My friend JAD is a cool dude, and he’s back for another cool talk about masculinity. We pick up where we left off in our previous episode together, by talking about the hunt as an archetypal masculine activity. What a pleasure.
JAD is one of those people who’ve lived the lives of about five or ten very different people and somehow managed to integrate all those disparate perspectives into a worldview that’s striking, original — and, amazingly, coherent. He’s written for MAN’S WORLD twice: a Meditations essay on the necessity of male rites of passage, and an exclusive extract from his latest novel, Life in the Late Creepzoid.
JAD’s website is jad.world.
WHO IS JAD? IN HIS OWN WORDS
I introduce myself. My focus is integrating the human system. I perused this topic in my Ph.D. thesis. I continued this road with three years postgraduate training in psychology. I then maintained a private practice in Manhattan for two decades.
Concurrently I spent those years working in the esoteric world and had experiences that profoundly changed me. All these paths guide my work and authorship.
My approach is energetic. I will use the metaphor of a computer to explain. You have a screen, programs, machine language and the hardware that it runs on. The screen is your current state of self, the programs are what create that self and the machine language is your original design.
By three years of age your original machine language is overlaid with malware from the environment. This malware subverts the original function of your machine language. Henceforth anything that shows up on your screen is not you, it is malware. Incidentally this model perfectly overlays our collective global situation.
Reclamation requires erasing the malware. Your authentic design then arises on the screen of you. This is an individual task and one for humanity at large. Do this or perish is the reality we have created.
IN THE RAW 22: JAD II, Electric Boogaloo