Mystical practice is neither pathology nor revelation. It is a domain of trainable human capability. This website presents a method for training that capability using principles borrowed from physical strength and conditioning: minimum effective dose, progressive resistance, increasing complexity, scalability, and periodization.
The work here is for people who understand that self-actualization is not a theoretical state or an observed tendency, but a practical goal—one that has to hold up under real conditions. What follows is an account of a moment when that training was put to the test.
Embedded Files
Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies is not for people who have collapsed possibility into certainty. If you believe Ultimate Reality does not exist, or that your personal worldview or inherited tradition has already said the final word on what Ultimate Reality is and how human beings may relate to it, individually or collectively, this book is not for you.
It is also not for those who fear risk, ambiguity, or responsibility. Not for those who are unwilling to confront the individual and collective Shadow. Not for those who want meaning without cost, or transformation without exposure.
The experiences described in this book involve looking foolish, getting things wrong, and feeling emotions at superhuman intensity. If reading that list makes you anxious, defensive, or eager to argue, do yourself a favor and stop here.
Now ask yourself: is religion nothing more than an accretion of stories and practices, justified by increasingly baroque and incomprehensible theory? Is it merely a way to anchor ethnic and national identity, or to allow institutions to exert social control?
Or do you suspect it can—and should—be more than that? That any religion worthy of the name ought to provide the means to get up close and personal with some One, or some Nothing, that feels like infinite power and infinite meaning?
Do you also suspect that no worldview can be complete if it refuses to grapple seriously with psychedelic journeys, Near Death Experiences, and the full range of anomalous encounters that fall under the heading of Mystery?
If you answered the first set of questions with “No,” and the second with “Yes,” then you already recognize the wager this book makes.
Where Some Holy Spectacle Lies documents a firsthand investigation of Ultimate Reality that treats gnosis as an achievable, repeatable human capacity rather than a matter of belief or inheritance. What that investigation evokes—astonishment, alarm, inspiration, or something else entirely—is not the point. Its claim is narrower and more demanding: that the history of religion is not over, and that what comes next may demand far more of us than what came before, but will finally deliver on what religious traditions have been promising for thousands of years.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse