Rabbit Hole

Starred as the “on-camera investigator” for this Vision TV special. “Remote viewing” is the purported ability to psychically “see” through time and space to remote events and scenes. It sounds like baloney, but if you actually take the time to read about the history of ESP research you find a lot of intriguing experiments and a great number of intelligent sympathizers…

There’s a new mind theory out there … The theory is worth paying attention to because, well, it’s about you. Or at least two of you: the careful, analytic you, and your misguided shadow, who spends altogether too much time in the “wrong” section of the bookstore. One of you is a Mechanist. The other is a Mentalist. Though you may not realize it, you are two foot soldiers on opposing sides of a battle that began in utero…

My guide to all the weird permutations of waking and sleeping consciousness – the UK’s Independent called it “exhilarating,” The New York Times’s Sandra Blakeslee called it “audacious, enchanting, and often hilarious.” My Mom called it “long.”

Fifty million years ago we shared a common ancestor, a shared seed of mammalian sentience and emotionality. Then we split: one branch stayed on land, and one returned to the water. These two docs are about the mind that returned to the water. How did the ocean shape the brains, the societies, and the sensory worlds of whales and dolphins?

By the end of the twentieth century, scientists had scoured the far reaches of the material world. It was then that a few brave travelers turned in a different direction: inward!

Publishing a book is a bit like firing one of those emergency flares into the air. You never know who it’s going to attract. Most of the time nobody. You set the flare off in the Arctic tundra, get excited for some human contact, the light dims, cold sets in, and you die of exposure. But once in awhile someone comes by to take a look. And once and a while they bring with them something really cool.

A collection of academic essays edited by Alex Kohav that explores personal, theoretical, and historical dimensions of mystical experience. Alex contacted me about including my New York Times piece “The Anxiety of the Long-Distance Meditator” – all about striving to get to “initial enlightenment” via advanced meditation. It didn’t really work.

Does nature have an interior aspect – as we do – and if so, what is the relationship between that “mind” and ours? Do you have to be high to wonder about this?

Finally, one answer to a question that is top of everyone’s mind: what is it like to be a 10-ton echolocating sperm whale with stumpy flippers but excellent aqua-dynamics?

My first book. It took two months and they paid me six grand. Writing the wildlife guide was the highlight.