Another Crack Where the Light Gets in

5 Week Summer Madness Starts Soon!

Jul 03, 2025

We are back from Seville, Spain, where I spent parts of four days being filmed talking with John Vervaeke for his massive new project, The Philosophical Silk Road. The first part of the 3-part series, which includes me and several others, should be out in 12-18 months. I’ll let you know when it’s available on YouTube. It was really something new for me, and very much fun I have to say. Many thanks to John and Christopher and Aaron and the rest of the team for their hard work, and their boldness in assuming I might have something to say worth hearing.

And now for the first of the Summer Term offerings. I’ve been pondering for weeks trying to decide between more Corbin (Man of Light was the probable choice) and another installment in the Musicologies series. Then yesterday the long confusion magically resolved and we have our task. Matt Dillon of the Harvard Divinity School and host of the podcast Pop Apocalypse dropped an episode titled Madness, Mysticism and Philosophy - A Talk with Wouter Kusters. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to the conversation. Then we will read his book A Philosophy of Madness together and I’ll do my usual lecture/commentary on this (for me) extraordinarily well-timed discovery.

I knew about the book a couple years ago (it was published in English in 2020) but had never really looked at it. There was another with a similar title which I did glance at, but the last chapter was something about Darwinian psychology and I gagged and turned away from both. It was a mistake to ignore Kusters, or more likely a happy postponement. I feel as if this is a pretty perfect conjunction for me at this moment.

Some of you will recall that just before my first trip to Brazil and initial encounter with the Bwiti initiation ceremony I had discovered “by chance” Erik Davis’s High Weirdness, which really, really floored me; and that in turn led me to Jeff Kripal’s books - I read 6 or 7 of them before and during my trip. That was the context and preparation for my initiation experience. As a result of all of that, a whole architecture of psycho-cosmological walls and doors were torn down and/or opened for me. These were barriers I did not know were there until they failed.

I’m going to Brazil again in October, if all goes as planned, for initiation #4, and I am quite sure I have much more work to do in order to be as open as one needs to be for these miracles of spiritual learning to be effective. There is (at least) one more very big chasm in my cultural, spiritual and intellectual psycho-cosmos: Reason versus Madness. Of course overcoming this schism lies at the heart of the work of both Jung and Hillman, and so is part of my inheritance for decades, BUT somehow Kusters does things in his own ways which strike me as revelatory. And he brings together so many threads that I’ve been trying to untangle for years. Corbin makes a cameo appearance, Peter Kingsley is treated at length, and pretty much everybody else is in there too. Listen to the podcast and you’ll see what’s going on. It’s quite remarkable as personal history (Kusters was institutionalized twice for psychosis), philosophy, religion and much else. It’s a big book, 800 pages, but it’s an easy read—that is, it’s not Heidegger or Hegel or anyone else with a specialized jargon. Trust me, you’ll find it fascinating. It’s a powerful story, powerfully told, and as with Kripal and Davis, and indeed as with much great literature, this kind of thinking and writing can unsettle and change your life.

I’m super excited and I hope some of you will be able to find the time in your busy summer (or winter in the Global South) to come to the live sessions, or at least sign on for the recordings. This one will be a keeper.

I’ll remind you all again in a week or so.

SIGN UP NOW

Our text is Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness.

FIVE Live Sessions: Thursdays 4-5:30 ET | July 17 — August 14

SUGGESTED DONATION $25 PER SESSION - $125 FOR THE SERIES

OR AS ALWAYS, PAY WHAT YOU CAN

RECORDINGS INCLUDED - YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ATTEND LIVE

TO REGISTER CONTACT ME VIA EMAIL:

tcheetham@gmail.com

Thanks for your interest - and tell your friends! See you then.