My Goddard Thesis Presentation is Now Online for Your Viewing Pleasure

I just uploaded to Google Video my thesis presentation I did to graduate from Goddard College in February, 2008. It is entitled "Initiation in Light of Religion, Ritual, Mythology, the Tarot, and the Spiritus." It explores the phenomenon of initiation within religion, the occult, mythology, the tarot and yoga. It's fairly sloppy in many parts, but it generally presents the main idea, which is that all true spiritual paths, like rivers, find themselves, sooner or later, dissolved into the ocean of Divine Consciousness. Humankind has always looked to the blackness beyond the stars and wondered the reason for our earthly existence. The variegated spiritual traditions of the globe are and have always been technologies for reaching higher states of consciousness, which peculiarly place us within the direct presence of what we have always called Spirit, or the Absolute, or God. I define initiation here as the absolutely unique and individual process of gradual illumination and inner unfolding of spiritual awareness and expanded consciousness within the human, usually marked by custom, symbolism, ritual, altered states of consciousness, ecstatic or ascetic practice, the ingestion of entheogenic substances, or any other technology available. It is that process which I investigated in my thesis, and that is investigated in this presentation. It would have been much more lucid and orderly if I hadn't been up all night snorting Klonopin and chugging Franzia with a psychotic yet gorgeous stranger the night before. Enjoy!

Happy Trails!