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When I started this series, Science and the Erotic Order, I didn’t know I’d be initiated into even deeper layers of perception of and grieving for the denigration of Goddess in the West and the immense ripples that mythic inheritance has sent through the millenia, and through the world.

But that’s what it means to do this kind of work publicly. You can’t be public about these things, and not be asked to go deeper with it yourself. After publishing the first few episodes in late Summer, early Fall of 2024, I started having some intense and profound experiences that I needed to process privately before I could return to working on this series.

This is a heartfelt exploration of what this series is really about. I set aside argument, proof, evidence—just for a moment, so I can express where this is all going; a sort of preliminary and tentative conclusion, if you will.

This is an exploration of gender in the sciences; how gender was woven into the very birth of science in the scientific revolution; how our mythic inheritance has shaped even this supposedly objective aspect of our culture; what that means for contemporary thought and psychology; and what we might do to right the imbalance.

This episode is part of my series Science and the Erotic Order.

The other episodes in this series are:

Sacred Matrix: the Goddess in Western Thought and Practice

Paradigm Crux: Consciousness Science and Metaphysics

Theory’s End: Abstraction Implosion and the Return to Wholeness

Spiral Time: the Metaphysics of Gender

Simulation & Eros: The Simulation Hypothesis as Distorted Spiritual Truth

Creating a podcast single handedly takes enormous effort—especially the episodes that require research, thought, and creativity. This episode, and future episodes in this series, Science and the Erotic Order, will be for paying subscribers. A free preview is shared here for everyone to enjoy.

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Thank you so much for reading and listening.

xo,

a

Science and the Erotic Order is back, with this, the fifth in my series on science and consciousness

For many people, the idea that we live in a simulation holds a certain intuitive appeal: there does seem to be something dreamlike or not fully real to reality itself.

We explore the simulation hypothesis by looking at Nick Bostrom’s 2003 paper, Are We Living in a Computer Simulation, that first proposed the idea in a scientific context. While the hypothesis holds a lot of weight from a materialist paradigm, as soon as we consider the role that consciousness plays, the hypothesis loses some of its appeal.

Plato’s cave, the Hindu concept of Maya, and the Gnostic Demiurge similarly question the nature of reality. The difference though, is that in these frameworks, philosophical and spiritual practice are meant to bring us closer to the truth. The simulation hypothesis, on the other hand, leads to the conclusion that we are forever trapped in a “simulated” reality and that we ourselves may not even be “real”.

Is this irreality simply a logical conclusion we ought to accept, or is the simulation hypothesis leaving out something important?

This episode is part of my series Science and the Erotic Order.

The other episodes in this series are:

Sacred Matrix: the Goddess in Western Thought and Practice

Paradigm Crux: Consciousness Science and Metaphysics

Theory’s End: Abstraction Implosion and the Return to Wholeness

Spiral Time: the Metaphysics of Gender

To go deeper into the concept of distortion that I mention in this episode, you can receive my recording Distortion Dynamic as a paying subscriber. (This is also the best way to support this work and to ensure I’m able to keep doing it.)

In this episode, I reference Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis, first presented in the paper Are We Living in a Computer Simulation, published in 2003 by Philosophical Quarterly.

I also mention David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness which I discuss at length in the episode Paradigm Crux.

To work with me 1-1, my books are open for 1-1 client sessions starting mid-April.

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A conversation with Andres Schabelman, author of Captains Wanted.

In this episode, I speak with Andres Schabelman, a writer, actor, comedian, and travel host. Andres has had quite a journey, with a background in the corporate world, as one of Airbnb’s first employees, to travelling the world and diving deeply into spirituality. His first novel, Captains Wanted, was just published this week.

It “tells the story of what happens when people are willing to follow a new path, especially one they don’t logically understand. Through a collection of ceremonial anecdotes that touch upon each of the senses, readers are invited to not merely observe but actively participate in the quest for self-discovery.”

In our conversation, he shares some really beautiful stories about his unfolding journey, how he got from the corporate world to where he is now, and his passion for human connection. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Andres.

Learn more about Andres

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit secretart.substack.com/subscribe

Metaphysics of Gender

Beneath the layers of historic and cultural distortion, might we find a profound metaphysical love story? In this episode, we explore spiral time as emergent from the collaboration between the masculine and feminine forces of nature.

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Abstraction Implosion and the Return to Wholeness

In The Master and His Emissary, psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist draws on cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry to paint a complex picture of right and left hemispheric brain function. The hemispheres differ not in what they do, but in how they do it: the right is attuned to wholeness, interconnectivity, empathy, and relationality; the left, to separating, categorizing, abstracting, and theorizing.

He argues that much of Western culture can be understood as a form of pathological left-hemispheric dominance, where abstraction has come to replace the very thing it was meant to represent. He urges a return to balance, where the world of the right hemisphere—of context, relationship, and embodiment—is given its rightful place as primary.

This episode is an exploration and summary of McGilchrist’s important work. This will set the stage for the next episode, where we will weave these ideas back into what we’ve been discussing in the previous several episodes.

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Philosopher David Chalmers introduced The Hard Problem of Consciousness in the 90s to distinguish between the relatively easy problems of consciousness that can be resolved via the standard methods of cognitive neuroscience (lol) and the comparatively “hard” problem of how matter could give rise to consciousness at all—which cannot, in principle, be resolved by science.

The hard problem is only a hard problem because of the standard metaphysical assumption of materialism. Since the 90s, many philosophers and scientists who have considered the hard problem have abandoned materialism in favour of panpsychism, dual-aspect monism, or other metaphysics that see consciousness as primary.

Nearly every spiritual tradition also sees consciousness as primary. Isn’t Self, not as ego, but as the Seer, the observer, the witness—consciousness by another name? Is science, through its own methods, coming around to this central spiritual insight?

In this episode I quote from The Hard Problem of Consciousness by David Chalmers, and Twilight of the idols, by Friedrich Nietzsche.

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The myth of the Goddess runs deep in the history of Western thought and practice. Goddess worship was prevalent in Paleolithic Old Europe, and well into the Iron Age. What happened? How is it that Goddess worship and polytheism came to be replaced by a monotheistic, masculine God?

Despite official doctrine, she keeps cropping up though, doesn’t she? Through Mother Mary, Sophia, the Shekhinah, the irrepressible Mary Magdalene: even within in a Judeo-Christian context, while official texts would write her out of existence, she can’t be suppressed.

Esoteric practice, folk mythology, non-doctrinal spiritual forms have always been places where the Goddess by her many names can be found. It would appear that suppression of the Goddess is intimately tied to power and Empire, a theme we will continue to explore in future episodes.

This episode draws largely from The Myth of the Goddess, Evolution of an Image, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, as well as (to a lesser extent) Did God Have a Wife, Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel by William G. Dever.

(If you're concerned about the association of the Feminine with matter, so am I. Try n hold your horses, as we'll complicate this in the next episode).

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Time ain’t linear, and this moment is an eddie…. As Mercury circles back, so must we, if we are to heed the tides of nature, and the gods of time. What must we retrieve in order to flow forward more fully?

This episode is a collage of selections from blogs I’ve written over the past 5 years. In going back, I actually surprised myself to see how I’ve been mulling over the same questions for many years. Here, I gather the threads of thought that I will continue to weave in episodes to come. A few themes emerge:

* Empire and consciousness

* Knowledge, power, and paradigm

* Unknowingness in Times of Change

* Selfhood as political necessity

* Courage in the face of monsters

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Scientific, cultural, and political revolution go hand in hand

It’s almost trite to speak of our current moment as a paradigm shift. Yet, if we root the concept in Kuhn’s analysis of scientific revolution, it may be a useful lens with which to make sense of these times of massive change.

When we understand the current dominant mode of thought in a historical and global context, it becomes clear that its basis in reductive materialism is by far the anomaly. A more spiritual or animist worldview is the norm both historically and globally.

This episode looks at this from a decolonial perspective. In the future I want to come at the same question from scientific and philosophical perspectives, a line of thinking I started exploring here (in my most popular blog post, which I’ve unlocked for a time).

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What would it mean to take a spiritual approach to politics? An exploration of the left/right binary, if and when it’s still useful, and how we might adopt a politics that is actually effective.

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