Category: Philosophy

Continuing on with Chase Griffin’s shamanic, concrete, digital, comedic, literary wanderings, the Plasmate most sacred and profane blasts at us a conversation with polymath extraordinaire Richard Polt.

From infinite mathematical points to AI paranoia, ‘The Singularity’ haunts our age. But what if these supposed endpoints are just clown cars packed with paradoxes? To understand our digital present, we need to track the ghosts of weird history.

The tyrants of our time call upon us to ask “Who is like unto the Beast?” From Silicon Valley’s AI worship to ancient Rome’s imperial machine, Jonathan Cobb traces how the Antichrist is not a future threat but a present reality—the mechanization of society that promises kingdoms while demanding our souls.

In a world obsessed with comfort, Ordeal-ology explores why we crave ordeal and apocalypse. From The Walking Dead to ancient shamanic rites, the essay asks how deliberate difficulty might restore our resilience, creativity, and meaning. Through psychology, philosophy, and myth, it calls for a new “ordealology”—a practical wisdom of constructive distress.

Power operates by simplification. Our very ability to perceive and interact with the world involves a capacity to tune out portions of it and pick out certain parts of it as relevant. In this way we are tuned into a particular frequency of reality.

Cosmos Co-op was a way of combining my philosophy and lit background, my anti-imperial activism, and my “integral vision” specifically, an attempt to build a world-changing organization.

This essay explores how, in an age marked by the proliferation of signs, the symbolic nature of art retains its power to reveal otherwise incommunicable truths.

In a mysterious library of life’s recordings, a narrator seeks access to his own existential video, navigating the blurred lines between perception, memory, and the afterlife’s strange bureaucracy.

How are we controlled through our concept of the animal?

The ancients spoke of a “music of the spheres,” by which all of reality vibrated in a vast harmonious frequency. Rhythm and unfolding are fundamental to metaphysical and social reality.

When I ask most Buddhist teachers about the most pressing spiritual question for me — the fate of the soul after death — they’ll tell me that the soul is an illusion.

Naming is an amateur verbal art form, poised between the free-flowing inclusivity of an improv class and a tragic neurotic obsession with every unuttered sentiment.

Both/and, neither/nor, all & none of the above—in a mediascape designed to hack our dopamine reward systems, how do we practice the complexity of keeping cool?

Today I condensed the universe into a ball / A small, red ball that I could pick up and bounce / And balance on my head / And shove my hand through

“Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” While there’s nothing of Rumi in this essay, this poem may be an apt introduction.

Bodies of light? Telepathy? Breathing underwater? Exciting ideas from sci-fi & free range mysticism suggest extraordinary physical mutations. Why not? Questioning the assumptions of various evolutionary worldviews…

If, as William Burroughs proposed, language is an alien virus—then what are LLMs? What is the potential for AI consciousness, given what we know about life?

I dream about a dimension beyond this one: a realm that includes none of the limitations I despise. This is what Moshiach—a true messianic age—would mean to me.

History is a kind of dream. The dead are always with us. The more our culture melts away, the more we cling to a sense of solidity. Art tells us we are at sea.

Has the world already ended? Are we dead? Neither literally nor metaphorically, this essay argues that we have become spectral beings in our image of the world.

“And what do you know about paradox?” Grolier asked his younger sister, Mailka. “The harmony of opposites? But I still don’t know what that m… means.”

A virgin will rebuild from ash the burning library at Alexandria. She will not take any prisoners. Her large eyes will be tests that you must pass. For a third time will the Argo sail, outperforming Voyager One. You will learn of how this ship is not different from your body. It will move beyond the speed of light.

Language has served as a way to bridge a perceived gap between consciousnesses who believe themselves to be separate. By another reckoning, language has served as a crutch to help us hobble through the woundedness of feeling separate.

Mark your calendar for this sure to be stellar upcoming event (offered online and in person); and a call for papers that look at various ways of expressing integrality, drawing on of the work of Jean Gebser, Sri Aurobindo, Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, or other “integral” thinkers.

Infinite Conversations has been pursuing an extended reading program for Sri Aurobindo’s writings for several years now. Here is an update on our progress, with information on how you can participate…