I recently (last night) sat down with James on Engaging the Phenomenon for a conversation that ended up covering a lot more ground than I expected going in. You can watch the full episode here.
It was a wide-ranging conversation, but a few threads stood out: where the name The Maze to Metanoia comes from and the contact experience that shaped it, initiation as a three-part process our culture has largely lost the third step of, alchemy and CE-5 as two versions of the same door, and the case for staying genuinely uncertain rather than landing on a tidy theory. We also spent real time on Ontological Health: what people actually need when an experience cracks open their sense of reality, whether that’s contact, a near-death experience, or something else entirely.
James is one of the good ones in this space. Sharp, generous, and a genuinely thoughtful interviewer who lets a conversation go where it needs to go. If you don’t already follow Engaging the Phenomenon, I’d consider this a personal endorsement: subscribe to his channel. It’s a great source of insight and he’s a sweet, intelligent guy doing this work with real care.
Up next: ANOMACON 2026. I’ll be presenting The Threshold, the series I’ve been publishing here on Substack, as a talk. The core of it is a thought experiment: what if the phenomenon isn’t primarily an object, but something closer to a relational level of reality? One that sits below the usual split between a symbol and what it represents? That would explain why contact experiences tend to arrive with both physical effects and dense symbolic content at once, rather than one following the other. It’s also where the ontological health work is headed next, and ANOMACON felt like the right place to bring the two threads together in person.
If this resonated, you’d likely find your people in the Discord: a growing community for the stranger end of the phenomena, the philosophy under it, and the experiencers living it. We go deeper in real time. JOIN HERE.
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The experience is yours. The silence is optional.
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