one benefit of publishing is that your audience might also consist of resurrected people. and through that, perhaps friendship, and learning. but it seems intuitively right through analogical scaling that until you have a relation with resurrected people, they can only access you through what is made public, like ...

In my mid-twenties I graduated from medical school and started work; at first as a doctor, then in research for a doctorate. These were years in which I experienced the power of that "alienation" so characteristic of modernity.

And, as always in "this life", fundamental problems to do with ultimate purpose and how ...

Franz von Stuck is usually referred to as a Symbolist painter, which he is. However, he easily qualifies as a Romantic painter as well and is sometimes classified as such (Late Romantic).

​His Falling Stars is a good example of his Romantic side on full display. A simple, straightforward painting depicting von ...

In yesterday's post "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch," I revisited an old 2019 post in which a book titled Serendipities manifested "a strange sort of anti-serendipity": The book caught my eye because the cover art was a painting I had recently posted about, but it turned out to be a version of ...

The problem of entropy is one that presses upon us the average mortal life perhaps more strongly than evil.

By "entropy" I mean the universal tendency for beings to experience cumulative adverse change with time: dysfunction, degeneration, disease - and the ultimate manifestation of entropy is death.

All of these ...

This evening, I saw a textbook article, for reading comprehension practice, about the Ethiopian calendar and how it differs from the Gregorian.

About an hour later, I saw a /pol/ thread titled "TIL Africa has its own time," with a screenshot of an article about "African time" as a reference to Africans always being ...

The Hermit card of the Tarot has been in the sync stream recently, including this "Hermit Portal" painting by Laura Bruno, which features an owl -- a bird which does not appear on most Hermit cards.

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In "Hart, hermit, skeleton" (July 1), the Hermit card was discussed in conjunction with the ...

I've been reading Trish MacGregor's novel White Crows. Hal is a person from the distant future who has time-traveled back to c. 2022.

Sometimes, when they'd been preparing for this trip, they'd gotten -- or remembered -- data that had contradicted what they currently had known about the twenty-first [century]. He ...

At the moment, the last post in the algorithm-generated "Poplar posts" list at the bottom of this blog is "Chubby Checker, god of quads" (August 2025). I clicked on it and, scrolling through the comments, found this one from Gondola:

It's weird how old themes take on new meanings as time passes. Those Temperance and ...

Long-term (six year plus) readers will know of my recurrent "obsession" with the subject of evil; and the nature and definition of evil.

This is because I believe that the nigh-universal lack of understanding of evil has rendered almost-everybody helpless in the face of a very powerful class of persons who have ...

Morality does not derive from Laws.

Morality derives from God: from the nature, purposes, and methods of God; as manifested in divine creation.

The morality of Men derives from their personal affiliation to God*.

*The morality-enabling affiliation to God must be personal; it may or may not also be collective in ...

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 ...