A Letter from the Editor – by Jeremy D. Johnson

Originally published on Metapsychosis.com.


We’re live. After many months of preparation, design, planning and team assembling, Metapsychosis: Journal of Consciousness, Culture and Planetary Thought has flickered into existence from the digital protosphere.

Our wish is for this publication to flourish from the collective intelligence of its readers, artists, and writers. We dreamed it up, but the dream belongs to everybody. The dream belongs to you.

We wanted to create a space, a literary space, where art could respond to global, technological, and political overload. Where spiritual wisdom could interface with critical thinking. Where knowledge could mutate into an art form. Most importantly, a platform where we could mix and mutate our ideas into emergent conversations about the future; about what it means to relate with another in a planetary context. Our journal asks: what can we become? How might we realize potential futures? Can we do so with both the arts and the sciences? Knowledge-Art?

Surely any kind of change must first occur through the art of conversation, and literature, one might argue, is a form of conversation with its host culture.

Metapsychosis attempts to speak to and with art, facilitate a space where inquiries can be made and critiques brought forth, but also functions as an open studio where experimental acts in creative and philosophical inquiry can yield insight into a systemic and often times overwhelming planetary crisis.

My friend and artistic director (AKA “shadow government") Marco V. Morelli has provided this video invocation as both an explanation of our project and an expression. Where our descriptions trail off, muse-filled invocations follow…

https://vimeo.com/metapsychosis/inception

For my own invocation, I offer a constellating act of starry night, which in an earlier draft became the creative inception for my part in developing the journal.

We’re looking for artists and writers who have a unique sensitivity to intuit latent possibilities in the present. As Radiohead recently put it: “The future is inside us, it’s not somewhere else.” Metapsychosis is interested in working with individuals who have their finger on the cultural pulse, as it were. For this launch week, Kingsley L. Dennis writes about the convergence of digital gnosticism and planetary problem-solving. Vanessa D. Fisher explores the hidden world of gender and sexuality. Ania Chapska exposes our literary senses to the smokey flames of Varanasi. William Irwin Thompson offers that often rare and direct poetry that pierces through the veil of the larger ecology of consciousness into human life.
###Joining the Infinite Conversation
Some of you may already be familiar with our platform project, A Theory of Everybody, which dreamed up Metapsychosis as well as its complementary book club, #LITGEEKS: an unusually hardcore book club, a podcast network, Infinite Conversations, and our community forum by the same name. These are all part of one, big, cohesive conversation we’ll be having together about literally everything, and everything literary. As Marco described it, our dream was to put together a “depthosphere” to explore what it means to truly live, create, and survive as a planetary denizen in the 21st century.

We hope you explore this inquiry with us. Infinite Conversations await.

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This is a beautiful introduction to our project, @Jeremy. Somehow I feel that Metapsychosis came out of an adjacent dimension through me to find you—for what alien purposes we’re in the process of discovering.

I look forward to getting to know the myriad offspring of our multi-mind melds!

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I love how fundamentally similar, yet divergent in expression, I see your two introductions. Complementary alignment.

Something I’ve often thought a lot about the last few years is that connection, in and of itself, is an act of creation. A connection between two things creates a new thing, both yet neither. The way a line connects two dots into a line, or blue and yellow make green. Connection is fundamentally transformative, because time moves forward, so it can’t be undone.

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…aliens…shadow governments…

alien = me

I’m finding that in these very chaotic/disruptive/transformative times that deeper (more human, less instrumental) relationships are the primary path to work with my own shadow materials (and you yours) as we recover lost magical truths about ourselves.

What bravery is required because of the necessary mountain climbing and mountain moving.

So glad to see this particular community forming up to assist in the united journey.

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