We’re just finishing the last two of the 21 sessions of the current seminar this week. It’s been amazing from start to finish. Honestly, you should have been there. (FYI: I do market recordings of past seminars - just ask). After Kripal & Strieber’s The Super Natural, Vaeni’s Urgency, and Eisenbarth’s The Girl Who Thought She Was God we are definitely on a roll. There really isn’t much choice of direction: we are headed further into the unknowable. (Although Jeremy Vaeni will likely bury his head in his hands because we are avoiding Awakening. But all of us are left rather stunned by his admonishments. So: not avoiding!) I’m off to Brazil for two weeks soon but we’ll pick up where we left off for eight weeks in April and May.
Sometimes I think that we (I mean me and my companions in the seminars) are on the cutting edge of astonishing realizations about Reality. Other times I think we will be remembered as among one of the most bizarrely deluded populations of lunatics in history. Maybe somehow both are true. Mostly I think I don’t know what the heck is going on. I am fairly sure that although this state of befuddlement is very hard to endure, it is ultimately the least dangerous position to be in. We can follow Keats and call it Negative Capability, or share Corbin’s enthusiasm for Apophatic Theology, or join Jeff Kripal who more actively suggests “saying away and saying again.” I have only admiration for Jeffrey when he pleads with us to please just be open and honest and avoid the sneering attitude of Superior Intellectual who cannot stoop so low as to even briefly take seriously the crazy nonsense that is such a ubiquitous element of human experience. I am entirely enthusiastic about being a Jamesian Radical Empiricist. (And in that regard will here publicly admit with some degree of shame—a very useful emotion—that it was probably a deep-seated Arrogance that prevented me from taking “American Philosophy” as an undergraduate because, you know, American Philosophy?! Only Europeans (i.e., Germans) can really think… Oh Lord… Where does this kind of bullshit come from?). If I was going to have to be Educated, I would have probably been much better off in the anthropology department, or in botany where I could have had the example of Richard Evans Schultes. But I had very little courage, no interest in kinship structures among the Gururumba, and the wrong style of imagination for plant life (this has since changed: see Coccia, The Life of Plants).
But to really be a radical empiricist you can’t just sit at your writing desk and wait for impossibilities to appear. You have to look for them. As Anya Foxen points out in the talk she gave at the Archives of the Impossible conference last year (which I posted yesterday and which you must hear), the weird stuff probably pops up anywhere you might look. But you have to have the language and the sensorium to access it. (The two are inextricably linked).
So for those reasons at least I want to stay focussed on high strangeness, the Impossible, and the truly weird for a while. Maybe forever. It prevents us from getting arrogant, comfortable, or authoritarian. I think it can help prevent both a casual acceptance of “easy” spiritualities, and the haughty superiority that comes so readily to the educated rationalist (I mean me).
Our primary texts for this series will be High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019) by Erik Davis, who is, among many other things, a former PhD student of Jeff Kripal, and Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (2023) by Diane Pasulka, professor of religious studies at UNC, Wilmington. There are a variety of other texts we may sample from along the way and I’ll supply excerpts as needed. But there’s enough in these books to keep our heads spinning for a very long time. Come along, it will be really exciting. And remember you don’t have to come live—just get the recordings.
Tuesdays & Thursdays — 4-5:30 pm EST
8 WEEKS: April 9 through May 30
Full tuition is $40 per week. $320 for the series. Recordings included.
Scholarships are always available.
You can register and pay by the week or the full term.
PAYMENT LINKS ARE IN THE REGISTRATION FORM LINKED BELOW
The texts are all available online both hard copy and digital. If money is an issue I will supply pdfs of the texts.
Registration will get you all the links you will need: 1. The Zoom sessions and 2. the pdfs and 3. the folder where the recordings will be located.
Links to the recordings are sent to everyone, so when you can't make it live you'll still get all the content.
Email me with any questions: tcheetham@gmail.com
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