This book explores a strange new spirituality about to enter into competition with other established religions. My purpose here is to convince you that its emergence is probable, if not inevitable.Robert C. Tucker was a Canadian psychologist who worked with an organization called COMA - Council On Mind Abuse (not to be confused with his namesake, an American political scientist who covered the Soviet Union and wrote a biography of Stalin).
I begin this exploration with an unproven assumption based on Darwinian evolutionary principles: a new predator will appear on our planet, an evolutionary prototype designed to prey on humans. Another assumption then follows: this predator will evolve gradually and incrementally from humanity, just as we apparently evolved from lower forms to prey on them.
A further assumption suggests that these predators have already appeared as evolutionary prototypes, as new humans with advanced methods of survival and new forms of spiritual expression and religious organization designed to support and advance their predation."
— Robert C Tucker, An Age For Lucifer: Predatory Spirituality & The Quest for Godhood
Science of the Spirit
Running Time: 01:35:00
Download: MP3 — 130 MB
Are psychopaths smart? Contrary to the impression some may have of the psychopath as evil genius, the reality is not so romantic. According to Lobaczewski, they are less intelligent on average, and you won't find many, if any, super geniuses among their ranks.
Of course, that's not to say that there aren't smart psychopaths. Their bell curve is just shifted down a bit to the left (if Lobaczewski is correct). Which means you're probably just as likely to encounter a relatively smart psychopath as you are a slightly-more-than-relatively smart normal person. Here's how he put it:
The average intelligence of essential psychopaths, especially if measured via commonly used tests, is somewhat lower than that of normal people, albeit similarly varied. However, this group does not contain instances of the highest intelligence, nor do we find technical or craftsmanship talents among them. The most gifted members of this kind may thus achieve accomplishments in those sciences which do not require a correct humanistic worldview or technical skills. (Academic decency is another matter, however.) (Political Ponerology, p. 111)As I wrote in the footnote to this paragraph, whereas psychopathy's interpersonal/affective traits are associated with higher verbal intelligence in the current literature, the antisocial traits are associated with lower general intelligence.
I've written a little of Iain McGilchrist's The Matter With Things, and I'm guessing I will be contemplating this work for a very long time to come. As I was reading parts again recently I cannot help but make the obvious correlations between the nature and actions of the left hemisphere and the nature and action of the global psychopaths attempting to take over the world.
For those not familiar with McGilchrist, he is a psychiatrist, philosopher and author who's primary thesis is that the western world is leaning toward a left hemisphere perspective. He has taken two master works (The Master and His Emissary, and The Matter With Things) to tease out this idea to an extraordinary degree of rigour.
I've done a series based on part of the last chapter of The Master and His Emissary if you are interested in the complete vision of a left hemisphere dominated world - it looks frighteningly like Orwell's 1984, 21st Century China, or the WEF.
The left hemisphere is all about our capacity for utilisation (to make use of things), expressing the will of the ego by acting on the world, manipulating the world for some utility. Whereas the right hemisphere is very different and has a broader scope. The right hemisphere could be thought of as responding to the world beyond itself with an understanding of the 'whole', the 'big picture', if you like. McGilchrist offers that the left hemisphere is about ap-prehending (from Latin ad + prehendere, to hold onto) and for the right hemisphere com-prehending (from cum + prehendere, to hold together) when interacting with the world.
What would we do without this special form of human know-how?
That being said, there is a shadow to everything, and people are just as familiar with this darker side of technology as they are with the brighter side.
Needless to say, we have been inundated with the disasters of our insatiable desire to create conglomerations of various individual components that when properly animated with some sort of power source "do" something that we find useful, exciting, and entertaining — or deadly.
Most of this inundation comes from fanciful science fiction stories about killer robots and strange mechanical implants or, the most horrific addition to this plethora of "bots gone bad" — nanotechnology — tiny cell-sized, or even smaller, mechanical creatures that can penetrate the inner sanctums of our body and wreak a special sort of bedlam.
This week as we are once again joined by Gurdjiffian student and teacher Alan Francis (International School of the Fourth Way) who discusses these themes in both broad and personal terms, bringing his astute observations to the fore to answer the questions many of us have right now about where we may be, collectively and individually.
Running Time: 01:10:54
Download: MP3 — 97.4 MB
If we're lucky, we have threescore and ten years — in a very big wide world, full of history — to experience as much as we can take in.
Threescore-ten is not nearly enough, but some extraordinary people manage to encompass and give order to a lot of it.
And some even more extraordinary people manage to rise above their own lives to interpret creation and the fabric of the universe as having consistent meaning across cultures and throughout the ages.
David Ray Griffin was Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Theology, at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University, from 1973-2004. With his senior, Dr. John Cobb Jr., he co-founded the Center for Process Studies in 1973.
Griffin has stated that "the task of a theologian is to look at the world from what we would imagine the divine perspective, one that would care about the good of the whole and would love all the parts."
Not only was David an outstanding theologian and one of the two best-known living scholars of Alfred North Whitehead's process theology (the other being John Cobb): His books also spanned the related fields of postmodernism, theodicy (defence of God against evil), primordial truth, panentheism, scientific naturalism, parapsychology, Buddhist thought, and the mind-body interaction.
This week on MindMatters we are once again joined by inimitable Gurdjieffian scholar and Maronite Priest Joseph Azize whose paper "Gurdjieff's Help for the Deceased" delves into this subject. Join us as Joseph shares his research, insights and personal experience with some very little known exercises of Gurdjieff's - and explains not only the means from which one could honor and assist our loved ones (should they require it), 'essence to essence' as it were - but also to help grow and develop one's own self and Being.
Running Time: 01:42:02
Download: MP3 — 140 MB

Miriam Grossman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, in New York on Sep. 23, 2022.
Concerned adults are sounding the alarm on the lack of scientific studies to support transgender medical treatments that permanently alter a young person's physiology and leave their mental health issues unresolved.
Child and adolescent psychiatrist Miriam Grossman, who has been a mental health professional for 40 years, said the gender industry is built on the lies of one troubled psychologist.
"The person who came up with the theory was Dr. John Money, and he came up with this idea that a person's biology — their body, their chromosomes — is completely separate from their feeling of whether they are male or female," Grossman said during a Sept. 23 interview for EpochTV's "American Thought Leaders" program.
Grossman said the industry surrounding gender ideology — from gender clinics and hospitals to transgender pride flags and the emergence of a transgender civil rights movement — is based on a concept that was never proven to be true.
"In fact, the opposite was proven," she said. "This whole concept of having an identity as male or female being completely separate from your biology has actually been proven incorrect by John Money's experiment."
Comment: Here's a talk given by Dr. Grossman earlier this year at the Miami National Conservatism Conference:
Running Time: 01:01:47
Download: MP3 — 84.9 MB
Comment: One might say it is the result of a left brain dominant world.