metaphysics – Trance Blackman

Emptying the Cave: Gnosis, Conditioning, and Direct Knowing

Emptying the Cave: Gnosis, Conditioning, and Direct Knowing

On Knowledge and Uncertainty

04 October 2026 ~ 36 minute read

The strange thing about these conversations is how quickly a search for truth can become another search for explanations. One map leads to another, another interpreter appears, another layer of reality is proposed, and before long the thing we were trying to understand has become buried beneath an increasingly elaborate cosmology. At some point, I find myself wanting to step back from all of it and ask a much simpler question: what can I actually observe, test, experience, and know for myself?

Lux Colloquii

The Architecture of Knowing: Evidence, Secrecy, and Consensus

Archives, Narratives, and the Limits of Certainty

02 October 2026 ~ 21 minute read

There is a certain tension in trying to make sense of a world where so much of what we know comes to us secondhand. We inherit histories, narratives, assumptions, and interpretations, then build upon them as though the foundations have already been settled. But the further you look, the more complicated that picture can become, and the harder it is to separate what is known from what is simply accepted.

Lux Colloquii

The Terrain Within: Host, Microbe, and Environment

Rethinking Parasites

28 September 2026 ~ 40 minute read

There is a tendency, particularly in health discussions, to reduce everything to a simple question of what is good and what is bad. Parasites belong firmly in the latter category, at least according to the conventional story. But the deeper I get into the terrain model, microbial ecology, fasting, and the strange adaptability of living systems, the less satisfying that binary becomes. What if the organism we are calling the problem is sometimes part of a much larger process? And what happens when we start asking not simply what an organism is, but what it is doing, and why?

Lux Colloquii

The Devil We Feed: Fear, Attention, and the Creation of Reality

The Observer Becomes Part of the Story

26 September 2026 ~ 40 minute read

There comes a point in any investigation when the thing being investigated is no longer the only thing worth examining. We can follow the names, institutions, documents, networks, symbols, patterns, and apparent connections as far as they will take us, but sooner or later we have to turn the question back upon ourselves. What happens to the observer who spends enough time looking into the machinery of power, control, fear, and hidden influence? And what happens when the search for an explanation becomes part of the very environment we are trying to understand?

Lux Colloquii

The Language of Illness: From Symptoms to Systems

The Living Terrain of Body, Mind, and World

21 September 2026 ~ 23 minute read

There’s something about the simplest questions that can open into much larger territory. A cold, a symptom, a restless night, a shift in mood, a change in the weather: none of these things necessarily exist in isolation. They happen within a living system, within a particular person, at a particular moment, in relationship with everything surrounding them. And perhaps some of what we have forgotten begins there, in the relationship itself.

Tag: metaphysics

Emptying the Cave: Gnosis, Conditioning, and Direct Knowing

The Architecture of Knowing: Evidence, Secrecy, and Consensus

The Terrain Within: Host, Microbe, and Environment

The Devil We Feed: Fear, Attention, and the Creation of Reality

The Language of Illness: From Symptoms to Systems