About

 

The Teeming Brain is a blog magazine of ideas in an age of apocalypse.

Topics and themes include:

  • creativity, psychology, and consciousness
  • religion, horror, and the paranormal
  • books, films, television, art, and music
  • the beautiful, weird, transfixing, mournful, and terrifying
  • science and science fiction
  • the bankruptcy of scientism and the reductionist materialist paradigm
  • the spiritual counterculture and the influx of excluded worldviews and ways of seeing, knowing, relating, and being
  • peak fossil fuels, economic collapse, the catastrophe of global corporate capitalism, and the dark future of the growth paradigm
  • Jihad vs. McWorld, American imperialism, and reactionary fundamentalisms
  • government corruption, political polarization, and the rise of a surveillance state
  • the corporate-administrative hijacking of universities and the revaluing of education in purely economic and vocational terms
  • climate change, apocalyptic ecology, and humanity’s alienation from the natural world
  • the misguided tyranny of mainstream allopathic medicine and the propaganda machine of big pharma
  • the transformation of culture and consciousness by technology
  • the simultaneous utopian and dystopian potentials of the digital media revolution
  • the fate of books, reading, intellect, and inner depth in an age of chaos, collapse, and amusement to death
  • the preservation of knowledge, culture, and enlightened ways of knowing and being in a possible new dark age

Three noteworthy quotations, taken in tandem and bridging the East-West divide, constitute a koan of juxtaposition that transmits our supervening and underlying purpose here:

“To be mad, as the world judges, is to be trapped in a narrow and lonely reality. To be sane, as the world judges, is to be trapped in a reality no less narrow, but heavily populated. But there is also a higher sanity. Its health is freedom from all traps, its sign is the knowledge of many realities. We are in the stage of closing up all the traditional dichotomies of western culture which have served as the bulwarks of the old Reality Principle. Spirit-flesh, reason-passion, mad-sane, objective-subjective, fact-value, natural-supernatural, intellect-intuition, human-non-human — all these familiar dualisms which have divided the spectrum of consciousness vanish as we create the higher sanity.”

- Theodore Roszak

 

“In every great time there is some one idea at work which is more powerful than any other, and which shapes the events of the time and determines their ultimate issues.”

- Francis Bacon

 

 

“Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life. Think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success. That is way great spiritual giants are produced.”

- Swami Vivekananda