Mircea Eliade
Michael Harner and the Birth of Core Shamanism: Bringing Ancient Practice to the Modern World
Michael James Harner (1929-2018) occupies a singular position in the history of Western engagement with shamanism. He was not a New Age guru who stumbled upon indigenous practices and repackaged them for profit.
Near-Death Experiences and Shamanic Initiation: When Clinical Death Meets Ancient Ceremony
Here is something that should stop you mid-step: a Dutch cardiologist and a Siberian shaman, separated by five thousand miles and five thousand years of cultural context, are describing the same journey. One speaks in the language of peer-reviewed cardiology journals.
DMT and the Chemistry of Dying: The Endogenous Psychedelic at the Threshold of Death
In 1990, Rick Strassman, a psychiatrist at the University of New Mexico, received the first federal approval in over 20 years to administer a psychedelic compound to human subjects. The compound was N,N-dimethyltryptamine — DMT — a molecule so potent that it produces a complete transformation of...
Spiritual Perspectives on Death
Every wisdom tradition humanity has produced has placed the question of death at its center. Not as a problem to be solved but as a mystery to be encountered — the threshold experience that defines the boundary of ordinary consciousness and, according to virtually every spiritual tradition,...
Sacred Time and Circular Consciousness
Stand at the center of a modern city and feel time as it moves. It moves forward.
Psychosis vs. Mystical Experience: When the Boundary Dissolves
A man sits in a psychiatric ward, convinced that he is at the center of a cosmic event, that reality has revealed its true nature to him, that he can perceive dimensions of existence that others cannot see. He speaks in a pressured, fragmented way about the interconnectedness of all things,...
The Dark Night: The Debugging Phase That Modern Mindfulness Marketing Ignores
Every major contemplative tradition, without exception, includes a stage of profound difficulty in the awakening process — a period of darkness, disorientation, suffering, and apparent regression that occurs not because something has gone wrong but because something is going right. St.