About
Mesocosm is written and maintained by Barnaby Thieme. I can be contacted at bathieme (at) hotmail (dot) com.
I write about the history of culture and ideas, with an emphasis on philosophy, literature, music, religion, and history. You can read more about the history of this blog here.
Ares of interest include general system theory, metaphysics and phenomenology, ethics, poetry and literature, cognitive and social psychology, psychotherapy process research, comparative religions, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, classical music and opera, entheogens in history and culture, and world history from the paleolithic through the present.
I’ve worked as a contributing editor and technical writer, most recently for Facebook, where I was the first and only technical writer dedicated to internal services and tools for several years; for Oculus VR, where I documented software libraries and APIs for consumer virtual reality headsets; and for Erowid, where I worked on drug law, pharmacology, cultural history, and the psychological and spiritual effects of altered states of consciousness.
In 2018, after 18 years in San Francisco, I moved to Berlin with Mrs. O’Cosm and our cat Django.
mes-o-cosm [mez-uh-koz-uh m] –noun 1. The intermediary zone of engagement that lies between the microcosm (individual) and the macrocosm (the universe). Usually understood to be the domain of human interaction and culture.
Except where indicated, Mesocosm is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Good stuff. The need for “something” in our Western cultures is very hard to fulfill, if indeed that is the “cure”. There was a time when I thought becoming a monastic might be a good idea. The “God Business”, for folk such as you (and I, I think) is nearly non-existent. One needs to be independently wealthy, yet, if accident of birth did provide such a life, the “enwisened” are not generally willing to lead the life (or subjugate ideals) needed to generate that sort of income or assets. For me, Mahamudra (a combo seemingly of Tibetan and Zen Buddshim) and its mantra of watching the mind seems to both point and be a good direction for further mind work. Take care! Paul
Paul Stevenson
August 25, 2014 at 7:31 am