The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Category “Mysticism”

The Passion of the Space Jockey

Sunday, 14 February, 2021

Alienated Sentience and Endosymbiosis in the World of H.R. Giger by Eric Wargo The following is a paper presented in 2018 at the Rice University conference Gnostic Afterlives in American Religion and Culture. A final, fully sourced version appears in the journal Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 5(1), 2020. Giger paintings are used with permission […]

Big in Japan

Saturday, 15 February, 2020

Check out the very fun conversation I had last year with John Craig on his Japanese webcast Real Rover, about all things time-loopy. We discuss retrocausation, alchemy, Zen, and the Long Self that precognition gives access to. Enjoy! ***

Look Back in Amber: Dream Paleontology as a New Gnosis

Tuesday, 31 July, 2018

We are four-dimensional beings. As I argue in my new book Time Loops, our behavior at any given moment is shaped not only by the exigencies of that moment and what has preceded it, but also by what comes next; we are informed by things we will learn in our future, not just by what […]

The Nightshirt Guide to the Twin Peaks Rebirth

Tuesday, 27 June, 2017

“We live in a world of opposites, of extreme evil and violence opposed to goodness and peace. It’s that way here for a reason but we have a hard time grasping what the reason is. In struggling to understand the reason, we learn about balance and there’s a mysterious door right at that balance point. […]

Master Minkowski’s Wild Ducks (Zen and the Glass Block Universe)

Thursday, 4 May, 2017

Probably because I am thinking about (and trying to finish a book on) precognition and retrocausation and the glass block universe they seem to imply, I keep finding my thoughts returning to a famous Zen koan from 8th-century China. You will have heard it: Master Ma and his student Pai Chang were walking along when […]

Psi’s Big Guns: Sleep Paralysis and Astral Time Travel

Saturday, 16 April, 2016

A year ago I wrote at length about out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) in the context of alchemy and the hermetic tradition. I confessed that I was a fence-sitter on the question of what they are—lucid dreams that just feel more real than most (i.e., corresponding to real physical environments) or actually what they feel like, some […]

Altered States of Reading (4): Ginsberg & the End of the Bookstore

Saturday, 9 April, 2016

Ralph Waldo Emerson warned, in his essay “Self-Reliance,” about the failure of most people to notice and follow their inner light or spark: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he […]

Lost in Translation (or, Don’t Look for a Matrix of Meaning)

Tuesday, 15 March, 2016

I have been arguing that present experience contains associative traces of emotional events ahead of us in time; we are detecting (faintly) the future—the real future, not just some imaginatively forecast future—at all moments, mostly beneath the level of conscious awareness. But because the retrocausality implied in this model is so “hard to think” (and […]

Synchronicity Machines and Psychotropies of Spacetime

Tuesday, 1 March, 2016

It is because we are lost, decentered by the ego and conceptual symbolic thought, that many mystical or religious experiences involve a sudden amazement of what Ram Dass famously called “being here now,” or simply presence. What is really the most obvious fact, our simple existence somewhere, our conscious awareness, suddenly comes alive as something […]

The Vicinity of the Real (Tarkovsky’s Stalker)

Sunday, 2 August, 2015

The Zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s late sci-fi masterpiece Stalker is one of my favorite places, real or imagined. It is a landscape of overgrown ruins, where spacetime itself is uncertain and only the experienced can guide you through. It is not that the guide (the “Stalker” of the title) knows the way—because the way is […]