The Nightshirt Sightings, Portents, Forebodings, Suspicions

Posts tagged with “Zen”

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! ***

Edges of Forever: Time Travel and the Stories That Might Have Been

Thursday, 21 February, 2019

“We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.”—Adam Phillips, Missing Out Ship’s Log: star-date 3139.0. Having tracked unusual spacetime ripples to their source, the Starship Enterprise now threatens to be ripped apart as it struggles to maintain its orbit over an uncharted, weirdly time-disturbing planet. There is chaos on the bridge. Mr. […]

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 […]

What Was Your Original Face on Mars?—Zen and the Prophetic Sublime

Saturday, 11 February, 2017

The famous “Face on Mars,” first photographed by the Viking orbiters in 1976, was the object of much speculation in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to be. After it was identified by Richard C. Hoagland, the Face became the central icon in a narrative of ancient global destruction—perhaps nuclear war—that, some suggested, may have […]

Zen, Signs, and the Arrival of Meaning

Monday, 2 January, 2017

Even though they were widely panned when they came out and have now been mostly forgotten, I have a soft spot for M. Night Shyamalan’s films from the early 2000s—Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village. Signs, especially, I thought was a satisfying, intimate-scale sci-fi film about alien invasion, but it lost many of its viewers by […]

Phil Dick Boulevard: Precognition, Karma, and the Unconscious

Saturday, 30 January, 2016

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. — Carl Jung The future is more coherent than the present, more animate and purposeful, and in a real sense, wiser. It knows more, and some of this knowledge gets transmitted back to us by what seems to […]

The Solaris Mind: Hypnagogia, Meditation, and Insight

Sunday, 8 March, 2015

A classic motif in science fiction is that humanity ventures to the farthest reaches of space only to find, impossibly, something of our own that we had forgotten. Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, about a planet covered by a viscous ocean that manufactures simulacra from its observers’ unconscious, is probably the purest expression of this […]

The Rashomon Brain: Hunting Duck/Rabbits, Seeing Multiple Realities

Sunday, 1 March, 2015

“A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a coconut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and picks them up. She gets very sad of course and cries heart […]

Spock Was a Zen Man

Saturday, 28 February, 2015

Leonard Nimoy was, without a doubt, the most decisive influence on my spiritual life. He provided my first model of the mystical path, when I first started becoming curious about such things as a teenager. When creating the character of Mister Spock, Nimoy was drawing directly from his childhood experiences of Orthodox Judaism, but I […]