T MCK X Ephemera

Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.

I am interested in the psychology of religion and religious experience, generally; and especially in the meditative practices of Theravadin and Zen Buddhism. Since 1981 I have also focused on the use and abuse of entheogens, or psychedelic plants and drugs. In the spring of 2009 I began to look into ayahuasca, a pan-Amazonian entheogen, especially interested in its curative effects on cancer patients, in Peru. A second major area of interest, since September 11, 2001, is in the psychology of political awareness and in the social psychology of authoritarianism, the authoritarian personality, and the rise of fascism in the United States and around the world. I have been observing, writing, and speaking about what I call The Psychology of Non Perception, the title of a work in progress, which is an analysis of the strategies of denial, ignorance, and repression concerning (especially) the events of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington DC. This work draws heavily on the observations of Solomon Asch, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and others. Asch, especially, a social psychologist, and refugee of Nazism, observed an appallingly large percentage of his experimental subjects preferred a socially constructed reality to a true one, even when that true one presents itself unambiguously to the senses. I am also interested in the psychology of peak performance in athletics and creativity.