Do you feel trapped inside systems that seem broken and obsolete, yet struggle to imagine or create alternatives? Our contemporary meta-crisis is not only political, ecological, and economic. It is a crisis of consciousness, creativity, and imagination — and it is at that level that this seminar goes to work.

Throughout history, periods of upheaval have produced prophets, poets, mystics, and visionaries who broke through obsolete assumptions and opened new possibilities for thought and collective action. They treated imagination, ritual, and prophecy not as fantasy or escapism, but as methods for renewing both self and society. This seminar explores what those traditions offer us now, at a perilous moment when what Jungians call the archetype of the Apocalypse is surfacing in the collective psyche. As things go increasingly haywire, we benefit from developing internal detachment and mastery. A disciplined creative practice is one way to stay sane in a time of collective madness.

There is also a practical urgency. As artificial intelligence absorbs the routine work that structured traditional career paths, our innate human capacities — inspiration, intuition, pattern-breaking, the ability to see what the machine cannot — will increasingly take primacy. Learning to work deliberately with the imagination is no longer a luxury for artists. It is becoming a survival skill.

What You Will Do

This is not a lecture series to absorb passively. Each participant is invited to develop a project across the six weeks — a book, film, artistic work, social initiative, business idea, or other undertaking that requires imagination, attention, and sustained discipline. Alongside the project, we will experiment with practices designed to interrupt habitual perception and recover creative agency: the attention audit, spontaneous composition, prophetic writing, work with the daimon, and psychomagic interventions.

Sunday sessions combine lecture and seminar discussion. Wednesday sessions are workshops devoted to practices, project development, and collective inquiry. All sessions are live on Zoom and recorded for replay. Readings and screenings are recommended but never required; every session stands on its own.

I have spent more than twenty-five years working inside these traditions — as a participant, not only a researcher. My books Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and How Soon Is Now? explored shamanism, prophecy, and the ecological crisis as an initiatory threshold. Through Reality Sandwich and Evolver I built early experiments in the kind of creative community this seminar continues. What I offer is decades of dedicated research into these topics as well as direct engagement with the visionary lineages we will study.

Twelve live sessions, recorded for replay.

We meet on Sundays, starting August 23, from 1 pm - 4 pm EST, and Wednesdays, starting August 26, from 2 pm - 4 pm EST. Last live session: Weds, Sept 30.

The Core Idea

William Blake wrote: "The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself." For Blake, imagination is not a mental faculty we use to escape the world but the ground that brings the world into being. Drawing on Sufi mystics like Ibn 'Arabī and Suhrawardī, the scholar Henry Corbin described the mundus imaginalis — an intermediate dimension between the sensory world and the formless spiritual spheres, where spiritual truths take on form and physical forms are spiritualized, accessible through trained and heightened awareness. And the seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme understood the universe itself as divine play (Spiel) — the self-revelation of the groundless divine source, expressing itself out of pure joy rather than struggle. As Norman O. Brown put it, glossing Boehme in Love's Body: "God's life is play. Adam fell when his play became serious business."

Terence McKenna liked to say that the universe is made of language. If that is the case in some sense, then what new ideas and capacities follow from the insight? Can we draw upon the deeper source of the Logos itself — to reimagine reality and, also, to reconstruct it? Drawing on philosophy, poetry, esotericism, psychology, and cognitive science, we will explore how imagination and language shape experience, identity, and culture — and how practices of attention, ritual, and creative work become instruments of transformation.

Who Is This for?

Writers, artists, filmmakers, founders, organizers, and anyone who senses that the current moment demands more from them creatively than they have yet given — and who wants a rigorous, historically grounded framework for that work, along with a community of serious peers. No prior background in esotericism or philosophy is assumed; curiosity and commitment to a project are.

The aim of this seminar is not merely intellectual understanding. The goal is your liberation as a creator — with the hope, or the prayer, that the deep resources of the imagination can help shift society away from its current doom spiral.