Psyche

In this episode, I reflect on the 2017 Electric Dreams adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s “The Commuter” alongside Adam Phillips’ idea of the unlived life. Macon Heights — the town that never officially existed — becomes a powerful metaphor for the life we imagine would have been smoother, more coherent, less burdened.

Drawing from my clinical work with autistic clients, I explore whether our defining “symptoms” or fractures are actually structural — and what it would mean to remove them. If you could erase the wound that shaped you, would you still be yourself?

This is an episode about fantasy, identity, and the unsettling cost of chasing a seamless life.

In this episode, I explore whether Georges Bataille can be read as a radical theologian precisely because he refuses to save God.

Drawing from Allan Stoekl’s essay “Bataille, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Death of God,” I contrast Teilhard’s vision of convergence and Omega with Bataille’s insistence that completion ends in rupture — that absolute knowledge collapses into nonknowledge.

Although I no longer identify as a Christian, I remain drawn to radical theology. Here, I wrestle with a tension I feel even within progressive theology: after rejecting a literal deity, do we still preserve a highest ground — a metaphysical guarantor — under another name?

Bataille’s atheism forces me to ask whether a truly radical theology must relinquish even that.

Not comfort.

But courage.

In this episode, I explore Georges Bataille’s account of religion through Zeynep Direk’s reading — not as belief in a divine being, but as the acknowledgment of the movement where life and death pass into each other.

I reflect on my own shift beyond doctrinal Christianity and how I’m developing what I call ethical hedonism — a way of honoring pleasure, eros, and vitality without abandoning structure or responsibility.

We’ll talk about ego, excess, abjection, and the festival as a necessary interruption of productivity — and why building small “festivals” into our lives may be essential for psychological health.

What if transcendence isn’t a ladder we climb but a descent we resist?

In this solo episode, I explore an intuition that first confronted me in my own therapy — especially when I began taking my dreams seriously. The symbols that unsettled me most were the ones that betrayed my conscious morality and stirred disgust or erotic charge. And yet, those very images carried psychic energy that felt unmistakably sacred.

Bringing together Bataille’s claim that the sacred can be entered through the latrine, Philip K. Dick’s idea of the “trash stratum,” alchemical transformation, Lacan’s notion of jouissance, and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, I challenge the spiritual-material dualism that elevates prayer above orgasm and transcendence above embodiment.

If the sacred erupts precisely where identity destabilizes — in what we expel, repress, or deem impure — then the places we most want to reject may not be obstacles to depth. They may be its doorway.

In this solo episode, I explore what Jeffrey Kripal calls the traumatic secret — the uneasy coordination between trauma and transcendence in mystical literature — through the philosophy of Georges Bataille.

I reflect on how Kripal shaped my own intellectual and spiritual development during a season of deconstruction, teaching me how to remain open to mystery while staying critically grounded. From Bataille’s ideas about eroticism, death, and transgression to Huxley’s filter theory and the destabilization of the ego, I examine the possibility that rupture does not “cause” mystical experience but may sometimes allow it to appear.

This is not a romanticizing of trauma or a defense of supernaturalism. It’s an inquiry into thresholds — those moments when the structures of the self tremble and something larger presses in.

The shell must be broken.

What emerges remains a mystery.

I don’t believe in astrology.

But while reading I Don’t Believe in Astrology by Deborah Silverman, I found myself unexpectedly confronted — especially by the fact that Capricorn is traditionally associated with The Devil card in the tarot.

Not evil. Attachment.

In this solo reflection, I explore ambition, purpose, materialism, and the subtle chains we don’t realize we’re wearing. I talk about being a terrible boss but deeply driven, about the difficulty of being still, about the constant hum of productivity in my nervous system, and about Freud’s death drive and the superego’s demand to produce.

This isn’t a book review. It’s a meditation on compulsion, freedom, and what it might mean to loosen the chains without abandoning ambition.

I don’t take the symbols literally.

But I do take what they reveal seriously.

I’ve been using the phrase ethical hedonism in recent episodes, but I realized I hadn’t slowed down enough to ask a foundational question: what do I mean by pleasure?

In this solo reflection, I think out loud about pleasure as subjective, embodied, relational, and psychologically complex. I explore the neuroscience of dopamine, the difference between craving and deep presence, and how culture shapes what we’re allowed to enjoy.

This episode isn’t definitive. It’s a work in progress. A serious attempt to ask whether pleasure — when it enhances vitality, connection, and coherence — might actually be an ethical guide rather than something to mistrust.

In this solo episode, I explore a tension that I’ve encountered both personally and clinically—the way some high-control religious communities can feel deeply warm, relational, and inviting at first, and yet over time reveal a much more rigid and exclusionary structure underneath.

I begin with a personal reflection on being re-exposed to Douglas Wilson while listening to conversations about Christian nationalism, and how his winsome, calm, and disarming tone stands in stark contrast to what I see as deeply dangerous ideas—especially when it comes to democracy, pluralism, and the ability for real difference to exist.

From there, I unpack what I’m calling aesthetic hospitality—the way warmth, attentiveness, and belonging can function as a kind of soft power that draws people in before they’ve had the chance to fully discern what they’re stepping into.

Drawing on psychoanalytic insights, including Todd McGowan’s critique of community and James Hollis’ distinction between internal and external authority, I explore how belonging in these systems is often conditional, particularly for LGBTQ+ individuals, and how exclusion is frequently reframed as truth, morality, or righteousness.

This episode is ultimately an invitation to develop a deeper kind of discernment—not just asking whether a community is kind or welcoming, but whether it can actually tolerate your full existence without requiring you to become someone else in order to belong.

What if suffering isn’t the clearest sign I’m on the right path?

In this episode, I explore the legacy of high-control Christianity and its elevation of pain as virtue, contrasted with a different ethical vision rooted in aliveness, pleasure, and embodied experience. Drawing on David Congdon, Linn Tonstad’s resurrection-centered theology, and Carrie Jenkins’ work on love, I begin to reframe pleasure as something deeper than indulgence—as a guide toward a more fully lived life.

This is an exploration of ethical hedonism, not as an escape from suffering, but as a way of no longer centering it.

I’ve been reading Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown as a way of making sense of what I’ve been calling my own ethical hedonism — not indulgence, not impulsivity, but the question of whether pleasure might actually function as guidance.

Included in that book is Audre Lorde’s classic essay The Uses of the Erotic, which I recently told a group chat might be one of the best essays I’ve ever read. In this solo episode, I unpack why.

Lorde reframes the erotic not as performance or spectacle, but as a form of embodied knowledge — a deep connection to our capacity for joy that becomes a lens through which we evaluate our lives. When we reconnect with that internal hum of aliveness, she argues, we can no longer settle for what is merely safe, conventional, or externally approved.

Along the way, I explore a resonance I can’t ignore — the connection between what Lorde calls erotic knowledge and what James Hollis describes as inner authority. They are not saying the same thing. They are not operating in the same tradition. And yet both point toward an internal guidance system that asks us to live from alignment rather than expectation.

This episode weaves together ethical hedonism, embodied joy, clinical reflections, and the responsibility that comes with knowing your own capacity for depth.

Once you know your capacity for joy, you are responsible to it