Open-Source Approach to Spiritual Practice

MetaTheurgy with Kevin Cann

Kevin Cann is a contributor to Jeffrey Kripal’s book How to Think Impossibly. He is a high-functioning autistic individual whose perspectives inform his philosophical work. Cann is the originator of a worldview he calls Platonic Surrealism.

Kevin Cann explores MetaTheurgy as an expansion of ancient theurgy, reframing ritual, consciousness, and wonderworking through the contemporary lens of his system, Platonic Surrealism. He explains how human beings function as interfaces between awareness, potentiality, monadic consciousness, and the physical world, offering practical methods to restore agency in a postmodern culture marked by alienation. Cann also discusses how ritual, transcendence, and expanded states of mind can foster healing, meaning, and participation in a larger cosmic process.

00:00:01 Introduction: metatheurgy and expanded awareness
00:01:42 Origins, Platonic surrealism, and, ancient theurgy
00:03:48 Wonderworking, UFO summoning, and, altered states
00:07:03 Metamodern, moving beyond postmodern despair
00:12:02 Rituals, daily practices, and, reframing life
00:15:12 Healing, empowerment, and, suffering in modern life
00:29:47 Wonderworking, personal transformation as the core
00:33:21 Freewill, determinism, and, feedback loops
00:44:06 Human beings, monads, souls, and, plasma symbiosis
01:08:53 Conclusion

New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science.

(Recorded on December 9, 2025)

For a short video on How to Get the Most From New Thinking Allowed, go to https://youtu.be/aVbfPFGxv9o

For a complete, updated list with links to all of our videos, see https://newthinkingallowed.com/Listings.htm.

Check out the New Thinking Allowed Foundation website at http://www.newthinkingallowed.org. There you will find our incredible, searchable database as well as opportunities to shop and to support our video productions – plus, this is where people can subscribe to our FREE, weekly Newsletter and can download a FREE .pdf copy of our quarterly magazine.

To order high-quality, printed copies of our quarterly magazine: NTA-Magazine.MagCloud.com

Check out New Thinking Allowed’s AI chatbot. You can create a free account at awakin.ai/open/jeffreymishlove. When you enter the space, you will see that our chatbot is one of several you can interact with. While it is still a work in progress, it has been trained on 1,600 NTA transcripts. It can provide intelligent answers about the contents of our interviews. It’s almost like having a conversation with Jeffrey Mishlove.

If you would like to join our team of volunteers, helping to promote the New Thinking Allowed YouTube channel on social media, editing and translating videos, creating short video trailers based on our interviews, helping to upgrade our website, or contributing in other ways (we may not even have thought of), please send an email to friends@newthinkingallowed.com.

To join the NTA Psi Experience Community on Facebook, see https://www.facebook.com/groups/1953031791426543/

To download and listen to audio versions of the New Thinking Allowed videos, please visit our new podcast at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/new-thinking-allowed-audio-podcast/id1435178031.

Download and read Jeffrey Mishlove’s Grand Prize essay in the Bigelow Institute competition, Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death, go to https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/docs/1st.pdf.

You can help support our video productions while enjoying a good book. To order a copy of New Thinking Allowed Dialogues: Is There Life After Death? click on https://amzn.to/3LzLA7Y (As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.)

To order the second book in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogues series, Russell Targ: Ninety Years of ESP, Remote Viewing, and Timeless Awareness, go to https://amzn.to/4aw2iyr

To order a copy of New Thinking Allowed Dialogues: UFOs and UAP – Are We Really Alone?, go to https://amzn.to/3Y0VOVh

To order The Other Goddess: Mary Magdalene and the Goddesses of Eros and Secret Knowledge by Dr. Joanna Kujawa, go to https://amzn.to/483vqPl

To order How to Think Impossibly by Jeffrey Kripal (with collaboration from Kevin Cann), go to https://amzn.to/3XJ7OJw