Richard Grossinger | The Sun Magazine

Richard Grossinger

Richard Grossinger is a cultural anthropologist, writer, and co-founder of North Atlantic Books, a leading publisher of alternative health, martial arts, and spiritual titles.

— From April 2003
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

A Phenomenology Of Panic

Part of the problem with panics, Gene taught me, is the very sense that there is a problem. This creates a bogus responsibility for either oneself or someone else to solve it. If the patient can’t solve it, he is not only panicking; he is a failure. If he passes the responsibility to a clinician, he loses power and gives up the right to direct his own life.

April 2003
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Cosmic Mysteries, Cosmic Hype

A Hard Look At The New Age

There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.

February 1990
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Child In The City

The horror and melancholy of childhood are what stand out. I can no longer remember most of it explicitly. I cannot even swear that the haunting happened in this lifetime. The so-called moment of trauma has vanished into the darkness of existence itself.

March 1988
The Sun Interview

The “Face” On Mars

An Interview With Richard Hoagland

I realized that I was looking at something that was either a complete waste of time, or the most important discovery of the twentieth century if not of our entire existence on earth. There is no middle ground.

July 1986
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

The Warrior And The Militarist

A Discussion

To talk, as some do, about “making a world without war” when we’d be lucky to have a world without nuclear weapons, is talking hearsay and utopian theory. We can’t just talk peace, we have to be peace, or it’s another kind of bravado. I’d like a world without war; but we’d all settle for a world without wars that kill everything. — Gary Snyder

April 1986
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