continued from Part 3 . . .
The next few weeks were a blur. I’d be up all night with Zephyr and her new friends at the Fortean Society, just tagging along on their investigations, feeling miserable and ignored, and nodding off at my laptop during the day. They were calling it the Cincinnati Mothman. Adding the locality became a tradition after the Chicago flap in the late 20-teens. It didn’t appear every time I slept, or daydreamed, or just zoned out from exhaustion, but the correlation was pretty strong.
Tulpas are semi-sentient thought forms from the Tibetan tradition. The modern tulpamancers on 4chan and Reddit talk about turning their bodies over to their creations, but they aren’t supposed to leave your body and fly around scaring people.
Over-stimulated and overwhelmed, I lost the ability to direct it. It just wandered around, appearing in random places that I happened to be thinking about, or places that I had been years ago. There did appear to be a radius of effect. There were no sightings that I could find at my middle-school summer camp in Wisconsin, or near my grandparents’ house in Florida, or the little German town where I did study abroad during college.
Mostly I just stalked Zephyr. I’d think about her, imagine her, and sometimes I’d just be there, watching her. She rarely saw me back, but when she did, it was always clear she saw the Mothman and not “bearded balding Bryan with a ‘y’.” There was no banter with the Mothman. After that first time, when she froze in her window, in just a t-shirt (no panties), with toothpaste on her chin, she always went with adrenaline, fight over flight. It never occurred to her, in the moment, to whip out her phone and take a picture. I don’t know if it would have showed anything if she had. The tulpamancers talk about these things as “controlled hallucinations.”
On one occasion when she did see me, she wigged out and started throwing salt. She was crying. I felt awful. But it gave me an idea.
“We should try and banish this thing, formally, with a ritual,” I said to her, at the coffee shop.
“You know how to do that? For real?”
“Sure. But I’m not interested in having other people around, getting in the way. No equipment, no cameras.”
“Fine with me, as long as you get rid of him.”
“Why are you so scared of it? It hasn’t done anything to you.”
“He is a fucking monster. I’m supposed to be scared of monsters. It’s the whole fucking point of monsters.”
Why my accidental astral projection took the form of a toxic red-eyed angel from an abandoned dynamite plant in West Virginia, instead of a satyr or a swan or a shower of golden sparkles, like Zeus, I have no idea. Probably I need therapy. Or maybe Jung was wrong, and archetypes are not eternal but more situational. It didn’t really matter at that point. I had a chance to endear myself to Zephyr in a big way, and I was going to take advantage of it.
Home Base with Jeff Warren
This week I stumbled across a new Substack.
Not entirely a coincidence, because I met Jeff Warren at a retreat center called the Lama Foundation in New Mexico about ten years ago. I was there on the National Science Foundation’s dime, working on my evolution podcast, VSI. Earlier episodes of that show are posted on Doctor Eclectic here. I did not interview Jeff at that time, but I did interview some of the other academics and activists. Those episodes will probably make it to this site sometime this summer, once classes are over.
I have never spoken to Jeff since then, but I found his first book, The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness, at my local public library. He spent a year journalistically bopping around from lab to lab, being experimented on by neuroscientists and writing about it (including some nifty-neato cartoons!). I liked it so much I’ve been using the companion website in my neuro classes ever since. One of the first things I have them do is watch this video for an overview. That book-based website is no longer updated, which is one reason I was excited to find the new Substack and shared it with my current students the very next day.
Jeff is committed to the cause, but is also something of a goofball. If you’ve read literally anything of this newsletter, I’m sure you can see the similarities. This is from the transcript of the Season 2 opener of the podcast he does with Tasha Schumann.
Okay, the way I think of what this podcast is, well, it's straight up, it's about practice.
It's about exploring different weird best practices in different domains of human life, from meditation to therapy to psychedelics to movement to communication, art, drawing, voice, you know, it could be really any domain.
And that is to connect, sort of help people connect to tools and resources that they can use in their life.
But I mean, I kind of think the bigger picture for me is it's about helping people sensitize to their internal experience, to develop a kind of literacy of consciousness, to get more clear about all these subtle things that happen in experience, absorption, letting go, insights, like these aspects of our experience that are so fundamental that we don't often don't even know are kind of happening.
He smiles a lot more than I do, and the gray in his beard is more obvious because he’s not a blonde, but yeah, interdisciplinary ‘brother from another mother’ kind of thing. He has the other half of this amulet, which for me is a Cheers joke.
Little did I know (until just now) where that joke originally came from.
I searched for the phrase and turned up this delightful 1905 children's book by Edith Nesbit, who happens to be a co-founder of the selfsame Evil Organization (the Fabian society) plaguing Mr. Schuyler in his autobiography Black and Conservative.
Now there’s a rabbit hole I’m not going down on this particular day. If you happen to do so, please
Finally, I’ve mentioned Chloe the Wonder Dog and her participation in the Dog Aging Project a few times.
Those researchers have now started a Dog Aging Institute to raise money now that their NIH funding is running out. Their impact metrics infographic, copied from their latest newsletter, is below.
To give them a small boost, I include a link to The Sample, a newsletter recommendation service.