Tag: ontology

  • The Saucer People Want Twinkies: Folk Practice as Cultural Behavioral Therapy

    The Saucer People Want Twinkies: Folk Practice as Cultural Behavioral Therapy

    In his 2016 book written with UFO abductee Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, Jeffrey Kripal notes Grays were, in appearance, strikingly similar to the fairy folk of Northern Europe. Also like them, they were frightening, came out of the night, and abducted people. I might note in passing that the […]

  • Nixon and the Dinosaurs: A Folkloric View of Time

    Nixon and the Dinosaurs: A Folkloric View of Time

    A substantial number of years ago, a friend of mine explained to me his view of history. “Everything that happened before me happened at the same time. Nixon. The Dinosaurs. All of it.” He was joking. Mostly. But it’s something that has stuck with me for thirty years now, because as a view of how […]

  • What’s It Like to Think You’re a Bat?

    What’s It Like to Think You’re a Bat?

    I want you to take seriously for a moment the proposition that you might be a bat. Therian is a term which has been coined by a group of people who self-identify as being, in some ontological sense, non-human, specifically an animal or plant which exists on this planet. That last disclaimer is because there’s a […]

  • Where Did My Pen Go? A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe

    Where Did My Pen Go? A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe

    A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe Let’s start with a truism. Those are always good. To live is to continually encounter the unknowable. And boy, that unknowable is everywhere. Every time we ask a question to which we practically cannot get a definitive answer, we are encountering the unknowable. The unknowable can include […]