Month: October 2025

A Few Notes On Psychic Self-Defense

John Michael Greer329 Comments

It’s a longstanding custom on this blog that whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject I’ll discuss in the fifth Wednesday post. This month, by a large plurality, readers asked for an essay on psychic self-defense: the art of protecting yourself against hostile or…

October 2025 Open Post

John Michael Greer464 Comments

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered)…

The No-Ego Ego Trip: An Interlude

John Michael Greer274 Comments

Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery…

A Vision: The Principal Symbol

John Michael Greer112 Comments

Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, it’s time for us to plunge into the depths of Yeats’s Vision. That’s easy, in a certain sense, because Yeats starts out the main body of our text by tossing the reader straightway into the deep end of the pool, launching at once into the core…

Situationism: Laughter from the Empyrean

John Michael Greer347 Comments

Tolerably often, when I’m reading any of the documents that came out of the original Situationist International, I end up feeling as though the author is caught up in a desperate struggle between his own Marxist presuppositions and the world as it actually exists. That’s common enough in 20th century Marxist literature from outside the…