My website is now back online, en route to a new version, after being inaccessible to me since January 2020. I won’t go into the details of how it got shut down, but I had to go through many phases to regain access to it, get the codes and relationships necessary to have it re-hosted and restored, and then to update it. Much of it hadn’t been touched for ten years. It will take me many months to restore and update it, but I hope to have it done before the end of 2020.
During the period that my website was frozen, I moved from being a consultant and acquisitions editor at North Atlantic books, the press I founded with Lindy Hough in 1974, to curating my own imprint, Sacred Planet Books, at Inner Traditions. My own Inner Traditions book also came out (April 7, 2020), and I have done a number of podcasts based on it, which will be URL-ed on this site.
The world has changed since this website last peeked at Earth. We moved, unprepared, into the time of COVID-19. Though nothing can come close to touching the reality it has introduced at every level of planetary life, I reached out to healers, scientists, and visionaries and helped compile an anthology with Sherri Mitchell and Kathy Glass, entitled The Coronavirus Transmissions:Alternative methods for engagement with COVID-19. See https://www.innertraditions.com/catalog/product/view/id/2108/s/the-corona-transmissions/
Published April 7, 2020
Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
- Table of Contents (from final ITI manuscript)
- <TOC CT>Foreword by Brian Swimme
- Introduction: An Unbottomable Void
- <TOC PN>Part One: Worlds and Lives
- <OC CT>Chapter One: The Hole in the Materialists’ Universe
- Chapter Two: Reincarnation and Past Lives
- Chapter Three: Transdimensional Physics and Biology
- Chapter Four: James Leininger or James Huston?
- Chapter Five: Karma, Nonduality, and Meaning
- Chapter Six: The Universal Basis of Past-Life Memories
- <TOC PN>Part Two: Transmutations
- <TOC CT>Chapter Seven: Cosmic Chicanery
- Chapter Eight: Trauma and Redemption
- Chapter Nine: Worshipping the Algorithm
- <TOC PN>Part Three: Simulations
- <TOC CT>Chapter Ten: Personal Identity
- Chapter Eleven: Multipersonhood
- Chapter Twelve: The Superconscious Source
- Chapter Thirteen: Undumbing the Universe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
No one can bottom out the universe, but I dig as deep as I can, which gets me to uncertainty states of meaning and language and avoids the bottomings-out of neuroscience, physics, and Buddhism. I totally agree with Buddhist ontology but I have to arrive there by a different route because I am not writing a Buddhist book. It is more Sethian but not even finally that. It’s its own crisis of faith, plus this. I can’t write about consciousness now without facing its conditions:
“This is a book about consciousness, but it is consciousness under capitalism. I can’t change that fact, no matter what I write. We “sell” our ideas, our literary styles, our words. We don’t intend to, but persuasion is built into language and tone. Under the circumstances, I have tried to make Bottoming Out sell-neutral, but it is of its time and there are only so many voices available. I am trying to say that science is not sell-neutral, not anymore. Electrons, quarks, quanta, and the like are products, intellectual currency. Their value vanishes at the burning of the Amazon and the suicides of Native American youths.”
<T>What scientistic liberals miss is the subtext with which they have saddled themselves. Rationalism and empiricism mask a marriage of science and capitalism for the corporate takeover of reality. The algorithm has been blackmailed into converting everything into commodities and cashflow, masking their theft in its own quantitative depth. I say “everything” because parsecs of space and zettagrams of meteor dust are used to inflate the algorithm and make its hegemony inviolable.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence has made human intelligence more and more artificial, and human reality less and less real.”
My own last sentence is this (after that I quote Seth 2): “If the universe were real, it would be exactly the same as it is, so it is real and looks exactly like this, but in a totally other way”
My main other literary project has been periodically rewriting Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage. I have been working on it since the 1970s. Yet times and meanings are changing so fast that I have had to completely rewrite it some thirty or forty times.
I have simultaneously been working on a revised edition of Out of Babylon. I will try to put my opening notes from both books on this website under writings. With New Moon: A Coming of Age Tale, they make up a nonfiction novel trilogy.
12/19 No great ideas. I wish there were a community where people of our generation and persuasion decided to live. No other ambition but people to talk to. Real talk beyond the present polarized ideology and apocalypticism. Not that all that isn’t true enough, but we still have to live and die in our time.
The Trilogy
In an era of global displacement, institutionalized violence, and sexual flagrance, I wonder about the relevance of a narrative set in the nuanced and quixotic fifties and sixties. Yet when I go back to the mysteries and wonderments of this text, I realize that our stories, innocence, and intimacies are all we have. Our willingness, our enthusiasm even, to live what we are born into is what heals us and gives us hope.
A good story is a prayer that feeds the gods. Its message back to them is thank you, this world is a magical and redemptive place, despite its many enigmatic appearances and atrocities to the contrary, for our yearnings are universal and speak to a covenant we share. Somewhere amid déjà vus, riddles, oracles, intimations, and elusive nostalgias are the alchemical ingredients of life on Earth.
This is my own telling of a myth at the level of a campfire story, or a science-fiction overlay, parable, or rock ballad. Its possibility is its melody, hauntingness, and sincerity, what those tell of an enigma that can’t be solved, can only be lived.
New Moon’s landscapes feature 1950s New York City (P. S. 6 and Bill-Dave Group among the venues), Camp Chipinaw (also Camp Swago, Camp Wakonda, and Camp Kenmont), the Nevele and Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Horace Mann School, Arista Teen Tours (across the US and Canada in 1962), Amherst College, the Sullivan County Democrat, Robert Kelly’s salon near Bard College, Stan Brakhage’s Rollinsville cabin, and Aspen, Colorado, circa 1965. Its themes include games, comics, and teen detective series of the 1950s; coercions of Hebrew School and Color War; a parallel search for sacredness and meaning in baseball, rock ’n’ roll, science fiction, and tarot; a transition through Freudian psychoanalysis to Jungian symbols and literary and shamanic magic; survival in a family in which both my mother and brother later committed suicide; the shadow of atomic war from Los Alamos through the Cuban crisis; adolescent alienation and fear; teen romance and courtship in a changing era.
There are numerous smaller venues: the Wizard of Oz and Dragons of Blueland; Central Park; clouds, stones, and planets in high-school science; speedskating and ice hockey; experimental films; Teilhardian and Gurdjieffian cosmology; the search for Bridey Murphy; interpretation of dreams; political and spiritual awakening; going on my first date to the game in which Roger Maris hit his sixty-first home run in 1961, and so on
Among my writings New Moon differs from books like Planet Medicine, The Night Sky, Embryogenesis, and Dark Pool of Light in that it is purely novelistic and anecdotal and relies on aesthetics of voice and view without a backup subject matter. As my attempt to write a literary nonfiction novel using the material of my life, it rests solely on its story-telling and narrative drive, yet it gives rise to the constructs and themes of my later topic-oriented books. It is also the cornerstone of my larger novelistic trilogy in which all three books are ambitiously literary while also psychospiritual and visionary.
New Moon pays homage to the novelists and poets of my adolescence: Robert Penn Warren, T. H. White, James Baldwin, Robert Lindner, D. H. Lawrence, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, as well as to Bobby Darin, Dion & the Belmonts, Paul Anka, P. D. Ouspensky, Carl Jung, A. E. Waite, Stan Brakhage, Arthur Clarke, and without my knowing it, J. D. Salinger, whom I somehow imitated without reading. I wrote lyricisms, epiphanies, and dirges akin to the ones that sustained me during those years.
This edition is distinguished from the original by having a subtitle A Coming-of-Age Tale, a cover by my old Goddard College student, painter James Rauchman (in place of the Jungian mandala on a black background), and a paperback format. Ignore the snipey reviews of the old edition; I have taken their relevant criticisms into account in rewriting.
Out of Babylon pays homage to William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Charles Olson, and Herman Melville.
Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage pays homage to Robert Creeley, Robert Kelly, Annie Proulx, Nadine Gordimer, Anita Shreve, William Blake, Pat Conroy, Orhan Pamuk, Vladimir Nabokov and, embarrassingly, Erica Jong insofar as I tried to write a more sincere and nuanced version of Fear of Flying.
In all three books I am shooting for a complex, seamless literary epic in which changes of tone and voice reflect shifts of consciousness. New Moon is the entry point and, for now, the only available book (other than earlier versions of itself and Out of Babylon).