You will fail, because every attempt fails.

The point is not to succeed.

It is to change gears. To remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality.

Shakespeare, lived at the border between the seen and unseen, and spent his life giving voice to the relationship between them. Time and again, his plays—I’m thinking especially of The Winter’s Tale , The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream —tell us that art is the mediating link between the realms, and thus in some way more real, because more... See more

what do you do when your consciousness is wide enough that powerful new marriages of form and formlessness are ever presenting themselves inside you?

You express them.

You create something that reflects this encounter, and which in many ways is truer than the rock it sits on, because it attempts to convey what’s beyond the rock, too—and because it... See more

Art is how we reintegrate our deep weirdness with our intellectual rigour.

Art is how we safely expand and rebalance the consciousness contract.

Art is how we honour the ineffable and unquantifiable dimensions of reality—bring them into the fleshy realm—without sliding into relativism or superstition or the dangerous predations of conspirituality.

We know that the mystical and expansive experiences we’ve read about or had ourselves are in some deep way true—truer than parking tickets and emails and ready meals. But the core wisdom of modernity—the whole drive behind the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution’s insistence on empirical evidence—is that once you open that door to the... See more

About a year and a half ago, I wrote an essay on here that reached a lot of people. It was a sweaty, breathless sort of essay, which suggested that for the past 500 years, the mainstream West has been labouring under a restrictive, straitened consciousness contract—an implicit agreement that only experiences in rational waking consciousness are... See more

I am praying for us all to remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality, and we don’t have to spend a single second or penny more resigning ourselves to the bullshit baubles thrust at us as the pinnacle of choice under consumerist capitalism, when in truth they’re nothing but a knife to imagination, to the energy and courage to... See more

As this year draws to a close, I am sending out a call—a prayer—for the new one. I am praying that we radically reorient all of life, from our everyday routines to what happens in our centres of power, around art and the creative act.