I’m not necessarily saying these are the “best” essays or even necessarily the most enjoyable to read. But these are the turning points, or keystones in the construction.

These are in order of their appearance (oldest on top), because the entire website is a series. I think these selections taken together will provide enough context to see the whole trajectory.

• Manifesto: First attempt to summarize what will be the whole trajectory. It foresees much of this, but not all of it.
  
• Imagine the Limits of the Imagination, part 1 and part 2: Part 1: “I think this offers a clue to what imagination can and can’t do. It can imagine the limits of its own domain, but it can’t imagine what lies “beyond.” It’s customary to raise imagination on a pedestal, projecting unlimited powers to this dimension of existence. And I think this glorification of imagination actually does it disservice and can quickly devolve to sloppy, new age thinking. And by failing to appreciate the limits of imagination, we also accidentally fail to appreciate its real potential.” Part 2: “It takes an elaborate system of metaphoric mirrors to show us the missing “half” of our vision of the world. And in the end the reader has to make the intellectually short, but disconcerting, leap through the looking glass. Where we end up is Nowhere — in a place that language and even the imagination can’t reach.”
  
• Direct and Indirect Meaning: Is there an unmediated intelligence — that is, a direct intelligence of the things around us that does not require language whatsoever? An intelligence that is not judgement, conclusion, idea, thought, story, theory, any of it?
  
• What Is Real? This is the question that is chasing me, or perhaps the question I’m chasing. Never to be answered, only to be asked in ever more profound ways.
  
• Negative Knowledge and the Eruption of a Metaphoric Mentality: 2nd in a series on the relation between story and reality. This takes me very close to the edge of a radically new way of relating to reality
  
• Why Am I Writing? I’m addressing that wider, peripheral mind that knows a deeper, non-verbal form of honesty, and which belongs to everyone. It’s everyone’s potential I’m addressing. I’m talking to that impersonal (non-defensive) honesty, which is the seedling of a truer life in me and you. It grows from a shared ground; although each person becomes an idiosyncratic expression of that ground.
  
• Defeating the Predator: Maybe the biggest turning point. Draws on Castaneda’s metaphor of the “inorganic predator”, which can be understood as David Bohm’s “Thought as a System”; or AI; or something close to a real predator.
  
• The Predator Is Real: The point is, a real predator has coalesced around these qualities. But our description of it is only metaphoric.
  
• A Non-Dogmatic Structure of Thinking: This one is mad, but freeing to the writer. It’s a way of summarizing the series to that point.
  
• The Stupidity of Greatness: A bit too long and difficult to be easily enjoyed. But key. “Even the resolution of this simple question depends on finding a view wider than the widest view of the question – not merely a wider interpretation, but an awareness that encompasses the limits (and therefore valid extent) of every interpretation that is encountered.”
  
• The Immaterial Origins of Life and Intelligence: Higher forms of intelligence encompass and precede the material and mechanical world, preceding and encompassing the intelligence of thought and language, too, just as water vapor encompasses and precedes the more material form of rain. We may only notice the rain of matter first, or the rain of semi-material thoughts and images, and assume that the material plain is the originating source. But there are nested hierarchies which go unnoticed, out of which the more material worlds of matter, biology, imagery and language condense, like rain condensing from invisible air.
  
• Post-Modernism as a Depersonalization/Derealization Crisis: Professional thinkers (academia) hit a dead end with regards to Meaning and Big Questions. Here’s how I “keep going” through this impasse and find meaning in the absence of certainty.
  
• Life, Death and Extinction: Part 1 of a series inspired by the book, “The Dawn of Everything.” Evolution is generally defined by a change in genetics. But our genetic heritage is a kind of magical seed bag of infinite potential — dormant seeds waiting for their epigenetic moment. No, it’s even more open-ended than that. Our genetics are recapitulated holograms of the primordial soup, which can germinate in any form when the immaterial lightning of insight alchemically strikes the fertile ground of biology.
  
• What We Lost (or How We Got Stuck): This is the second in a six-part series vaguely circling the book, “The Dawn of Everything”.
  
• Neither Materialism Nor Idealism: Western culture seems to be vacillating between these two extremes. An abstract Platonism that led to a Sky God divorced from earthly life, becoming a puritanical hatred of the body, which are all different forms of idealism. And then this strange scientific materialism, which also degrades matter and mines the earth as if it were inanimate. So, both viewpoints are limited.
  
• Time and Timelessness: This “trip” around the clock is mainly inspired by “The Ending of Time”, a conversation between Bohm and Krishnamurti, which I read about 35 years ago. But it’s been bouncing around like a pea all this time, gathering layers of dreamy contemplation, until it finally achieved just enough exit velocity to escape my pen as an orbiting essay on the nature of time and timelessness.
  
• Aphorisms (Volume 1, 2 and 3 so far):
  
• What Is Self-Knowledge? This is a thorough inquiry of the subject, but traces the famous Zen saying, “First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”
  
• Insight as the Deletion of Positive Knowledge: Maybe what we’re experiencing is no more confusing than what a caterpillar experiences as its cocoon deteriorates.