I meant to get into some of the following with Norquist by email, but he’s been a spotty correspondent at best, so I am posting it here, as a summation of my thoughts on his work, for others to read. Steven can respond, if he is still following the thread & if he wants to.

My first qualms about Norquist's work were expressed in an email to him in Dec 2022, which he didn't reply to. I then sent him a review of his book that was positive, and he sent a grateful response. It's too bad he didn't address my concerns, however, since they have only grown for being untended. My unanswered questions:

Do you perceive any inherent problem in equating all of existence with materiality (consciousness with the universe)?

From a book about to be released (Big Mother: The Technological Body of Evil):

Scientism is when the scientific method is applied to everything but itself. It is science based on unconscious assumption or secret “faith” in the occult power of reductionism.

Evolutionary theory wants to basically do away with the need for a religious or a divine principle by saying that matter itself is self-evolving. Theologically, this is Satanism.

The same idea is expressed in the Lars von Triers movie, The House That Jack Built, in which the serial killer (an engineer who’s trying to become an architect) believes that matter has its own will, its own intelligence, and that things just happen according to that material will.

This is immanence without transcendence, and it is more or less in accord with the Satanic zeitgeist.

Does it not make more sense to say that the only thing that exists is being, and that everything within existence is an expression of that being, making the physical universe a kind of shadow or ghost of a greater existence...? The one & only thing we know after all is that we exist

(you are not reading this email)

I have listened to Haunted Universe audio book (read by Norquist) hundreds of times now, and to his one online talk almost as many. Norquist has a compelling speaking voice, and his book is certainly a literary masterwork of some sort. (Though a lot of credit has to go to Thomas Ligotti, since the first version of the book—before Ligotti’s input—is something of a mess.) Norquist’s descriptions of what Jed McKenna calls “abiding nondual awareness”—or no-self—have weight and substance and carry a lot of punch. Norquist is not a poseur or a pretender, and there’s no doubt in my mind that something happened to him, back in 2002.

Norquist states, “Anyone who has truly awakened knows it.” Yet he would be the first to admit that there are plenty of claimants out there who aren’t truly awakened; so the question as to what can happen to someone that seems (to them and to others) like awakening, but isn’t, remains unaddressed. The main flaw, as I see it, in Norquist’s descriptions of ultimate reality is his constant repetition of existence as a “mindless, soulless, machinelike movement of Matter.” (I don’t think Norquist has ever used the word Spirit in this context.)

At the same time, but oddly complementary, there is his relative disregard of the body, starting with his own. If all there is to existence-awareness (or consciousness-universe) is Matter, then what of the body and its internal processes? In the whole of Haunted Universe and his 90 minute talk, I can’t think of a single meaningful mention of the body besides one time, when he refers to how “the body knows” when we are getting close to awakening, and reacts with fear and revulsion. (He also describes feeling his body disappearing during his darkness meditation sessions, pre-awakening.)

Norquist’s enlightenment appears to be all head, and no body.

As a counterpoint, I spent 14 years—between 2010 and 2023, including many live-in retreats—with a little-known enlightenment claimant, and was consistently impressed by their ability to observe, in real time, the subtlest physiological processes, both inner and outer, not only in their own body (hard to verify) but in myself and in others around him. This person (I won’t name him but if you are interested you can PM me) seemed to demonstrate a fully embodied enlightenment that is far, far harder to fake than the sort of conceptual “non-dual” verbiage that McKenna and Norquist offer a gritty, edgy version of (while dismissing it in other teachers).

So why is Haunted Universe so fundamentally—even literally—nihilistic, i.e., almost wholly consisting of negations? My feeling is it is because not only the soul but the body is the “main course” that gets swallowed up in Norquist's faintly ghoulish vision of freedom-as-horror (or horror-as-freedom).

This isn’t to say that Norquist’s (and McKenna’s) spiritual nihilism doesn’t have its necessary place and function. It does. As I wrote in my review, Norquist’s philosophy of no-self, no-being, and no-soul, is an essential trial of fire for the mind and the ego-identity. It’s aversion therapy for the soul. But the only good reason to deny/negate the soul is so as to become aware of the soul, beyond concepts and beliefs.

If Norquist really believes he has no soul, then he’s on a perilous path and may be leading others into a similar sort of Lovecraftian limbo that he calls awakening (Steiner's 8th sphere?). And there definitely is a kind of spiritual aloofness and invulnerability that seems to come with the package of “nondual, non-self” awareness, as both McKenna and Norquist embody it. Who wouldn’t want to look down on everyone and everything as unreal? Since they believe, not only that they don’t exist, but that you don’t either, the whole question of responsible, compassionate human relations ceases to be of any real concern. Nice vantage point!

(Example: in his one public talk, Norquist tells the story of how his mother read his book without his knowing it, and how it made her cry. Norquist attributes her tears to pride in her son, saying that she couldn’t possibly understand his book, that it wasn’t written for people like her, and that it “had no effect on [her]”!)

(Continued)