Baars's theater of consciousness, Stanislas Dehaene's neural correlates, and the difference between information broadcast across the brain and the subjective experience of that broadcast
Sociology of Knowledge
The Sacred Canopy
The plausibility structure — what holds a worldview in place, and what happens when it collapses
The Fine Print
What You Actually Agreed To
The Contents of the Modern EULA
The Captured Gnosis
The Gnostic Machine
Scientology's Cosmology as Valentinian Pastiche
The Contrarians
Small Is Beautiful
E.F. Schumacher and the Economics That Forgot the Human Scale
The Ecologists
Gaia
James Lovelock and the Self-Regulating Planet