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

Note, this bio page is written in support of an application for promotion. If it feels like I am blowing my own horn, I am. That’s the process. I will rewrite when that is said and done.

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 the 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 coordinated or created several additional courses, including Theories of Social Change (Sociology 435) and Canadian Society. I have recently completed a course about archetypes, narratives, and creation templates entitled Sociology 420: Writing New Stories

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. The organizational component is a big task and has taken a lot of time to get right, if it can currently be called right. 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

As I said, I’m a sociologist. I started my career interested in typical sociological things like the Labour Process, inequality, and gender. In my third year of a PhD program 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 and profitability. The article has been cited 65 times, reflecting its enduring impact on the field.

Helping to Transform Scholarly Communication

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 was immediately entranced with the revolutionary potential of the medium. Being in graduate school and surround by scholarly journals, I noticed right away that the WWW lowered publication entrance barriers. Basically, anybody with a computer and a bit of tech-savvy could online-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. Ignoring the vigorous and vicarious protests of one faculty member, 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 emergence of pre-print servers and the current emphasis, even by commercial publishers, on open-access options. I developed these ideas in 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,” all of which critiqued the control commercial interests had over the scholarly publication process and all of which advocated for sustainable, scholar-driven alternatives. These works highlighted the importance of equitable access to scholarly knowledge and inspired 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 Globalization, Radical Pedagogy, The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy (still publishing), The Cornerhouse, and AU’s highly regarded International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) (Cookson 2000). During this period I also built the software I needed to run the scholarly enterprises, including a web based MySQL database interface, ejournal management software (still active as “Scholarly Exchange”), and an online conference system, now defunct and replaced by advanced modern variations like Substack.

At the theoretical level, this work was driven by a critical analysis of what sociologists of science termed the “serials crisis”—the severe structural dysfunction of academic publishing (scholarly knowledge production and distribution ) marked, as it still is, by predatory commercial pricing, chronic production delays, and systemic social stratification. My dissertation documented how conglomerates like Elsevier and Springer had established monopoly control over essential research literature, imposing price increases that vastly outstripped inflation and forced libraries into devastating subscription cancellations. This commercial capture of scholarly communication created a perverse economy where publicly funded research became privately commodified, generating profit margins that enriched publishers while eroding the “Baconian ideal” of open, rapid knowledge dissemination originally envisioned for the scientific enterprise.

Moreover, I examined how the glacial pace of traditional publishing—averaging 28 months from submission to print and extending to decades in fields like archaeology—forced essential research into semi-private “invisible colleges,” thereby excluding junior scholars, developing nations, and marginalized groups from the intellectual conversation. This “Matthew Effect” in scholarly communication meant that access to the research frontier required substantial financial and social capital, directly contradicting the democratic promise of universal knowledge. Against the rising tide of neoliberal privatization that threatened to further monetize academic information through pay-per-view models, I argued that electronic journals represented a necessary political and technological intervention—one capable of slashing publication costs by up to 75%, eliminating distribution delays, and restoring scholarly communication as a public good rather than a market commodity.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out this way. Despite early inroads, commercial presses managed to re-colonize scholarly publication, taking the best ideas of the e-publication revolution (open access, rapid publication) and turning them into yet another costly imposition on the post-secondary education and research system. While commercial publishers have successfully monetized open access through exorbitant Article Processing Charges and “hybrid” journal models that double-dip through subscriptions and author fees, the fundamental economics of digital distribution still favor non-commercial alternatives. As we will see, the war is not yet over. New Knowledge Tools like Wiki Software, Semantic Extensions, and now even generative AI, coupled with the same digital infrastructure that enabled the initial transformation, provide yet another opportunity to wrest control of the society’s scholarly knowledge from the commercial presses and return in into the scholars hands. The question today is not whether we possess the technological capacity to democratize scholarly communication, we have that now, but whether academic institutions possess the political will to reclaim control of the research enterprise from corporate interests. I’ll talk more about this below.

Popular Communication: The Socjourn and The Conversation

In addition to taking on the commercial presses, I have actively pursued innovative methods to bridge the gap between academic sociology and public discourse, to take the knowledge produced in the academy and distribute it to the masses. 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 mildly 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 Socjourn, 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 Socjourn, I embraced this new mode of communication where I published several articles with significant global impact, 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)

My work attracts readers across multiple regions, including the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., demonstrating its global relevance. These achievements highlight my ability to translate complex sociological ideas into accessible and impactful discourse, but also bolster Athabasca University’s standing as a leader in inclusive and transformative scholarship.

Mystical Experience

Let’s face it, these hidden laws [of mysticism] are hidden, but they are only hidden by our own ignorance. And the word mystical is just being arrived at through people’s ignorance. There’s nothing mystical about it, only that you’re ignorant of what that entails.” Harrison, George. Living in the Material World. approx. 1:18:50

I pursued a typical career path for the first few years as an assistant professor, mostly focused on the potential of technology to give scholars more control of the thing they produced, knowledge (McGreal et al., 2005; Sosteric & Hesemeir, 2004) . 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. Rather, it was a cathartic release from a deep and pervasive fear instilled by my childhood indoctrination in the Catholic Church. Later, after consideration, I chose to call this a Clearing Experience because it helped me clear deep fears embedded in childhood.

The experience itself lasted only a few moments; however, it unleashed an overwhelming and inexplicable flow of creative energy. A few days after the experience, I sat down at the keyboard and began spewing words onto the page. The information itself, tightly packed, symbolic, metaphysical, visionary, mantic, poetic, and in some cases questionable and quite weird, blew apart not only the spiritual indoctrination I had received as a child but also the ontological and epistemological 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 eventually forced to reconsider everything I had ever learned about human nature, evolution, consciousness, spirituality, and human potential. It was quite the shock; a lightning strike, metaphorically speaking.

At this point you might thinking that mystical experiences are rare, especially among academics. But you would be wrong. Mystical experiences are actually quite common (Sosteric, 2018a), even amongst academics. Physicists have them (Wilber, 2001). Social scientists have them (Rowbotham, 1980). Sociologists have them. Psychologists have them. Abraham Maslow, for example, had several mystical/visionary experiences (“Abraham Maslow,” 2025). One vision which occurred the day following Pearl Harbor completely transformed his life trajectory and his scholarly work, putting him on a mission to develop what he called a Psychology for the Peace Table (Sosteric, 2025). I am certain there are a lot more academics out there who have had these experiences; it is just that many are too afraid to admit it, much less talk about it.

Three Choices

As the information spewed on the page I realized I had some choices to make. I could either continue spewing on the page to see where it would lead, or I could stop and go back to my technology research. I chose to continue, obviously, and it was an easy choice. Objectively, what had just happened to me was fascinating and I did exactly what any self respecting, well trained scholar would do when a fascinating thing had just shown up at their door–I researched it. There was some initial internal resistance. In the beginning I did think maybe I was a little unhinged and I was definitely concerned with the potential impact on my career if colleagues found out I was engaged in daily connection practice, but I thought I’d just keep things to myself until I felt ready to talk about it openly. That seemed safe.

Once I made my decision to keep spewing, I went and had a brief look at the scholarly literature. There I found Stace, Hood, Forman, Groff, James, Maslow, Versulius, Edward Carpenter, and a single sociological-duo, Back and Bourque, who published three or four papers in the late 1960s. If I’m going to be totally honest, I couldn’t really find anything that helpful in the scholarly literature.

For one, it was sparse, which was a bit surprising when I learned of the ubiquity of these experiences (Sosteric, 2018a). You would have thought, given how common they are in the general population, there’d have been more interest.

For two, while there were some descriptions of the experiences, the literature did not explain what it was or why it was happening. There were observations, but that was about all. I tried looking in the New Age bookstore for a bit, but that wasn’t any better. The shelves were a mish-mash mess of ancient (Buddhism, Vedism, Catholicism, Zoroastrianism), modern (Blavatsky, Crowley, Waite), and extraterrestrial “wisdom” cooked up, as I realized later, in a kitchen owned and controlled by big corporations (Carette & King, 2008). Honestly, I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it at all.

At a certain point early on I realized I wasn’t going to find much help in the literature. If I was going to understand these experiences, I was going to have to figure it out by myself. It is at that point that I had to make a second choice, a methodological one; how was I going to study this? After a bit of thought, I decided to “go native.” I decided to stop reading, dive right in full immersion, and just go wherever the flow would take me, at least for a while. It would be an ethnographic field study, a participant observation of Self with a healthy side of ex-post-facto introspective self-reflection served up on a dish of scientific faith that I could eventually figure it out. The methodological choices was a natural choice. I had done the ethnographic participant thing before in a simpler form (Sosteric, 1999) and I supposed I could do it again.

So that is what I did. I stopped reading and fully immersed myself in the spew. I made the decision to write it all down as transparently and accurately as I could manage. I wasn’t concerned with how weird it might be or if it made any logical sense, at least in the beginning. I figure I’d work thing about and judge it all later. My concern in the beginning was to just get it all down as accurately as I could. My only stipulation was that I would not write anything down that I thought would lead to harm for any other living being. Truth for the highest good of all beings was my early connection mantra.

Confronting the Spew

I have to admit, in the early days the information that spewed out wasn’t always the best quality. In many cases it was fascinating and enlightening, but there were also several issues.

For one, there was a lot of it. It poured onto the page as fast as my touch-typing fingers (80+ WPM) could manage.

For two, it was astonishing in its breadth and depth, covering cosmology, psychology, sociology, and parts in between.

For three, much of it went beyond anything I had ever been taught before. Not that everything that came out hadn’t been taught before. There was familiar information and later when I started up research again I found syncretic ideas everywhere. It was just some of the information was new to me, coming from a source internal to me.

Finally, four, the information was, how shall I say, energetically complex. The best way I can describe this is to imagine sitting blindfolded in a room with several knowledgeable experts around you. They all take turns talking at you. You can’t see their faces but you know there are different people talking to you because the things they talk about are unique to their expertise and their voices all sound different. They all have their unique vibrational fingerprint.

At some point early on in the process I began to understand why mystics of past and present say that the experiences are ineffable. It’s not that we cannot understand, it is that it takes a lot of time and effort to get it all down and sort it all out, more time than most people have and more effort than most are willing to apply. The ineffability arises from the volume and complexity of the information, the need for extended processing (necessitated by the lack of a coherent frame), and the given inability to express it all in a few sentences, or even a few books.

At a certain point in the early process I began to dimly realize the enormity of the task ahead. It wasn’t just getting it all down, it was going to be separating wheat from chaff, sorting things all out, organizing, and finally presenting it all a way that made sense. As my mind gradually wrapped itself around the broad vista ahead, I had to make a final choice. Devote what could very well be the rest of my life to this thing or walk away, partially enlightened but firmly back in normal space. I thought about it for a while, thought about the risks, the effort, the discipline that would be required. I struggled with self-doubt. Who was I, after all, to undertake such a task? I eventually put aside the doubts and decided to continue. So much fascinating information. And besides, I’m a trained researcher. It was very fascinating and I wanted to figure it out. I felt I probably had the skills to do so, and so that is what I did, I set out on a path to piece it all together into what I hoped would be an un-ineffable corpus that made coherent logical and empirical sense. A big task, true, but as I later realized I was uniquely positioned (historically and demographically) to carry this out. Notably, there were three things, three privileges, that made it possible for me to initiate the journey and blaze a (hopefully) clear path through the spew.

The Three Privileges

One, I had a job at a distance-ed university that allowed me the freedom to explore on my own terms. I didn’t have weekly classes (all courses were online), I had minimal administrative duties, and I worked out of the home so I had no travel time. My job gave me a remarkable amount of quiet time and I maximized the opportunity to explore and theorize that this gave me. I experienced, explored, wrote, researched. By my own loose estimate, I’ve put in over 20,000 hours analyzing, sorting, supporting, revising, and rewriting. There is no way I could have done this with a job in a regular university, much less a regular job.

Two, owing to my early interest in digital scholarly communication and software development, I was tech-savvy. I realized early that I could use information technology to help, and so that is what I did.

First, I used a word processor to write and edit. At first glance this might not 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 significance. Just imagine if Christ, Mohammed, Meister Eckhart, Joseph Smith, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Freud, Karl Marx, or anybody else for that matter all had word processors to help them write things down. Their output would have been more prolific, better organized, and they would have had more control over presentation. I explore the implications of this in two articles on Abraham Maslow and his Eupsychian Theory (Sosteric, 2026a; Sosteric, 2026b).
Second, I created the SpiritWiki, a MediaWiki-driven repository of all the things I’ve been thinking about since the beginning. II put it in place shortly after I began spewing to help me sort things out and have been writing concepts and taking notes in it ever since. It now contains over 1800 curated concepts (many of which are original, like Fabric of Consciousness, Resident Monadic Consciousness, Connection Experience). It started off as a sort of online, open “scholar’s notebook” but over the course of 20+ years has evolved into what I am calling a Knowledge System, a “structured, dynamic, and transdisciplinary architecture for the production, organization, storage, validation, and dissemination of knowledge” (Knowledge System, 2025). in this case SW is a knowledge system devoted to human development and the actuation of full human potential. Focussed information repository.
I have to say, the SpiritWiki has been an invaluable tool in helping me advance not only my understanding but also the theoretical coherence of it all. It puts everything in an easily accessible place. It tracks and changes the evolution of the idea over time. It allows semantic interconnections. It’s real time. [add more]. Talk more about it below Without this very recent mid-2000s invention, this Memex, this “personal memory system,” this Artificial Memory as Lars Ludwig talked called his invention, I would never have been able to get going.

Three, the last thing that helped me properly sort it all out, if you can call the various blobs I’ve got floating around now “properly sorted,” was my sociological training. The training from that discipline provided clear insight into the economic forces that continue to have undue influence over humanity’s understanding of itself. This was a big thing and very important. Sociology kept me grounded. Without it I might have floated off into weird mystical spaces like sometimes happens (I’m thinking Agehananda Bharati and Ram Dass here) or ended up repeating disinformation and ideology seeded, as I discovered, by economic elites (Sosteric, 2014,; Sosteric, 2020; Sosteric, under review).

So, there you go.

Three choices which moved me forward on a path cleared by fortune , invention, and little bit of post-secondary education.

Some Things That I’ve Learned

At this point I’m going to skip over a lot of the details in how I got to where I am today and just focus in a few of the important things I’ve learned as I wend on my merry way starting with

1. Mystical Experiences are Real and Important and Cannot be Ignored

One of the first things I realized was that mystical experiences, what I quickly came to call Connection Experiences are real, ubiquitous, and highly significant (Bidney, 2004; Hawks, 2002; Miller & Baca, 2001; Sosteric, 2018a). They are important and they need to be studied.

This might not sound to radical to most, but for a sociologist like me this this is actual heresy of the kind that got Rupert Sheldrake ridiculed in front of the entire scientific community (Freeman, 2005). Outside of a few big names (Joachim Wach, Ernst Troeltsch, and Edward Carpenter being the three prime examples) and a bit of research interest in the 1960s (Bourque, 1969; Bourque & Back, 1971; Bourque & Back, 1968), sociologists have nothing useful to say about mystical experiences. In fact, we’ve actively dismissed it (just wait until you hear about my experience with Sociological Forum). I was called a “space cadet” and “not a serious scholar” for showing interest.

Other disciplines have been a bit more open. Philosopher Stace , for example, called mystical experience “a psychological fact of which there is abundant evidence” and further said 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). Psychology has been studying it (in the margins true, but still studying it) since William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience (1903). Even historians have shown significant interest (Versluis, 2007).

But sociology?

Crickets.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to get a little sacrilege get in my way. I learned early that Connection Experiences are real, ubiquitous, and highly significant and we need to be taking a serious sociological look

2. Humans Have a Dual Consciousness

Second thing I learned … what we might call a Dual Consciousness Theory, the idea that the human body is characterized by two separate consciousnesses, two separate egos, a Bodily Ego that emerges from the neurological operations of the body and a Spiritual Ego emerges from the larger, independent Fabric of Consciousness. A “mystical experience” occurs when these two ego’s, normally disconnected as a consequence of Toxic Socialization, achieve a brief Connection, either spontaneously or as a consequences of various Connection Practices, triggers a Connection Experience which can be then be characterized along five Connection Axes (duration, intensity, quality, content, and outcome).

3. Nomenclature Confusion

Let’s face it, these hidden laws [of mysticism] are hidden, but they are only hidden by our own ignorance. And the word mystical is just being arrived at through people’s ignorance. There’s nothing mystical about it, only that you’re ignorant of what that entail. George Harrison. Living in the Material World.

A second thing learned, particularly as I began to dive into the literature, was we all suffer from Nomenclature Confusion. As defined in the SpiritWiki, nomenclature confusion refers to the proliferation and inconsistent use of terms employed to describe the core elements and concepts surrounding the experience and study of “mystical” experience” and related phenomenon.

Take the concept of mystical experience, for example.

Folks have called these things Activation Experiences, Aesthetic Experiences, Birth Experiences, Clearing Experience, Completion Experiences, Death Experiences, Deep Flow Experiences, Diminutive Experiences, Dream Experience, Flow Experiences, Peak Experiences, Plateau Experiences, Push Experiences, Rebirth Experiences, Restorative Experiences, Union Experiences, Pure Consciousness Events, Religious Experience, and so on and so on.

Or, consider the concept of a soul.

Here we have Ajayu, Angel, Atman, Augoeides, Big Self, Blazing Star, Brahman, Bright Light, Buddha Nature, CEFA, Deep Self, Divine Ego, E, Father in Heaven, Genuine Self, God Self, Great Self, Guardian Angel, Higher Genius, Higher Self, Highest Self, Holy Spirit, Immortal Spirit, Inner Healing Intelligence, Inner Radar, Inner Self, Inner-Self, Intrinsic Consciousness, Kra, La, Monad, Monadic Consciousness, Monadic Intensification, Nagi, Neshamah, Ohr, Original Face, Paramatman, Real Ego, Real Self, Sakshi Chaitanya, Saug, Self, Soul, Spirit, Supreme Self, The Four Unthinkables, The Witness, Transcendental Self, True Self, Universal Being, Universal Deity, Universal Self, and Upstairs Mind.

It is really quite ridiculous.

My solution to all this, as counterintuitive as it might sound, was to coin a series of grounded and culturally neutral terms to describe the core elements of mystical experience. Thus when I talk about my initial mystical experience (Sosteric, 202) I speak of it as a Connection Experience induced by the ingestion of a small about of cannabis, one of many available Connection Supplements (a.k.a. entheogens) used as part of my daily, disciplined Connection Practice.

There is a whole terminology I’ve developed surrounding the idea of Connection. You can browse the terms on the SpiritWiki pages devoted to unwrapping this terminology (https://spiritwiki.lightningpath.org/index.php/Connection).

These nomenclature, and particularly the five axes, provide a comprehensive and interoperable method for categorizing and comparing all forms of connection experience, offering a standardized analytical schema that mitigates terminological chaos, facilitates cross-cultural synthesis, and enables systematic empirical comparison across traditions, disciplines, and experiential modalities.If that sounds a little weird it is, but not really, at least not these days. The possibility of “connection” to a field or fabric of consciousness is entertained theoretically by several scholars these days, including a guy by the name of Mocombe (2021) who is trying to develop a “non-local” theory of consciousness to explain quantum biological effects by suggesting that they arise from connection to a “Consciousness Field,” made up of “psychions,” that contains all experiences and all information ever since the beginning and to the end of time. I talk about it in this Peace Table article “The Shifting Paradigm in the Science of Consciousness.”

4. The Accumulating Class has Colonized Our Understanding of Human Potential and Human Nature

tarot-devil Another thing I learned pretty early on was that the accumulating class has colonized our understanding of human “spirituality.” I first noticed this when I took a sociological look at the Western Tarot Deck. When I did I learned that Tarot was an ideological creation of Freemasons during the Industrial Revolution (Sosteric, 2014). I learned this when the foremost historians of Tarot called it the “…most successful propaganda campaign ever launched; not by a very long way the most important, but the most completely successful. An entire false history, and false interpretation, of the Tarot pack was concocted by occultist; and it is all but universally believed.” (Decker, Depaulis, and Dummet, 1996: 27). I write about it in some detail in my tarot case study entitled A Sociology of Tarot (Sosteric, 2014).

I learned about the colonization of human spirituality 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 a political threat and who was, consequently, assassinated by the Accumulating Class (Sosteric, 2020). I talk about that in my article Rethinking the Origins and Purpose of Religion: Jesus, Constantine, and the Containment of Global Revolution.

I found this interference a third time while exploring the ancient Zoroastrian faith, which I discovered is an important 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” (Sosteric, 2024) The articles are listed below for easy access.

Rethinking the Origins and Purpose of Religion - Jesus, Constantine, and the Containment of Global Revolution
From Zoroaster to Star Wars, Jesus to Marx: the Art, Science, and Technology of Human Manipulation -
Mystical Experience and Global Revolution
Star Wars is a Religion that Primes us All for War - article written in The Conversation

5. Consequently, we Need New Theoretical Frameworks

Finally, learned was that we need new theoretical frameworks. old ones inadequate, colonized, based on ideologically corrupted understanding of human nature and human potential. we need what I would call a coherent, advanced,Human Development Framework), becomes increasingly catastrophic.

a. need new psychological framework. current one, ego, superego, id, behaviourism, materialist, etc. completley inadequate. work here (list concepts)

new Needs and Attachment Theory - old ones inadequate [ explain why by drawing on “It takes a village”]
new personality framework
new pathologyframework
new approach to psychological and emotional healing and connetion (healing framework and connection frameworks)
new institutional framework
new ethical frameworks.
new creative frameworks.

b. new metaphysical framework. Need to decolonize our understanding of human nature and connection. involves reaching in decolonizing religion. bit of the work exposed in from zoroaster, rethinking the origins and purpose of religion, mystical experience and global revolution). most of it on SW or in repo.lightningpath.org. concepts Seven Pillars of AS

new metaphysical framework . A revitalization and clarification of core metaphysical concepts, including the dual structure of the human being (spiritual and bodily egos), the Fabric of Consciousness, and the central role of Connection Experiences (CEs) in human health and development.
Need new master narrative, new creation tempalte I would call it. includes
new conceptual and narrative tools to go along with that (metaphors, allegories, instruments,Nadir-Zenith-Clearing typology provide the necessary language and clarity for individuals to interpret, validate, and integrate their own experience

finally, New methods. particular important one autoethnography. modern instantiation of introspection.

FULL CIRCLE

6. Using Knowledge Frameworks to Transform the World

Coming up with new frameworks not an easy task. organizing and presenting not an easy task. teaching not an easy task. final thing I want to talk about here is

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.

Money Moksha - video version of Rocket Scientists’ Guide to Money and the Economy
Allegory of the Bucket
Who are You?
What is the Lightning Path?
What is your Purpose in Life?

FYI, 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. The poems are mantic, with themes that are eschatological, transformative, emancipatory, and critical.

Parables and Allegories

In addition to the poems 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 or the inclination to write it out.

Prose

In addition to the poems and poetry that spewed out, several books drafts gushed as well. These book drafts ranged from basic spirituality (The Great Awakening: Concepts and Techniques for Successful Spiritual Practice) through various Rocket Guides to some other stuff which I’ll talk about later because these books, written during the early phase of my research explorations, are in need of revision and currently unavailable. I hope to get back to them towards the end of 2026.

Impact

Counting citations, you wouldn’t think I’m having that big of an impact. But citations have never been a great way to assess impact and now, with the globally interconnected Internet, they can be quite misleading. For example, I have an “H” score of 5 or 10 currently, which is low. But is that my true research or theoretical impact? Years ago I wrote an article in the Socjourn on the how the concept of the “Alpha Male” is invalid. This was picked up by “Adam Ruins Everything” and put into a segment on YouTube which currently has over 6 million views. A year after that video came out, I wrote the same idea for The Conversation in an article entitled “Are Bullies Alpha Males or Sick Puppies.” It now has over 15,000 reads in six publications, including RawStory.

Or, consider my academia.edu site. Here I have 2,137 followers. This AI generated summary of my statistics log on academia.edu shows a readership in 198 countries with close to 9,000 downloads and a significant level of engagement.

References

Abraham Maslow. (2025). In The SpiritWiki. https://spiritwiki.lightningpath.org/index.php/Knowledge_Technology

Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

Bidney, M. (2004). Epiphany in autobiography: The quantum changes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 60(5), 471–480.

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