The Worldview Artist
Author, independent researcher, and ordained Integral Minister exploring spirituality, philosophy, language, and the symbols we use to make meaning.
Welcome
For more than twenty years, I’ve been writing about how people make sense of their lives: in memoir and fiction, in spiritual philosophy and cultural commentary, and lately in experiments with language itself.
At the center of my current work is the Taixuanjing, Master Yang Xiong’s Canon of Supreme Mystery. It’s a 2,000-year-old Chinese classic built on threes rather than twos. I have practiced with it for over a decade through contemplation, poetry, and divination, and it has grown into a book, a constructed symbolic language, and an embodied practice.
You’re welcome to wander. Start wherever your curiosity leads.
Books
Taixuanjing for Today
A contemporary companion to Yang Xiong’s ternary oracle, drawn from more than a decade of personal practice.
The Kalendar: The Black Stone (Integral Publishers, 2016)
Fantasy fiction and poetry shot through with Integral spirituality and philosophy. The story tells of the start of a war between two ancient, competing magical systems.
Soulfully Gay (Integral Books/Shambhala, 2007)
A memoir of spiritual awakening and sexual identity, with a foreword by Ken Wilber, who called it “one of the most astonishing tales of death and resurrection you are likely to find in today’s literature.”
Rising Up (Lulu, 2006)
My first book: a collection of short writings on LGBTQ culture and politics. It’s an early snapshot and doesn’t necessarily reflect my more recent perspectives.
Projects
The Two Currents (In Progress)
Revisits the theology and biography first set out in Soulfully Gay and updates them twenty years after the memoir was published.
Lingua-U
A constructed sound-symbolic system rooted in the ternary structure of the Taixuanjing and in how speech actually works. It’s open for contemplatives, artists, poets, and linguists to explore and test.
Jai’ai
The embodied side of Lingua-U: a developing practice that translates its sound structures into posture, breath, and movement.
The Left Hand
A feature screenplay adapted from Soulfully Gay. It’s a contained, dialogue-driven drama set over one year in Seattle, and it’s now complete and seeking producers.
Writing
The Worldview Artist: essays on Integral philosophy, spirituality, politics, and culture, 2018 to the present.
Start here:
- What is Integral Philosophy?
- Foundations of an Integral Spirituality
- What Spirituality Is: Spiritual Beliefs as a Mode of “Reality Talk”
- Meet the Post-Progressive Religionist
- Re-reading The Worldview Artist, 2018–2022
Read the Blog → · Taixuanjing Essays → · Lingua-U Blog →
Ministry
As an ordained Integral Minister, I practice a ministry of the written word. Its work is to create original writing as a public intellectual on spirituality, philosophy, language, symbolism, and contemplative practice, offered to anyone who finds it useful.
From 2022 to 2025, I stepped back from most public writing. That sabbatical was a quiet season, not an idle one: I worked privately throughout and wrote several books. The projects on this site are the first fruits of that time.
About
Joe Perez lives in Seattle. He holds a B.A. with Honors from Harvard University, where he studied Chinese art and religion, and an M.Div. from an interfaith seminary, with additional study at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is an ordained Integral Minister.