Future of the Body in Human Evolution

This overview of the artwork of Alex Grey (also published as a multi-part series on Reality Sandwich) looks at problems the art world has with spiritually themed art, Alex’s transforming relationship to darkness and shadow material, what his art says about sexuality, and the public roles Alex plays versus his studio work.

Stephen Colbert, a visionary Gen-X comedian who is especially popular with Millennials (unedited, rough draft) © 2011 Jonathan Zap An interesting trend I’ve noticed on Facebook is that young guys, who are mostly known to be heterosexual, and who usually have higher-than-average social status, make graphic statements about loving gay sex as jokes. For example, a probably heterosexual twenty-one-year-old student at CU posted a Facebook status update: “I love the way cock feels in and around my mouth.” Friends left good-natured comments going with the joke. In another such status update I noticed this morning, a very high status nineteen-year-old-male who is known to be popular with girls, has a bit of a reputation as a street fighter, and works in heavy construction posted: “now that i let some dude finish in my mouth i want in the butt.” Friends then posted comments that seemed to share in the joke, but without being mean-spirited, e.g. “ha, ha, I’m stoked.” They were all laughing with, not at, the joker. As a student of popular culture who writes about the evolution of sexuality (see http://www.zaporacle.com/eros-love-and-sexuality/ for some of my essays on the subject), I find this extremely interesting. But I also recognize [...]

The personal quest for human beauty may be an urge to phase shift…

The definition of pushing the envelope I have come up with and will employ here is: Boundary expansion into a zone of novelty previously unexplored by the species or an individual.

You’re only as old as you feel! The problem is that expression got old by the twentieth time I heard it, back in 1973. And now, after hearing it an additional twenty times a week in the ensuing thirty-five years, I have come to find this particular cliché to be very, very old. In fact, if this cliché were as old as my feelings about it, it would probably be able to remember a time when the Big Bang was a mere twinkle in God’s eye. And that’s just another way of saying that, based on how I feel, “You’re only as old as you feel!” has become an infinitely old cliché.

The Space-Time of your Incarnation

If you want to learn about what’s at the core of life, the essential and ultimate universal values beneath all the distractions, deceptions and delusions, then ask the living dead. No, I don’t mean zombies. From my experience zombies have little to offer when it comes to finding the deeper meaning of life. I am referring instead to the testimony of near-death experiencers, people who have been physically dead for short periods of time, glimpsed human incarnation from the outside, and come back to their bodies.

Extensive research has shown that near-death experiences have classic, universal elements and that near-death experiencers are usually profoundly and positively transformed as a result. Research also shows that parallel positive effects can occur in people just by reading about NDEs

©2010 by Jonathan Zap   Edited by Austin Iredale What is the Singularity Archetype? Some of the most significant layers of meaning in Avatar are not to be found in the articles available on the web that discuss its underlying mythology, at least from what I’ve read.  Avatar is charged with emergent archetypal messages from the collective unconscious that relate to an evolutionary event horizon which I’ve discussed in my writings on “the Singularity Archetype.” The Singularity Archetype,  a term I coined many years ago, is a primordial image of an evolutionary event horizon that seems to be an implicit potentiality glowing in the collective unconscious of our species. I first wrote about the Singularity Archetype (though I didn’t use the term at the time) in an undergraduate philosophy honors paper I wrote in 1978 when I was twenty-years-old and which is available on line: Archetypes of a New Evolution. I discovered that there was an emergent archetype that contained crucial information about our future evolution and that manifested itself in dreams, fantasies and religious visions forming a core element in a largely unrecognized contemporary mythology. The most potent expression of this mythology continues to be in science-fiction novels and films. [...]

The metabolism of our species is reaching a feverish intensity as we approach an evolutionary event horizon. One symptom of this feverish metamorphosis is our mutating relationship to body. Suffering associated with body image has reached such epidemic proportions in our culture that it must be counted as one of the greatest spiritual plagues ever to be visited upon mankind.
Note: this is the article form of what was originally a book proposoal. The Glorified Body book proposal contains some important information that is not presented here. You could read this as an introduction and then skip the similar overview in the book proposal and read the remaining sections. To find out what inspired this writing, and why it remained a book proposal read The Path of the Numinous