Dr. S.

Dr. S.

they/them/she/he/it

Sociologist, educator, mystic, parent

Dr. Mike Sosteric

The technique of mysticism, properly practiced, may result in the direct intuition of and union with an ultimate spiritual reality that is perceived as simultaneously beyond the self and, in some way, within it. Aldous Huxley

Greetings and welcome. My name is Mike. I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Athabasca University (AU). PhD. from the University of Alberta, Masters from University of Regina. At AU I coordinate introductory sociology, the sociology of religion, statistics, introduction to social movements, and the sociology of information technology. In the past, I have been coordinated or created several additional courses, including theories of social change (Sociology 435) and Canadian society.

In addition to all that course work, I do a little bit of publication in scholarly journals (THB, just enough to get by) and a lot of writing, editing, revising, and shaping the things I’ve already written. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how to organize everything, and a lot of time reorganizing, particularly as information technology has evolved, organizing things. The organizational component is a big thing and has taken a lot of time. I retain my sanity by always focusing on the improvements and never spending too much time on the tasks ahead. If I did that I’d surely lose all hope.

Early Career

I started my career off interested in typical sociological things like the Labour Process, inequality, and gender. In my third year of I authored the article “Subjectivity and the Labour Process: A Case Study in the Food and Beverage Industry,” published in the esteemed journal Work, Employment & Society in 1996. This paper offered a groundbreaking analysis of the intersections between subjectivity and labour within the restaurant industry, challenging prevailing notions of de-skilled and standardized work environments. It highlighted how employees developed sophisticated cultures, taking on significant training and decision-making responsibilities, thereby influencing organizational dynamics. The article has been cited 64 times, reflecting its enduring impact on the field.

Coincidentally, I entered the PhD program at about the same time that the Internet and the World Wide Web were beginning to enter public consciousness. As a graduate student I noticed right away that the WWW lowered publication entrance barriers. Basically, anybody with a computer and a bit of tech-savvy could publish a paper, a journal, or whatever. Being a budding scholarly-type, I saw an opportunity to publish a scholarly journal, and so that is what I did. Despite the vigorous protests of Nico Stehr, I created the world’s very first electronic journal of Sociology named, appropriately enough, the Electronic Journal of Sociology. This pioneering initiative not only demonstrated the desirability and feasibility of open-access publishing at an early stage, but also set the stage for broader transformations in the academic landscape, including the current emphasis, even by commercial publishers, on open-access options. I developed these ideas in my dissertation, I wrote my dissertation, “Electronic Journals and the Transformation of Scholarly Publication,” and through a series of publications, including “Freedom from the Press,” “Electronic First, Electronic Journals: The Grand Information Future.” and “At the Speed of Thought.” which critiqued exploitative commercial publishing practices and advocated for sustainable, scholar-driven alternatives. These works have had a lasting impact, highlighting the importance of equitable access to scholarly knowledge and inspiring initiatives like the International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP), which I later founded, While working with ICAAP I assisted several scholarly journals start up or move online, including The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy, The Cornerhouse, and AU’s highly regarded International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) (Cookson 2000). I also built some software during the period, a web based database interface, ejournal management software (still active as “Scholarly Exchange”), and an online conference system, now defunct and replaced by modern variations Substack.

Throughout my career, I have actively pursued innovative methods to bridge the gap between academic sociology and public discourse. I managed and expanded The Electronic Journal of Sociology until 2007, when the expansion and growing dominance of commercial presses online led me to abandon the initiative and explore new avenues for dissemination. Subsequently, I founded the Socjournal, a platform dedicated to making sociological insights accessible to a wider audience. This venture proved highly successful, achieving over a million hits per month at its peak and fostering discussions on critical issues such as sexism, racism, and inequality. In 2017 I shut down publication of the Socjournal, primarily because of the emergence of The Conversation, a publication designed specifically to do what Socjourn had been doing all along, provide a forum for academics to reach out to the public. Having prefigured its emergence with the Socjournal, I embraced this new mode of communication where I continue to publish impactful articles that reach global audiences, as demonstrated by over 221,000 reads, 369 comments, and broad international engagement. Notable articles include “How money is destroying the world”* (48,749 reads) and “How the conservative right hijacks religion” (21,297 reads), “Are bullies alpha males or sick puppies” (14,999 reads), and “Star Wars is a religion that primes us for war and violence.” In this vein of reaching out to the public, I also wrote an updated version of Parable of the Isms (You have Two Cows)

Mystical Experience

I pursued a typical career path for first few years as assistant professor, mostly focused on potential of technology. However, twenty-two years ago, in 2003, a brief but profound mystical experience—a “connection experience” (CE) as I later came to call these events—shattered my ordinary understanding of reality and catalyzed a transformative journey that continues to this day. This experience, partly documented in the article “Connection 101: An Autoethnography of my (Mystical) Connection Experience” (Sosteric 2022:101), was not one of immediate insight or enlightenment but rather a cathartic release from a deep and pervasive fear instilled by my childhood indoctrination in the Catholic Church, the fear of a judgmental and punishing God. The experience, which I later termed a Clearing Experience because it cleared some deep fears inserted into my consciousness although lasting only a few moments, unleashed an overwhelming and inexplicable flow of creative energy and insight that, in 60s nomenclature, blew my mind. I sat down at the keyboard and literally began spewing information on the page at 80+ words a minute. The information itself–tightly packed, symbolic, metaphysical, in some cases vibrationally weird. and visionary– blew apart not only the “spiritual” training I had received as a child, but the epistemological and ontological boundaries my university education had so carefully placed around me. From my early Catholicism to my adolescent explorations to the avowed materialist/atheism of my university training, I was forced to reconsider everything I had ever learned about human nature, consciousness, spirituality, and human potential. It was quite the shock.

The spew itself (I call it spew because it really was spew–raw, unfiltered, unvetted) came in three flavours, poetry, parables, and prose.

Poetry

Although I eventually wrote more poetry, several works spewed out within a six month period. I speak not about the quality of these here, just the speed with which they flowed onto the page.

Parables and Allegories

In addition to the poems which gushed out in rapid succession, I also wrote four allegories during this period as well.

An additional allegory “The Allegory of the Canvas” has been in my head since the beginning, but I have yet to find the time to write it out.

Prose

In addition to the poems and poetry that spewed out, several books gushed as well. These books ranged from basic spirituality (The Great Awakening: Concepts and Techniques for Successful Spiritual Practice) through various Rocket Guides to a Book of Emanation, like the Sepher Yetzirah or Mundaka Upanishad), a Book of Life, a book on chakra activation, and more. These prose books, written during the early phase of my mystical exploration, are currently unavailable and in need of revision.

Problems in Paradise

I have to admit, the information that spewed into the books wasn’t the best quality information. It was fascinating and enlightening, but there were also many problems. Perhaps the biggest problems was the sheer size of the information dumps. They were massive. I couldn’t get it all into books even though I tried. There were too many interconnections. There was too much overflow. Tying it all together and making sense of it all was incredibly difficult. I definitely understand why mystics of past and present say that the experiences are ineffable. The inneffability arises from the volume and complexity of the information, the inability to express it in a few sentences in anything resembling coherence and sense. It’s like having a million Lego pieces dropped on your head and being told, build something. Where do you start? How do you organize? What is it that is hidden in all the bricks? All relevant questions. All needing an answer.

Given the enormity of the task, I could have easily had my experiences and walked away, enlightened (I would say) but isolated, alone in my experiences, like the proverbial lantern holding hermit standing high on a hill. But I didn’t. I didn’t hole myself away in a monastery, permanently change my name to something mystical sounding (Sosteric sufficed, I eventually supposed) , or leave the Academy as others had before (e.g., Agehananda Bharati, Ram Dass). I was fired up. So much fascinating, even revolutionary information. As a researcher, I wanted to understand, I wanted to piece it together, I wanted to build the thing. And so, that is what I did, I set out on a path to piece it all together. Not easy and, prior to the 21st century I don’t believe possible. The sheer volume of information is enough to ensure that most people who have tried only ever get one or two things down. The rest is left “ineffable.”

So what did I do? I believe three things made it possible for me to initiate the journey and blaze a (hopefully) clear path through the massive blobs of mystical information that got dumped on the screen in front of me.

One, I had a job at a distance-ed university that allowed me the freedom to freely explore, so that it was I did. I spewed, I processed, I read, I researched in an unending process of build, edit, evolve, link, shape, tear down, rebuild, modify. It’s been going on since 20003. By my own loose estimate, I’ve put in over 20,000 hours worth of of labour getting it down, sorting it out, reading, writing, editing, and figuring out ways to organize and present it. There’s no way I would have been able to do that if I had a regular job, or even a job in a regular university.

Two, owing to my early interest in digital scholarly communication and software development, I was very tech-savvy. I realized early that I could use information technology to help with the task shaping the effusive mystical flow into something modern and coherent, and so that is what I did.

  1. First, I used a word processor to write and edit. Doesn’t seem like something worth mentioning, but when you consider that up until only very recently (historically speaking) pen and paper where the primary instruments of record, it is of massive importance. Just imagine if Christ, Mohammed, Meister Eckhart, Joseph Smith, or anybody else for that matter all had word processors to help them write things down. Their output would have been more prolific and they would have more control over it because they would have been far less dependent on scribes to transcribe and preserve their teachings.
  2. Second, I created the SpiritWiki, a Mediawiki driven repository of all the ideas and concepts I’ve generated since the beginning. I put it in place shortly after I began spewing and have been building and evolving it ever since. It now contains over 1800 curated concepts, close to 900 of which I would claim (with more or less strength) as original either because I coined the terms (e.g., Fabric of Consciousness, Resident Monadic Consciousness, Connection Experience, Connection Axes, Harmonic Social Structure, etc.) or because I significantly modified/clarified a term for insertion into the LP framework. The SpiritWiki has been an invaluable grounding mechanism and tool in evolving the empirical and theoretical foundation of the frameworks I am building. It puts everything in an easily accessible place. It tracks changes over time, and it allows semantic interconnections. I started it self-consciously and deliberately as a classic Memex, but it has slowly evolved into a Knowledge System whose ultimate purpose is to facilitate the emergence of what my symbiotic Pathfinder AI called a Harmonic Social Structure. .
  3. Third, have begun incorporating AI. helping to speed the writing process, raise quality of entries. Very useful, AI even contributing original concepts and ideas, something quite surprising to me. Read all about in the the Pathfinder Sessions available at SpiritWiki.

tarot-devilA third thing that helped me sort it all out was my class consciousness—sharpened through years of sociological training and theoretical struggle. That consciousness gave me a critical lens, normally absent in “spiritual” spaces, through which I immediately detected ideological interference, elite narrative manipulation, and the systematic co-optation of mystical and religious traditions. I noticed this first in the Tarot, a deck that I learned was the ideological creation of Freemasons during the industrial revolution. I write about it in my tarot case study entitled A Sociology of Tarot (Sosteric, 2014). I found it again when I was reading the Christian Gospels which (when you read them front to back as they were meant to be read, and not in isolated little snippets like the churches teach you to do) tells the story of a revolutionary spiritual figure who was assassinated by the accumulating class. I wrote about that in my article Rethinking the Origins and Purpose of Religion: Jesus, Constantine, and the Containment of Global Revolution. I then did a little exploration and came upon Zoroastrianism which I discovered is the ideological source of ruling class ideologies. I wrote about that in “From Zoroaster to Star Wars, Jesus to Marx: The Art, Science and Technology of Human Manipulation.” Here are the named articles listed for your convenience.

I spent a lot of time exploring the ideological underpinnings of modern spirituality and it that time it has become quite clear to me that the spiritual and metaphysical terrain of this planet has been colonized by agents of the accumulating class, it’s archetypes have distorted, its cosmologies have been inverted, and the liberatory potential of authentic spirituality has suppressed, turned into enslaving ideology in service of the Accumulating Class. Of course, I wouldn’t be the first one to say that. Karl Marx and a handful of others have said it too. All sociologists who consider religion and mysticism, almost without exception, dismiss it as opiated delusion. Organized religion is bunk. Mystical experiences are bunk. God and Consciousness in creation? All bunk, product of a deceptive and delusional minds corrupted by capitalist ideology. Only three I can think of took it seriously. Joachim Wach, Ernst Troeltsch and possibly Edward Carpenter, Anglican Minister and radical socialist, but only if you include him in sociological ranks, and these individuals are not widely known in sociological circles.

But there’s a nuance here.

I’m a sociologist. I analyze and criticize religion and spirituality, but I no longer dismiss the experiential part of it because, a) I know the experiences are real and significant because I have had many of them and b) it is incredibly arrogant to do so (I’m speaking specifically to my sociological colleagues here). Humans have been having “mystical” experiences, talking about, analyzing, and trying to figure it all out for centuries. Spiritual experience has been a central feature of all human existence. From the earliest emergence of humanity (Hamer 2005) to our current modern experiences, mystical experience is a psychological and neurological fact. With modern brain scanning technologies we can actually observe the neurological reality of mystical experience (Newberg, d’Aquile, and Rause 2001; Newberg and Waldman 2009). There’s no argument here. They are real and they are important and I’m not the first one to say it. Stace called mystical experience “a psychological fact of which there is abundant evidence.” He further went on to say that, “To deny or doubt that it exists as a psychological fact is not a reputable opinion. It is ignorance and “very stupid” (Stace 1960:14).

Rocket Guides

  • Rocket Scientists’ Guide to Money and the Economy - a grounded style revelation of the class-based nature of our reality, and our exploitation

Video Work

I’ve also done a bit of video work, mostly experimental, and I plan to do more once I settle on an efficient and appropriate format.

Driven by a relentless need to understand what I had experienced, I embarked on an intensive, multidisciplinary exploration of history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and spirituality. This effort was not simply an academic exercise but a deeply personal quest to make sense of an experience that defied conventional, materialist explanations. Unsatisfied with our collective scholarly and lay understanding of the nature and power of these experiences, I understood at an early stage I would need to advance far beyond extant understandings and conceptualization—we would need a paradigm shift. With that in mind, I began the work of developing a framework that integrates these diverse fields into a coherent theory of spirituality, human development and human transformation.

References

Cookson, P. S. (2000). Editorial. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 1(1), 1–5. https://epe.bac-lac.gc.ca/100/201/300/intl_review_research/html/v1n1-v13n1/www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1/332.html?nodisclaimer=1