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The night before last, as related in "Inanities with Elon," I dreamed about having to do a bizarre "worksheet" with Elon Musk and some of his employees, which combined extremely easy exercises with extremely confusing ones.

The very next night, I had another dream that took that theme to another level. I was in a ...

It is surely pleasanter to expect things to get better in the future, than to expect the opposite.

Yet, if we are honest, such predictions ought to be rooted in honest realism rather than what happens to make us feel more cheerful at the moment.

But aside from this, optimism is often tainted by Boosterism - which ...

A few years ago, nearly everyone was manipulated into fear. Now, at least a portion of the West is being manipulated into optimism, which informs me that very few people learned anything from the campaign of manipulated fear.

Some of the most egregious examples of recent and ongoing optimism manipulation: The lack ...

I admire Böhme, Schelling, and Berdyaev because they understood the inherent contradictions in traditional Christian theology concerning freedom and evil. If nothing can be prior to our outside of God, then, as stated in Acts 17:28, in God, we live and move and have our being. The same applies to everything in ...

I have often discussed the change in human consciousness by which our original state of near-complete (albeit largely unconscious and spontaneous) immersion in a group identity; has transformed to the modern experience of - on the one hand - alienation, cut offness from community and indeed the world; and - on the ...

It strikes me that the way in which (what I might call) mainstream/ orthodox/ traditional Christian theology tries to explain its inbuilt contradictions, is by the assertion of contraries, in a paradoxical and mystical way.

The contradictions arise from monism - by which I mean that the starting assumption is of the ...

Joseph Smith spoke with God face to face.

Brigham Young didn't know him from Adam.

I dreamed that I was for some reason spending the day with Elon Musk. We stopped by a field where ridiculously low-tech “rockets” were being tested, and my impression was that all of his employees were weird, grossly incompetent, and just not very smart. Elon went to elaborate lengths to play not-very-funny ...

In 1998, a mysterious stranger with no name (though there are some who call him Tim) told Whitley Strieber that the man who “would have unlocked the secret of gravity” was never born because the couple who would have been his parents were murdered by the Nazis. I posted about this three years ago on my Strieber ...

So apparently the sync fairies are doing their own version of this meme now:

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The other day I ran across a post on 4chan somewhere that said something like “YouTube is allowing straight-up softcore pr0n now. Just put in [this search term], and you’ll see.”

Wait, so you mean if you search for ...

The two men retired to the library, leaving the women to the smoking room and the staff to the dishes. Now, my dear friend, come take a look at this, A beautiful bottle, and no doubt the contents are of even superior quality, Yet you will not drink it, Not at this time, no, Precisely, and that is part of the reason ...

From Jerry Pinkney's illustrations for Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse:

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From a children's book I found today, telling the story of the Chinese zodiac:

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Are lions and cats really interchangeable, though? As it happens, I also ran across this meme ...

A drawing Carus completed the same year he died.

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Carl Gustav Carus (1789 - 1869) - Ruine einer gotischen Kirche im Wald - 1869

There was a letter in the mailbox. An actual letter, not a bank statement or a bill. It was personally handwritten and placed inside a particular envelope, chosen with care, light green in color. It was addressed to Ferdinand, which was not his real name, but rather the name with which he signed his life’s work, ...

I dreamed that I was temporarily living in a large house owned by someone else, who also lived there. One day I came downstairs and found a box of hand-painted 15th-century Italian Tarot cards sitting on the kitchen counter. It looked exactly like a box of such cards I owned and kept in a room on the fifth floor, so I ...

I had missed this very interesting post by William James Tychonievich - Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life - when it came-out some six months ago.

I agree with his remark that dreaming goes on all the time, but only sometimes emerges into awareness; and some of these times may include ...

​I recently reflected on an ultimately pointless discussion I was involved in not too long ago, and it occurred to me that the vast majority of arguments some people tout as coherent and ironclad are actually flawed and deceptive.

The biggest doozies among these have to be the arguments marinated in things ...

Q: Is it possible for be A Christian, and to practice another religion?

A: Yes it is possible, here-and-now....

But it was not always possible.

In the past (and even today, in other places) someone who recited a creed would believe that creed. More exactly, he could not say it unless he believed it; because ...

In Zooey by JD Salinger, which is one of my favourite stories - reinforced by the preceding and following stories of Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, and Seymour: an introduction - the young adult protagonists (Franny and Zooey Glass) are acutely motivated by a hatred of egotism: in themselves, as well as in ...

My prediction: Before this April (i.e. within less than a month of the new DT administration) there will be a massive Fake Pennant atrocity to justify massive Western intervention in the Middle East - de facto in support of CHOAM.

There will be some kind of state of National Emergency in the major Western military ...

the first instalment of the new series. the content will be much the same: random nonsense. the name was chosen, ultimately, by my wife. i think she means it to refer, not to the quips, but to the quipper*

you don't hear much of anything anymore

artistic dynasties are very rare, and probably rarer now than ever. the ...

This image was briefly shown in a Michelle Stone podcast, in a context that made it clear it was the interior of a Mormon temple:

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Since I had just posted on two lions in a library, and Leo had followed up with a post of his own on the same topic, this got my attention.

What temple is that, ...

Nothing can be prior to or outside of God.

The above is a fundamental assumption in Christianity and in virtually all Christian doctrines, dogma, philosophy, theology, and teaching; however, the assumption faces heavy headwinds when another core assumption of Christianity comes into play—namely, freedom. Or at ...

No poet can hope to understand the nature of poetry unless he has had a vision of the Naked King crucified to the lopped oak, and watched the dancers, red-eyed from the acrid smoke of the sacrificial fires, stamping out the measure of the dance, their bodies bent uncouthly forward, with a monotonous chant of "Kill! ...

It seems possible, and perhaps likely, that Jesus Christ's work was at a cosmic and creational level primarily and essentially.

Jesus changed reality, and set-up a new possibility.

The religion of Christianity would therefore be something secondary and optional - a means to the end of being A Christian, that might ...

On December 22, I posted "Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney," a post which was occasioned by my discovery of that artist's version of Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse. This was in the middle of a flurry of blue-butterfly syncs, which began on December 1 -- see "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho ...

My basic understanding is that in the process by which Jesus's work and teaching became "Christianity" - something simple and inner, became something complex and outer.

With Christianity; Jesus's teachings became an "outer" set of laws/ rules embedded in a structure of government, with "the Christian's" duty being, ...

Over the last 100 years people have looked all over the place for spiritual enlightenment, often adopting various forms of what has become known as New Age spirituality which was regarded as a more advanced form of religious understanding with greater insights than conventional approaches. It is true that, as the last ...

"Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."

Philippians 2:12 (written by the Apostle Paul.)

This seems fundamentally wrong for these days and times, in terms of how a Christian ought to approach ...