Working Papers
Spines — the sources gathered and the argument mapped, not yet built out. Each carries an editor's note saying as much. When one is finished, it moves to the essays.
The Synchronicity: Moulin Rouge! and Devdas as Twin Fin-de-Siècle Documents
Why the Comparative Pair Is a Scholarly Object
The Sacred Fool at the Rafters: Toulouse-Lautrec as Vidushaka
The Sant-Witness Archetype in Moulin Rouge!
Community Crisis Response as Constitutional Alternative
CAHOOTS, STAR, and Olmstead's Integration Mandate Applied to Police-First Response
A Monotheism That Kept the Nature Cult
Sikhi Between Monotheism and Animism
The Visual Rhyme: Naga Canopies and Mushroom Morphology
A Morphological Meditation, Not an Attribution
ADHD as Adaptive Intelligence in the Wrong Environment
The Mismatch Hypothesis and the Politics of Deficit
Altered States as Knowledge Technologies
Not Pathology, Not Recreation
Buddhism vs. Marxism: Who Is Actually More Pessimistic?
Two Diagnoses of Suffering, One Winner
Codependency, Empaths, and the Invisible Child
A Genealogy of the Relational Trauma Archetypes
AI as an Emotional Intelligence Buffer
Cognitive Extension and the Limits of the Outsourced Heart
The Hard Problem: Fundamental Consciousness or Emergent Mind
What Western Neuroscience Cannot Explain and What Eastern Traditions Never Needed To
The Consciousness Medicine Market
COMPASS, atai, MindMed, Cybin, and the Enclosure of the Psychedelic Commons
Dharmic Psycho-Ethics vs. Western Psychiatry
Coercion, Autonomy, and Karma Across Four Traditions
Dream Analysis and Liminal States as Legitimate Epistemology
A working paper on what the sleeping mind knows and why the waking one stopped listening
Entheogenic Traditions and the Peoples Who Kept Them
Indigenous sacramental practice among the Wishtoyo Chumash, the Tongva, and the traditions the modern state scheduled
The FDA and DEA Regulatory Landscape for Psychedelic Therapy
A readiness analysis of American psychedelic medicine at the approval threshold
Flooder and Accumulator: Two Neurodivergent Emotional Architectures
A working paper on why the same diagnosis hides opposite machines
Why the AI Revolution Feels Like Magic
A working paper on the oneiric texture of machine intelligence
GLP-1 Drugs and Their Unstudied Effects on Consciousness
What happens to wanting when a molecule turns its volume down
The Neuroscience of Hypnotherapy: What Trance Does to the Brain
Theta, the default mode network, and the suspended narrator
The Burned Pharmacopoeia: Colonialism and Indigenous Plant Knowledge
How a working archive of medicine was extracted, criminalized, and erased
What Second Temple Judaism Borrowed from the East
The Persian account behind the world Jesus inherited
Jungian Archetypes as a Cross-Cultural Map of Consciousness
Testing the collective unconscious against traditions that drew their own maps
Entity Encounters: McKenna's Dimensions Against Campbell's Archetypes
Two incompatible readings of the strangest reproducible report in altered-state phenomenology
Grandiose and Vulnerable Narcissism: Why the Clinical Distinction Matters
Two strategies over one wound — and a culture that can only see the loud one
Non-Western Epistemologies Against Scientism: Incompatibility, Not Opposition
Why the debate is lost at the framing, and what disciplined adjacency looks like
Psilocybin Through Grof's Transpersonal Framework
Does the mushroom fit the map the clinic drew for a different molecule?
What the Psychedelic Philosophers Made of Māyā
McKenna, Gallimore, and Hancock against the classical concept — the veil kept, the exit lost
What Transmission Gives That Self-Study Cannot
Received Knowledge, Taught Knowledge, and the Lineage Claim
Shamanic Rock Art as Vision Documentation
Reading Painted Stone as Phenomenology
Liminal States as Healing Technology
Sleep, Dreams, and the Instruments Modernity Filed as Downtime
Why Psychiatry Misreads South Asian American Patients
Diagnostic Instruments, Idioms of Distress, and the Model Minority Mask
The Firewall and the Forest
Plant Payloads, Trained Priors, and the Boundary of Ordinary Mind
The Neuroscience of Inspiration
Why Downloads May Hit Neurodivergent Brains Harder
Karma as Token Causation, Pratītyasamutpāda as Structural Model
Dependent Origination Read Against Modern Causal Inference
Trauma as Initiatory Doorway
Between the Pathology Frame and the Transformation Frame
Žižek versus Murphy on Buddhism: The Third Position
Two Men Reading a Sanskrit Map in English
Anima and Animus Integration as Development, Not Identity
Recovering Jung's Contrasexual Archetypes from the Taxonomy That Captured Them
Biological Essentialism as Epistemological Violence
One Logic, Two Targets: Two-Spirit Genders and Entheogenic Knowledge
How British India Manufactured Its Own Legitimacy
Knowledge Production as the Empire's Legitimacy Machine
The Colonial Sanitization of Entheogens
A Parallel-Erasure Timeline, Not a Conspiracy
Dawkins and the God of the Gaps He Refuses to See
Selective Skepticism and the Unexamined Metaphysics of Materialism
Dawkins's Transubstantiation Framing and Selective Social Construction
The Religion Charge, Turned Back on Its Maker
Diaspora Nationalism and the Flattening of Hindu Kinship
The Umbrella Identity, Manufactured Abroad and Exported Home
Ethical Non-Monogamy and Relational Maturity: What Actually Makes It Work
Capacities, Not Permissions
What Evolutionary Biology Actually Says About Monogamy and Hypergamy
An Audit of the Pop-Evolution Complex
Gender as a Consciousness-Level Phenomenon, Not Just Social Identity
Epistemology Before Identity
Granta 173 and the Outer Limit of the Literary Apparatus
A Prestige Issue Read as Evidence, Not as Exception
Homonormativity: Protected for Whom, at Whose Expense
The Critique at Full Strength, and the Question It Refuses to Drop
The Masand Cycle: How Revolutions Become Their Opposite
An Institutional Law Stated as a Research Program
Operation Blue Star: Structural Preconditions, Not Spontaneous Violence
Reading the Assault as an Outcome, Not an Explosion
Parallel Erasures, 1875–1907: Dual Epistemicide in Colonial Punjab
One Mechanism, Two Reformations
Partition Literature as Trauma Archive
What the Files Omitted, the Fiction Kept
People's Algo: Indian Elites and the Diaspora Working Class
Cultural Capital at the Seam of Two Migrations
The People's Algo as Epistemic Decolonization
System Prompts, Two Tracks, and a Meta-Framework
Postcolonial Theory for Non-Academic Readers
Foucault, Gramsci, Spivak, and Appadurai as One Toolkit
Sacred Sexuality: Colonialism's Desacralization of Tantric Traditions
From Sacred Technology to Scandal to Merchandise
Selective Scientism: Where the Standard of Proof Moves
A Four-Case Audit of How Rigor Is Applied Unevenly
Settler Homonationalism: Inclusion as a Colonial Technique
How the Vocabulary of Liberation Became a Grammar of Ranking
Two-Spirit Sovereignty Against the Western LGBT Frame
Definitional Jurisdiction and the Refusal of Comparative Flattening
Hukam Is Not Command: Untranslatable Glossaries for AI
Conceptual Sovereignty Inside Machines Built to Flatten
Who Gets to Look Back: Representational Power in a Storefront
A Field Note on a Luxury Window and the Politics of the Gaze
From 1DES Media to Datura Media: The AI Transformation of Independent Media
From Scarce Craft to Abundant Generation
Amitabh's Angry Young Man as Post-Emergency Protest Cinema
Protest Without a Movement
Dum Maro Dum to Divine Darshan: Bollywood's Search for Nadar
The Intoxicant Route, the Devotional Turn
Epics as Trip Reports
Reading the Mahabharata's Great Vision Against Psychedelic Phenomenology
Bhangra, Punjabi Folk, and the Ghazal as Living Archives
What the Sung Record Kept
Guru Dutt as Depression Cinema: The Melancholic Artist Archetype
The Artist the Market Destroyed, or the Genre That Diagnosed the Market
The Hero's Journey and Jungian Archetypes in Modern Superhero Myth
A Comparative Reading Through the Screen Incarnations of the Flash
The Mahabharata as a Technology for Reading Power
What the Epic Makes Visible, and for Whom
The Indo-Soviet Co-Productions and the Afghanistan Silence
Ali Baba, Sohni Mahiwal, Ajooba — Three Films Two States Agreed to Forget
J. Cole's 4 Your Eyez Only as Moral Philosophy
Inherited Violence, Witness Consciousness, and the Obligation of Survival
Music as API: An Infrastructure Theory for AI-Native Platforms
When the Song Becomes a Response to a Request
Music as API, Second Pass: What the Interface Conceals
The Revolution That Arrived Already Institutionalized
Neurodivergent Heroes in Hindi Cinema: Virtue Where Diagnosis Sees Pathology
The Aspirational Archetype the Clinic Would Inventory
Psychedelic-Era Hindi Cinema, 1967–1976: A Working Periodization
Counterculture, Godmen, and the Closing of an Idiom
The Stalker as Romantic Hero: Shah Rukh Khan's Nineties
How Hindi Cinema Recoded Obsession as Love
Kishkinda Kand and the Modern Succession Drama
The Ramayana's Template Inside Franchise Cinema
Tamasha as Case Study: Persona Against Shadow
Reading Imtiaz Ali's Film as a Clinical Document
The Divided Self: A Jungian Reading of Tamasha
Persona, Shadow, and the Long Discipline of Integration
The Architecture of Bhakti: SICI as Film Theory Alternative
Beyond the Monomyth: An Indic Grammar for Screen Story
The Door That Opens from the Other Side
Nadar as the Missing Element in the Matrix and in Western Self-Help
The Druski Bargain: Corporate Permission Structures and Viral Content
The Capture Cycle at the Scale of a Single Career
The Emergency as Cultural Rupture: A Media Studies Event
Censorship as Stress Test, the Archive as Result
The Wachowskis Were Reaching: The Trilogy Couldn't Name What It Found
Maya, Samsara, and Hukam at the Edge of a Hollywood Vocabulary
Trust as Technique: A Tulsidas Doha Against Fear
What a Sant Couplet Does to the Mind, and What Cinema Does With It
Vishwaroop Darshan in 1980s Television Epics
Filming the Unfilmable: Cosmic Form on the Small Screen
Banda Singh Bahadur and the First Sikh Polity
The Renunciate Who Minted Coins in Another's Name
Bhakti Dohas as the Earliest Existential Therapy
What Tulsidas and Salok Mahalla 9 Do to an Anxious Mind
Cis-Sutlej Historiography and the Artifact of 1849
The Sikh Sovereignties the Archive Was Taught Not to See
Dhulla Bhatti: What Punjabi Folk Memory Did With a Rebel
A working paper on the rebel the state filed as a bandit and the people kept as a song
Guru Ram Rai and Dehradun: An Exposure Gradient, 1815 to 1947
A Dharmarth Cadastre instrument applied to the Doon valley's oldest continuous darbar
Hukam Against Technique: Raag Maru Meets Jacques Ellul
A working paper on two accounts of what orders the world
Morcha Guru Ka Bagh: Discipline, Sovereignty, and the Price of Witness
A working paper on the Akali experiment in unarmed sovereignty
Not a Dialect: Punjabi's Independent Line from Proto-Indo-European
A working paper on the comparative method against the colonial label
Punjab and 1984: Structural Preconditions, Not Spontaneous Violence
Ram Setu and the Colonized Epistemology of Myth
Salok Mahalla 9: Three Stages, One Urgency
Two Passages: Sikh Community Formation in Malaya and North America
The Nihang–Sindhi Conflict as Downstream of the Gurdwara Act
A Boundary Enforced by Its Own Orphans
The Bedi Clan: Guru Nanak's Lineage and Its Political Afterlife
What a Tradition That Severed Blood from Power Did with the Blood
The Ethnoburb as Diagnostic Barrier
Reading Mabute-Louie's Reinforcement Loop
The Indian-American Academic Double Bind
Excel Without Accommodations
The Treaty of Lahore: Khalsa as Khalisa
How Sovereignty Became Cadastre
Vanvas: Exile as Contemplative Practice and Strategic Preparation
What the Forest Teaches That the Court Cannot
What Is Jot? Sikh Divine Light and the AI Consciousness Debate
A Theological Reframing, Not a Verdict on Machines
The Television Epics as Mass Philosophical Transmission
How the State Broadcaster Became a Philosophy Teacher
The Yogavasistha as Consciousness Philosophy
Reading an Old Dialogue as a Theory of Mind
The Dasam Granth and the Ethics of Force
What a Contested Canon Says About Rightful Violence
The Dasam Granth and the Sikh Ethics of Force
The Warrior Philosophy as Convergence, Not Rupture
Datura Grew Where They Said the Gods Lived
A Botanical-Geographic Overlay the Essay Must Earn
The Ephedra Impossibility Argument
A Receptor-Pharmacology Case Against the Standard Soma Identification
Harmful and Liberating God Concepts
Reverse-Engineering Religion from the Nervous System
The Deva-Asura Pharmacology: Mapping Hindu Cosmology onto Altered States
Serotonergic Light, Anticholinergic Shadow
Lingam and Yoni: Cosmology Before the Colonial Gaze
Two Desacralizations of One Diagram
Shamanism Without Psychedelics: The Singh Account as Foil
Drafting the Strongest Doubter the Entheogen Thread Has
Maya Meets the Machine: Vedanta and Artificial Reality
A Parallel Tested, Not Collected
Maya Against Karma: Gallimore's Stopping-Too-Soon Critique
Two Indic Operating Systems, One Psychedelic Courtroom
Rishis in the Dasam Granth: Sikh Reinterpretation of Vedic Sages
Inheritance Without Subordination
Salok Mahalla 9: Three Life Stages and the Urgency of Practice
The Ninth Guru's Closing Counsel
Samsara as Conditioning: What Rebirth Looks Like Under a Scanner
The Wheel Read at the Resolution of a Single Mind
Engineered Samsara: The Feed as a Wheel Built on Purpose
Conditioned Repetition as a Business Model
The Shravan Calendar: Monsoon, Mushrooms, and the Memory of Soma
A Ritual Calendar Read as a Fossil
Shiva as Somanatha: The Lord of Soma in Text and Practice
An Epithet, a Sacrament, and a Double Reading
Sikhism and Sanatan Dharma: The History of a Question
Who First Asked Whether Sikhs Are Hindus, and Why
The Receptor Argument: Can Modern Psychedelic Science Read the Rigveda?
What a Clinical Literature Can and Cannot Say About an Ancient Sacrament
How a Sacrament Loses Its Name: The Soma Referent Problem
Ordinary Forgetting as the Null Hypothesis to Erasure
The Soma Candidacy Problem: What the Vedic Sacrament Actually Was
A pharmacological audit of the candidates, not a history of the debate
Tantra's Refusal of the Binary and the Policing of Method
Antinomian Technique as Contested Consciousness-Work
The Kalyug Thesis: Dating an Idea That Presents as Timeless
When the Age of Decline Was Invented, and What It Was For
The Shaman Written Out: Ecstatic Lineages and the Respectable Self-Image
The Nath, the Sinister Yogi, and What Brahmanical Memory Set Aside
The Soma Sanitization Hypothesis: Translation as Erasure
How the Vedic sacrament was rendered respectable, and by whom
What AI Rediscovered: Karma as a Credit-Assignment Doctrine
Dependent Origination as the Structure the Credits Accumulate In
Did Pearl Reinvent Karma? Testing a Single Claim
The Ladder of Causation Against the Doctrine of the Deed
The Roads Not Taken: Udasi, Nirmala, and the Closed Plurality
Heterodox Sikh Lineages and the Boundary That Ended Them
Vedic Cosmology and the History-Correlation Temptation
The Architecture of World-Ages Against the Record of Events
The Compound Is Your Couch
Cult television, spy procedurals, and the fear you were sold at a safe distance
Zoroastrian Rulers and the Naming Erasure
What the Achaemenid kings actually called themselves — and what the erasure of those names was designed to conceal