Socratic Dialogues and Trialogues between Jonathan Zap and other thinkers

Thijme is a self-taught artist who lives in a very small, rural town in Northern Holland. His amazing three-minute video, I Paint (click to watch it on Youtube), was constructed using simple, stop-motion and time-lapse techniques and no digital effects. It could have been made, as Thijme points out, a century ago. It would sometimes take him several days to construct a single frame and his output averaged one minute per year. Once it was complete, he posted it on Youtube and within three days it was being seen in almost every country on earth and soon had over a million views.

The Seductive Power of Facebook To see the latest status update and earlier ones scroll down to the bold font “STATUS UPDATES” In your face, facebook: A friend posted on Facebook: but i don’t want a mother fucking “timeline”. Me: Facebook doesn’t care what you want. It will just keep reminding you, again and again and again, wearing away your will away day-by-day, until one day, inevitably, in an irreversible moment of weakness you will click OK, and then your life will forever after be defined by Facebook’s new timeline. Stop your futile resistance. You will be assimilated. Friend: i find the forced sentimentality facebook is going for, as if your facebook is a kind of digital memory album, incredibly unappealing and getting in the way of what i actually want from a social network like facebook. at best, this is an e-mail and photo storage and info sharing site, and while there is an obvious narrative element, forcing it to be crafted around a personal narrative breaches into that cloudy privacy area facebook isn’t great at. It’s kind of like a website that doesn’t understand it’s own function and personal space – I feel like that’s why myspace fizzled out [...]

An article (and associated podcasts) published in Reality Sandwich entitled A Deep Dive into the Mind of Terence McKenna included some shocking revelations about Terence that come from his brother, Dennis. After a dark mushroom trip in the 80s Terence never took mushrooms again, and only rarely and reluctantly did any psychedelic stronger than weed. Meanwhile, in public he was encouraging others to take “the heroic dose” etc. I  added the following comment to the article: Mckenna’s Shadow Submitted by Jonathan Zap on Wed, 07/11/2012 – 07:44. I’m still processing the revelations about Terence which so far have increased my sense of the complexity of the man and increased my fascination with his enigmatic character. Jung once said, “The larger the man, the larger the shadow.” and no doubt 6’6″ Jung, who had an often brutal personality, hoped the aphoristic principle would be applied to him. I can imagine Terence, who always revered Marshall McLuhan, rationalizing that the “messenger was the message” and therefore that he was justified in making his public persona an edited performance art that combined authentic and inauthentic elements. Although my love and fascination with Terence is increased by the revelation, I don’t feel a need to gloss over it in [...]

Has anyone else noticed that civil dialogue with atheists, even more than religious fundamentalists, seems to be nearly impossible? I left a brief comment to a bitter cartoon that an atheist I know, and care about, posted on FB that compared life to a video game in which you would always be killed no matter what you did. I said something like, “Well, the idea of life as futile is nothing new. Camus recognized this as he traced it back to the Myth of Sisyphus. Given this point of view, what motivates you to work so hard at a number of things (the atheist in question was working his way through law school) ?  Anonymous Atheist: I don’t think your seriously interested in my motives. and I am not interested in entering a philosophical conversation in a quasi-public forum. But for what its worth; Truth, beauty, and wisdom.Tuesday Jonathan: Fair enough, and I agree facebook is not the right forum. If you are interested in a more thoughtful challenge, and I understand you may not be, I would ask if you would read one chapter from my recent book. It’s one one near-death experience. Something that is often paired with atheism, but [...]

This expanding document includes dialouges between me and John Major Jenkins, author of seven books about the Maya, and also between me and Ron Lampi, author, poet, visionary

© 2007, 2008 copyright Jonathan Zap, Harald Kleeman photo copyright Jonathan Zap Jonathan’s First Entry: I have long wanted to engage in dialogue (or trialogue or quadrilogue) with people schooled in the principles of Magik on some basic principles and applications of the art and science of manifestation. As you know, Crowley’s primer book on Magick, Magick without Tears, took the form of letters to a particular student, so it was a kind of monologue/dialogue where he responds and reiterates questions and issues, but the other side of the conversation is silent.  In this new Aeon we won’t be so patriarchal, and I propose opening the dialogue to three others I have in mind (Tyler Bennett, Freddy Abrams and Rob Brezsny if any of them cares to participate) so that we can have a more diverse range of perspectives and consider what some of my other white male friends have to say about Magick. This opening entry will be a bit free form, its purpose is not to deliver any finished ideas I have on the subject, but to present intuitions and questions I have and to get the whole Magickal orb rolling so to speak. I have some techniques I [...]

In the Spring of 2006, John Major Jenkins and Jonathan Zap were reminded that it had been exactly ten years since they had met through the late visionary genius Terence McKenna during a long, strange weekend in 1996. Both still felt haunted by Terence’s untimely passing, and thought about writing a book about him and how his work related to and influenced theirs, a kind of trialogue with the dead. Then they tentatively decided the book would focus on 2012 and the working title became: “Dialogues at the Edge of 2012 —-Journeying toward the Event Horizon amidst the New Age Carnival and Fundamentalist Doom Sayers.” Jonathan wanted the title to be “Carnival 2012” and aimed to expose all the projections and unworthy intentions swirling around this date. But man proposes, and the muse disposes. What ended up happening is that they each wrote about this long, strange weekend which culminated in an all night tape-recorded conversation in Jonathan’s camper. During the camper conversation they each introduced the strange convergence of elements that became the call to adventure leading them into mutant pathways and the weekend of convergence. And then, about a third of the way into transcription of the camper conversation, the muse suddenly diverted both of them into other projects, and the account of the weekend lay neglected, a curio made of zeros and ones lying on dusty shelves in various hard drives. Jonathan (who wrote this little introduction) rediscovered it in 2008, languishing within the narrow confines of an old thumb drive, and decided it was time to release it into the wild.

An exchange between Jonathan Zap and John Major Jenkins on Dreamspell