For many people in the modern materialistic world psychology has replaced religion, but how can you heal the mind if you don't acknowledge the soul? And most forms of psychology, despite the name, do not acknowledge the soul except sometimes when it is envisaged as an aspect or extension of the mind.Human beings ...

I don't know why I happened to remember such a thing, but when I looked at the calendar this morning, it occurred to me that today would have been the 99th birthday of the late great Gene Ray, commonly known as the Greatest Thinker and Wisest Human, the discoverer of Nature's Harmonic Simultaneous Four-Day Time Cube. ...

Yesterday, I featured a Franz von Stuck painting called The Wild Chase (The Wild Hunt).

The following two renditions of The Wild Hunt of Odin (Åsgårdsreien) by Norwegian Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831 -1892) offer clearer examples of what Odin's (Wotan's) wild hunt was about.

Excerpted from Wikipedia:

"The ...

If there is one area of life in which discussion is futile, it is when trying to persuade a Moral Legalist in a situation where somebody has transgressed a law, rule or principle, that he regards as both absolute and primary.

Such people cannot be made to recognize that the crucial move in their argument has been ...

Franz von Stuck (1863 - 1928) finished The Wild Chase (or the Wild Hunt) in 1889, the same year a certain Austrian individual who would one day become the leader of the Third Reich was born.

As evidenced below, the painting depicts the Germanic god Wotan leading a a chaotic hunt comprising a supernatural, ghostly ...

Since my post "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world" (June 10), the Hermit card of the Tarot of the Divine, which includes a white hart, has been in the sync stream. Wade has repeatedly associated this card with the deer-headed skeleton in "Humanoid deer creatures" (June 20), the idea being that in this white ...

Over lunch, I read this in Stories from the Messengers:

He described a day with a tightly knit web of meaningful moments, all tying back to a quote from Whitley Strieber he'd read that morning, "...the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark." Seconds later, he heard a woman on the radio ...

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BBC Radio Brains Trust, 1941 - this responded to questions sent-in by listeners. I think I recognize CEM Joad second from the left, and (?) Jacob Bronowski on the right (although it may be Julian Huxley).

I am mentally working-through some stuff that isn't currently ready for posting (and may ...

On Monday night, I dreamt that I had some large black screws made of plastic. You could screw them in without needing a screwdriver, just by turning the head with your fingers. I was considering using some of them to hold my clothing in place by putting the screw through the fabric and into the bone of my arm or leg. ...

On June 10, I posted "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," which included this picture of a Hermit card with a white hart added to it and associated it with this sort of "portal."

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That post also referred to "a space/time warp" and "portals or time warps."

One June 27, I posted ...

If, in a simplified way, if salvation is the purpose of this mortal life, then theosis is the meaning of it. In other words: theosis - i.e. becoming more divine - is what we are supposed to be doing on a daily basis.

But what this means is far from clear. To say that Love is primary, and we should become more loving ...

I was looking through some old dream logs and found this one, from January 18, 2016:

We’re saying goodbye to a young kid – blond, maybe 13 years old, who is J. S. Bach. Everyone says goodbye and thank you, and I say – because I feel like I ought to say it – “Thanks for The Art of Fugue.” It’s not very ...

On June 25, I posted "Another book called the Tree of Life," the titular book being one by Israel Regardie. I quoted a Wikipedia reference to two of his books, though: "he wrote two books on the Qabalah, A Garden of Pomegranates and The Tree of Life."

Despite having read rather broadly in the "magical" literature of ...

Here is the first speech of Alma the Younger after his conversion.

And it came to pass after they had fasted and prayed for the space of two days and two nights, [that] the limbs of Alma received their strength, and he stood up and began to speak unto them, bidding them to be of good comfort:

For,

said he,

I have ...

you can't step into the same river twice.

you don't know me.

.

an old arab was taken to mecca by plane. when he got there he was unimpressed. when asked why he said his spirit was still walking.

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lately i feel like Thomas Paine, of all people, and wish to reduce all my theology to:

i believe in God and hope ...

One of the most misleading aspects of hearing tell of high the experience of spiritual exaltation, is that such high states have been paid-for by servitude: to experience the kind of powerful enchantment that gets written about, extracts a cost in exacerbated mundane living.

Consider a successful pilgrimage - long ...

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The Voyage of St Brandon - by Edward Reginald Frampton

Over at the Notion Club Papers blog, I argue that The Sea Bell poem is Not autobiographical for JRR Tolkien but instead for Frodo in-universe; however, The Death of St Brendan ("Imram") poem is expressive of Tolkien's own experience and ...

In his essay On Fairy Stories; JRR Tolkien influentially invented the word eucatastrophe - i.e. a good-catastrophe:

The

eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good

catastrophe, the sudden ...

Today I discovered that if you search Google for chicxulub impact crater, as I just did, an asteroid will fly across the screen diagonally, making the window shake when it hits the bottom.

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No other asteroid- or crater-related search strings seem to trigger the animation. The key word is chicxulub ...

Traditional Christian theologies rest on the assertion that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent.

Despite this, the same theologies also posit free will and absolve God from the presence of evil in Creation.

The contradiction inherent between these two poles of belief is readily apparent ...

I recently read Shelby Van Pelt's novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. Despite the fact that there are no owls at all in this novel, the Acknowledgments at the end begin thus:

My grandmother collected owls. The china cabinet on the red shag carpet in her dining room was crammed full of them. As a kid, I spent a lot of ...

It is remarkable how few people nowadays can bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil. Could the reason be that if they did, they would have to admit the possibility of supernatural good and therefore of God? Do people not admit the reality of evil because then they would have to confess their ...

For the handful of interested readers; I have just posted a new tranche of posts on the blog Bruce Charlton on Music.

I am still emerging, slowly, from some kind of Upper Respiratory Tract illness I picked up when visiting Suffolk recently, and which has demotivated me from musical exploration.

All that I have ...

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Dylan Thomas

I was introduced to the work of Dylan Thomas at exactly the right moment - which was that post-Lord of the Rings era, after I first had felt the impact of major literary greatness, and began to seek more.

The medium was a one-man-show in Bristol by David Ponting, a dental patient of ...

This showed up on my YouTube feed.

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The video title is "Did Joseph Smith Steal Christian Theology and Repackage It As a New Religion?"

We should keep in mind that this is just an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory at this point, but what if it turns out to be true? Can you imagine the chutzpah of ...

When I was a kid, there were two initialisms used in my circle that were always pronounced as if they were French: HPA ("osh-pay-ah") and LPF ("el-pay-eff"). For the former, there was a brief period where the Portuguese pronunciation replaced the French, so the H was said as "aga."

HPA came from News Norm, the ...

people tell me that my theology mumbling is profound. and even when they don’t tell me, the results speak for themselves. those are generally the texts that get the most reactions. maybe it’s my nature to be immediately suspicious of stuff like this. but maybe not, because i know i used to think so as ...

People are always trying to explain "the problem" of Christian churches (and indeed all types of church) in terms of some specific malign influence.

This specific problem varies (to the point of being opposite) among analysers.

One pundit says his church's problem is infiltration by modern/ trendy pressures from ...

I ran across a reference to one Christopher Blythe, a Mormon "content creator" I hadn't heard of, so I looked him up. Not a great first impression, physiognomy-wise. Dude lowkey looks like a professional quote maker. I mean, seriously, this is a guy who owns a katana.

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I found his YouTube channel, ...