Girard
Mimetic Desire
On how we mistake imitation for authenticity, and why understanding desire's true source explains human conflict from the novel to civilization itself
Psychology and Human Sciences
Body and Somatic Traditions
Merleau-Ponty: The Body as the Subject of Perception
On how consciousness is always embodied, perception is the body's own encounter with the world, and why Western philosophy asked the wrong question about mind and matter
Bateson
The Pattern That Connects
On how mind is not confined to brains but is the pattern of relationship connecting all living systems, and why losing this vision destroys the world
Attachment and Relational Psychology
The Bond That Shapes All Bonds
On how attachment to a caregiver is not a learned response but a primary biological drive that determines all future relational capacity
Anthropology of the Sacred
Mircea Eliade: The Sacred and the Profane
On the irreducible structure of religious experience, the hierophany as sacred irruption into the ordinary, and how comparative study reveals the universal architecture of human meaning-making
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
Psychedelics and Consciousness Research
Set, Setting, and the Politics of Consciousness
Leary, the Harvard Psilocybin Project, and the Criminalization of Inner Experience
Trauma and the Wounded Self
Trauma and Recovery
On how institutional power silences trauma survivors, and why remembering what happened is always a political act
The Sacred Masculine
Iron John and the Wild Man
On the Wild Man as the masculine psyche that has descended into darkness and returned initiated, and why modern culture has starved men of this necessary encounter
The Sacred Feminine
The Eleusinian Mysteries: Demeter, Persephone, and the Feminine Descent
On the feminine descent as the template for human spiritual transformation, and how the Mysteries revealed regeneration as existence's fundamental principle
Psychology and Depth
Maslow: The Hierarchy, the Peak Experience, and the Farther Reaches
On studying human flourishing rather than pathology, how needs arrange themselves in development, and what the peak experience reveals about consciousness beyond the personal self
Propaganda and Influence
Walter Lippmann: Public Opinion, the Phantom Public, and the Management of Democracy
On how a progressive journalist weaponized democracy's fatal flaw—that citizens cannot know reality directly—into an argument for elite rule masquerading as necessity