Jeffrey Mishlove's New Video Series "InPresence"

Highly recommended: Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove's new series of short inspiring talks, "InPresence," on his YouTube channel, New Thinking Allowed. 

InPresence  0001:


InPresence 0002:


InPresence 0003:



To date Mishlove has posted 70 InPresence videos.You can find these and his many interviews on the "playlists" page for his YouTube channel.

(I am honored to say that a couple of years ago, for New Thinking Allowed, Mishlove interviewed me about my book, Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual.)

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

Notes on Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute

On Seeing as an Artist

Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe

Ax of Apocalypse: Strieber and Kripal's THE SUPER NATURAL: A NEW VISION OF THE UNEXPLAINED

Just posted in Literal Magazine, my review of Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal's THE SUPER NATURAL:  A NEW VISION OF THE UNEXPLAINED. It's a crunchier review than my usual 500 - 1,000 words; I went into detail about my own encounter with a mystical text, Francisco I. Madero's Manual espírita of 1911, plus brief discussion of Jeffrey Mishlove's The PK Man. 

This book is a flying ax of apocalypse. But whoa, let's first bring this identified flying thoughtform to Planet Earth: to Texas; Houston; Rice University; Department of Religion; and finally, the office of the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought, Jeffrey J. Kripal. 

Professor Kripal, who describes his work as comparing "fantastic states of mind and energy and their symbolic expressions in human history, literature, religion, and art," is one of two authors, alternating chapters, who have launched this catch-it-if-you-can metaphysical ax. The other is Whitley Strieber, a Texan internationally famous for his horror fiction and series of memoirs beginning with Communion: A True Story, the 1987 best-seller about his encounters with UFOs and entities he calls "the visitors." Whether you indulge in Strieber's shiver-worthy writings or not, you've no doubt seen the image of a "visitor" from the cover of Communion everywhere from the movies to cartoons: a bulbous rubber-like head with darkly liquid almond-shaped eyes.

If you've read this far and are tempted to stop, I urge you to take a breath—a bold breath. Should you still feel bristling hostility, as many educated readers do at the mere mention of such subjects as UFOs and "the visitors," that's normal. Soldier through the discomfort, however, and you may be able to open a door from the comfy cell of mechanistic materialism onto vast, if vertiginous vistas of reality itself—and not to the supernatural but, as Kripal and Streiber would have it, the super natural. 

That door does not open with a key but with what Kripal terms a cut—as provided by Immanuel Kant, that most emminent of bewigged German philosophers. More about the "Kantian cut" in a moment.

Never mind the remarkable contents of The Super Natural, the fact that two such authors would write a book together is remarkable in the extreme. Strieber, while building a passionate following for Communion, his many other works and esoteric podcast, "Dreamland," has also attracted widespread ridicule for his memoirs which go beyond retailing his perceptions of his abductions by "the visitors" to adventures, both in and out of body, with orbs, hair-raising magnetic fields, blue frog-faced trolls, and the dead. Nonetheless, Kripal, as one steeped in the literature of the world's religions, identifies Strieber's Communion as "a piece of modern erotic mystical literature," and indeed, nothing less than a litmus test for his own academic field:
>> CONTINUE READING on Literal Magazine

Your comments are ever and always welcome.

CLICK HERE.

Newsletter? Yep. 

It might go out in July. Maybe again in September.

It will have news and new podcasts, 

including from the Marfa Mondays Podcasting Project

SIGN UP HERE.

Selected Book Reviews by C.M. Mayo:

Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic

by Sam Quinones

Literal Magazine

Nut Country: Right-wing Dallas and the Birth of the Southern Strategy

by Edward H. Miller

Washington Independent Review of Books

A Slow Trot Home

by Lisa G. Sharp

Madam Mayo Blog

Life in Mexico

By Frances Calderon de la Barca

Tin House

>>ALL BOOK REVIEWS BY C.M. MAYO WEBPAGE<<

&

Waaaaaaaaaaay More Esoterica

More Madero: Interviews by Jeffrey Mishlove and a Review by Michael Tymn

It's sometimes curious the way books wend their way to their readers. When I started out writing under the name C.M. Mayo more than (ayy) two decades ago, like most young writers, I hyper-focussed on short-term goals such as getting an agent, getting published, winning prizes, and selling oh-so-many copies. I still relish getting published, winning prizes, and selling copies, when that happens to happen, but my view of the value and meaning of this peculiar endeavor we call "writing books" has since expanded into more esoteric realms, and in more ways than one. 

As those of you who have been following this blog well know, back in 2014 I brought out Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, which includes my translation of Manual espírita, by "Bhima," that is, the leader of Mexico's 1910 Revolution and President of Mexico from 1911-1913. In other words, I wrote a book about and translated a book of transcendental importance to the 1910 Revolution itself, among other things, to which, for more than a century, only a handful of specialists in Mexican history had paid more than a whit of attention. (And why not? Two words: cognitive dissonance.)

The thing is, a book is both a commodity, as anyone who works with a major New York publishing house or, say, a rare books dealer, can aver, and a mystical package, that is, a complex amalgam of thought-forms that, so encapsulated, code on paper, can travel forward across even vast realms of time and space to unleash its contents into the imaginal realm of a human mind. When that happens to happen.

Right now, as I am working on a book about Far West Texas, I have on my desk a mystical package that is 474 years old. Specifically: a paperback edition of the English translation by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz of the Relación or report of 1547 by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca to the King of Spain-- a story that is an odyssey if there ever was one.

To the news. I am very honored to announce that just this week Michael Tymn reviewed Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution on his blog over at White Crow Books. 

Among many other works, Tymn is the author of Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife. 

And I am also honored to announce that Jeffrey Mishlove conducted a three part interview with me about Spiritism in the Mexican Revolution for his program "New Thinking Allowed." As of this week, the first two of three segments All three segments are now on-line.













Mishlove is the author of The PK Man, a book that took him 20 years to publish, is now 15 years old, and is yet finding ever more readers. It may have gotten a slow start but I believe that Mishlove's The PK Man will stand as one of the landmark works of the 20th century. I explain in my forthcoming review of Jeffrey Kripal and Whitley Strieber's Super Natural.

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

(Centennial lecture for University of Texas El Paso)

Why Translate? The Case of the President of Mexico's Secret Book

Lifting the (Very Heavy) Curtain on Mexico's 1910 Revolution

CLICK HERE.

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

From The PK Man to Primates of Park Avenue: Whiplash Extremes of Human Behavior

I believe that through narrative we become more human; truth is beauty; exploration is infinite. Some years ago, in my literary explorations, I encountered Jeffrey Mishlove's The PK Man and found it astonishing. Well, because it is. (Read it if you dare.) 

Last week I had occasion to reread Mishlove's The PK Man, and now, as the author myself of a book about another astonishing book-- Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution: Francisco I. Madero and His Secret Book, Spiritist Manual, I found it even more astonishing, for I understood what courage it must have taken to not only write The PK Man, but to publish it. (Never mind, in my own case, to read it twice, cover to cover.) When it comes to this sort of material, most people, including myself back when, encounter a block of cognitive dissonance oh, say, the size of Greenland and Alaska and Antarctica combined. Multiplied by 11,999.

What prompted me to reread The PK Man was that I flew to Las Vegas to be interviewed about my book on Jeffrey Mishlove's show, New Thinking Allowed. (Stay tuned for the video links.) It was honor indeed. Of course I brought my copy of The PK Man for him to sign.

UPDATE: See "Axe of Apocalypse," my review of Strieber and Kripal's Super Natural for Literal Magazine, in which I discuss Mishlove's The PK Man at length.

UPDATE: Here are the links to the 3-part interview with me on Mishlove's "New Thinking Allowed":

But whoa, after all the metaphysical talk, as I was about to get back on the plane, I really needed to do a sharp turn on this teacup ride-- I mean, read something grounding, something very focussed on the materialistic. Anthropologist Wednesday Martin's personal memoir Primates of Park Avenue was just the thing. Highly recommended.

(And if you think The PK Man was more than a little weird, I point to Wednesday Martin's Park Avenue apartment which, by her own testimony, features an entire closet devoted to her handbags, including a much-coveted "Birkin" that has a markup over cost akin to the price of a small car.) 

(How was Las Vegas? Well, apart from the interview, the only thing I did was to go hiking in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. I did pass the Trump casino on the highway, which made me wonder, as I often do whilst perusing the news of the current presidential campaigns, whether I haven't slip-slided into some alternative universe.) 

> Your comments are always welcome. Write to me here.

On Writing About Mexico: Secrets and Surprises

Occult of Personality: The Interview

12 Tips for Summer Day Hiking in the Desert

Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe

One of the books that has most influenced my writing, and in particular, my ideas about narrative structure, is Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe. When I came upon it a few years ago, I was already a fan of Canadian novelist Douglas Glover and his notion of the story as net. In other words, even without the scaffolding of a formal plot (ye olde Fichtean curve), a net of images can cohere and indeed so powerfully resonate in the reader's mind that the net is the story. A satisfying story. It was directly--- literally, less than an hour--- after reading Glover's essays on the story as net and the novel as poem (now collected in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son) that I sat down wrote the one that became the title story for my first collection, Sky Over El Nido. In this story the images, woven throughout, have to do with flight: birds, nests, eggs, airplanes. What's the "plot"? A fistful of air.

>>READ THIS POST ON THE NEW PLATFORM WWW.MADAM-MAYO.COM

Later, before beginning to write my novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, I happened upon Talbot's The Holographic Universe, an elegantly lucid and very accessible overview of some of the (then) most cutting-edge theories in quantum physics and in particular, those of David Bohm. If the universe itself is a hologram, or has holographic characteristics, then this could explain why nets of images--- the suggestion of the whole in each of its parts--- can resonate with such strange power in a reader's mind.

Does my novel have that power? You decide. But one of the several paradigms I worked with while writing it was, again, the story as a net and, to borrow the title of one of Douglas Glover's essays, "The Novel As Poem." Yes, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is a poem. And the main character is not a person but an idea--- the prince as living symbol of the future of the empire. Where does such an idea live? In many minds--- ergo, the novel has a crowd of characters, indeed, a net of characters, woven in among each other's minds and actions.

Just of few of the fleeting and repeating images: the Totonac bowl, Egypt, birds, sweets, twilights, composers, asparagus.

(Though indeed it does have a plot, and I worked with various paradigms--- Fichtean curve, Syd Field's three acts, and others--- while constructing it.)

Last night, I happened upon this video of pychologist Jeffrey Mishlove's interview with Talbot. It's well worth watching in its entirety. Sad to say, Talbot died of leukemia in 1992.

More anon.