Video Talks

Here are an assortment of talks / explorations from over the years, many with immersive sound and graphics.

How to Explore Consciousness

There are few activities more thrilling than the exploration of consciousness, particularly in the form of intelligent spiritual practice. A talk on some of the terrains of meditation experience and their attendant risks and benefits.

Why Meditate

Maybe meditation is something you want to pursue, maybe it isn't. In this ten minute clip, I lay out my own reasons for practice, and discuss an experience I had on retreat that brought the whole thing home.

Mansion of The Mind

An animated tour through waking, sleeping and dreaming consciousness, made by the Discovery channel. Features a fire-breathing dragon, a magical tennis ball, a lot of hand waving and an embarrassing pimp roll.

Radio Docs

I’m one of the founding producers of CBC Radio’s The Current, and have done pieces for Ideas and Tapestry . Here are a few highlights.

Ocean Mind

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... more

While You Were Out

Two CBC Ideas documentaries on sleep and dreaming. We spend 1/3 of our lives asleep, and yet there is no consensus as to why. Sleep and dreaming are deeply mysterious. The more you examine them, the stranger and more variegated they get.

The Real World of Dreams

Dreamy radio. Thirty minutes of craven lusty anguished interiority and writer Rodger Kamenetz' "authentic self."

Websites

The Head Trip

Made this site when The Head Trip - came out. If you click on each wheel segment you can read a little blurb about each different state of consciousness. Also excerpts the entire introduction of the book, and has some other stuff too.

Urbantherapy

“Cities are plastic by nature. We mold them in our own images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them." -Jonathan Raban, Soft City. I spent 2 years building an impressionist encyclopaedia of cities. Read about it here.

Illustrations

The comic panel is to the scientific fig what subjective experience is to objective brain science: sloppy expressionist truant vs anal materialist authority. My book, The Head Trip was an attempt to bridge these two worlds.

The Author’s Hypnagogic Wakeup

Where exactly do these hypnagogic images come from, and is there any logic to their appearance? Are they a species of dream, and if so, do they appear suddenly, as fully developed dramas, or do they evolve more gradually, as part of some furtive and mysterious psychic progression? The dramatic tension is almost unbearable.

Mavromatis’ Four Stages of Hypnagogia

The mysterious psychologist Andreas Mavromatis – another obsessive classifier – spent a lot of time trying to work out the exact progression of hypnagogic experiences. Hypnagogia: the Everyman’s Trip.

Inventions

Wheel of Consciousness Animation

Around the Wheel each state of consciousness animated by changes in global brain activation, from the Hypnagogic state at sleep onset through to the mysterious depths of Pure Awareness

The Consciousness Mixing Board

A summary of much of what I learned while writing and researching The Head Trip. Via expectations, suggestion and possibly even intention, we can learn to remix consciousness. We live in special-effects studios of the mind

The Dream Director

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.... more