Teaching Spring 2024 in the Kosmos Institute's Mastery Series
I am honored to announce that I will be teaching a nine-class course through the Kosmos Institute this spring! The founders of the organization have pulled together an incredible program, and I will be presenting the first installment of the 2024-2025 Mastery Series beginning in late March.
Lots to unpack here, so let's begin with a summary of exactly what Kosmos is and its goals:
Kosmos Institute is a new and stable home for the sacred art of free inquiry. We are an academic locus for the transformation of individual and collective consciousness which occurs through engagement with emergent and ancient knowledge systems within the interdisciplinary precincts of Mythology, Esotericism, and Archetypes.
We believe these fields belong together in the perennial search for truth, a search that is usually seen as the exclusive domain of science on the one hand, and religion and the cynical denials of analytic philosophy on the other.
As you can tell from the accompanying image, the entire year is full of incredible scholarship, of which my course is just the first. Over nine Saturdays, I will be presenting a look at Near Death Experiences through a comparative, archetypal lens. Of course, if you know anything about me, it's not going to be just about NDEs. The NDE is a gateway to understanding all unexplained phenomena, just one prism of many through which these topics are refracted.
Although human beings have always been preoccupied with mysteries, one of these endures above all others for the sheer implications it raises: what happens to us after we die? Does human consciousness persist? Do our actions in this life incur metaphysical consequences to face after death?
These types of queries formed the bedrock for countless religious ideas, from early indigenous belief to antiquity and into the modern era. The importance placed on this, the greatest of all mysteries, invited layer upon layer of dogma, obscuring the issue in many ways.
If we strip away the arbitrary layer of human belief, however, we are left with a startling amount of evidence suggesting that, indeed, some aspect of the human experience perseveres following death. This statement finds an abundance of support from the testimonies of those who claim to have had Near-Death Experiences.
Current resuscitative techniques and other medical advancements have made NDEs easier to study and verify. This does not mean that they are an experiential artifact of modernity, however. A close examination of ancient and indigenous traditions from around the world demonstrates that little about the core experience has changed over time, which continues in the face of cultural disparities.
While the notion that consciousness survives death is confrontational in its own right, it seems that the NDE—itself already a threshold event—can potentially serve as a gateway to understanding other modalities of contact with the more-than-human world. When a comparative approach is applied, we see resonances with all varieties of contact experiences, including other altered states of consciousness and interactions with non-human intelligences.
Roughly speaking, this course is broken into two halves: the first half is an examination of the phenomenon itself, including support for its objective existence, while the second half seeks to dismantle boundaries between the NDE and other contact modalities not currently accepted by mainstream consensus.
I said it earlier, but it bears repeating: I am honored beyond words to be invited to participate in this opportunity. Additionally, the ability to share this information through a different format than my usual vector is exciting—books are great, but limited in how they can present information, and certainly don't facilitate easy discussions. I have some special surprises planned for this course that I know you will love!
I encourage anyone who is interested in delving deeper into NDEs (especially their interdisciplinary qualities, which are not remarked upon nearly enough) to head on over to the landing page for the course and consider signing up. We are still a little way out, but the end of March will be here before you know it!
