Beauty in the Eye of the Phase Shifter © 2006, 2008 Jonathan Zap Edited by Austin Iredale (On May 31 of 1996, a morning of intense intuitions drastically changed my view of corporeality, beauty, sexuality, and eros. This experience is described in "The Path of the Numinous" and the intuitions of that morning are developed in "The Glorified Body---Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution,” and that work serves as a foundation for the present reflections. In writing the following reflection, I use the pronoun “we,” by which I mean “me,” but also the many others who have parallel feelings. There are some for whom the experience of beauty may be quite different, especially those who have been conditioned by pornography, those who view sex as reducible to concrete actions on the genital level, and those most attracted to the human form ...
Archive for the ‘Body and Evolution’ Category
Avatar and the Singularity Archetype ©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 ...
The Glorified Body—-Metamorphosis of The Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution—–article
THE GLORIFIED BODY Metamorphosis of The Body and the Evolutionary Event Horizon copyright 2005 by Jonathan Zap > "Glad Day" by William Blake (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) 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. Media bombards ...
THE GLORIFIED BODY Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution --- a book proposal-- © 1996 Jonathan Zap revised 11/29/05 >Glad Day "Glad Day" by William Blake (To find out what inspired the following, and why it remains in this form, see The Path of the Numinous, but essentially I found that when I had written the proposal I had recorded what I had to say on the subject, and had no desire to turn it into a book. I have also rewritten this book proposal as a briefer article, you will miss some important sections but there is more flow, and you won't have the annoyance of frequently hearing about a nonexistant future book. To read the article click here) I. OVERVIEW Suffering associated with body image has reached such epidemic proportions in our culture ...
You're Only as Old as You Are: The Six Noble Truths of the Zap Philosophy of Aging © 2007, Jonathan Zap, age 49 Revised 2008 Edited by Austin Iredale “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. Being infinitely old must be ...