Chinese New Year, beginning the Year of the Fire Horse, coincides with Mardi Gras this year. I'm thinking this is not a good omen.

Mardi -- ruby Tuesday, stupid bloody Tuesday -- is the day of Mars. In the Chinese system, both Fire and the Horse are associated with Mars as well. Fat Tuesday suggests the feeding fat ...

A short time ago, I commented on a quote by Mario Gramsci, a Marxist thinker and politician who died in Mussolini’s jails before the outbreak of the Second World War. Although I know little about Gramsci, he strikes me as the sort of twentieth-century figure who convinced himself that he was striving to make the ...

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a consequence of a more individual life on earth is a more individual life after the earth. if your inner life on this earth is unlike anyone else’s, then what comes after will be even more unlike. if there ever was a collective afterlife, it is no longer the case.

in the same way, you invite people into ...

I have read a great deal of modern pagan and/or neo-pagan writings; and have some acquaintance with such people. Indeed at one time, for several years and some twenty years ago-plus, that is what I might well have called myself.

This movement is, unfortunately, permeated and motivated by a resentment against ...

The terminology of totalitarian evil takes many forms; one aim of which is to enmesh our consciousness in word-spells conducive to the evil strategy of subversion, corruption, destruction and inversion.

Literally all of the Litmus Test issues - great and small - have used positively-inflected tendentious ...

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Government Bureau - George Tooker - 1956 Bureaucracy is a cold, mechanistic, systematic, dehumanizing, and impersonal force that is, by its very nature, anti-personal, meaning openly anti-spiritual in its overarching operations and motives.

Make no mistake, as a cold, grinding, soulless ...

I have often wondered why - despite three decades of the internet; "global leaders" have so many in-person, face-to-face conferences.

The answer, I believe, is that the public aspects - speeches, lectures, symposia, workshops, seminars etc. are insufficient to account for the conference phenomena - acting as an only ...

This morning I was, for complex psychological reasons, listening to a vaporwave remix of "Dark Horse" by Katy Perry.

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At the same time, I was browsing /x/, and just as I heard the line "like a bird without a cage," I clicked on a thread with this as the main image:

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It's a bird ...

. . . and all I got was this photo of Michelangelo's Pieta.

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I have not had the chance to see Michelangelo's Pieta in person, but I was happy to experience it vicariously through my wife's recent trip to Rome.

My wife also attended a General Audience at the Vatican and saw the pope at a ...

Kites -- the bird of prey, particularly in the form of Garuda -- have been in the sync stream, which put in my mind Rudyard Kipling's poem "Night Song in the Jungle":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free -- The herds are shut in byre and hut, For loosed till dawn are we.This is the ...

Less than two weeks ago, I posted "The power of the Sun in the palm of my hand," the title being a line spoken by Doctor Octopus in one of the Spider-Man movies. Today I ran across this in a used bookstore:

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According to the summary on Wikipedia, Klara is an intelligent robot that observes the ...

My post "All the pebbles I have seen" takes its title from a song by Donovan. Bill pointed out that the singer's name means "dark" or "black." More specifically, according to Wiktionary:

From Irish Ó Donndubháin (“descendant of (a person named) brown & black”), from donn (“brown”) and dubh ...

I came across the notion that "Writing is thinking" from post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman - in the mid 1980s; and the potentially-linked idea that "Thinking is participation" from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, in the past 15 years or so.

Both are valuable insights, but partial truths: writing can be ...

These two links appeared one after the other on Synlogos -- meaning that the two posts were published very close together in time, probably separated by minutes rather than hours. (Both are dated February 12, with no more specific timestamp.)

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I read "The Epstein Inquisition" first. If the web ...

PSYOPS are regarded as top-down mass psychological/ sociological manipulations; and they are all evil by nature; because they are not motivated by love - not in harmony with divine creation.

Also, since they aim to change "other peoples" behaviour in pre-determined ways, PSYOPS are intrinsically evil in that they ...

Just as in the 2020 Birdemic - when utterly wild and deeply ignorant claims of lethal-danger emanating from serial manipulators and liars; were taken seriously, made into policies, and enforced upon the world; we are now seeing the same with "predictions" about "AI": and the endemicpandemic that is ...

In "Update: Some additional pebbles have been seen," the name Lassie came up as being symbolically related to Colleen, as both names originated as common nouns meaning "girl" used in Celtic countries. In a comment, WanderingGondola noted the further connection that the most famous Lassie is a collie, which is quite ...

First, some comments by others on "All the pebbles I have seen," pasted here for searchability and ease of reference.

William Wright (WW) said...

When I read the line about "precious stones for Colleen", the image that actually came to my mind was Ungoliant. Specifically, the scene in which, after she and Melkor ...

If you agree that the primary unit of reality is Beings, then there are no "causes".

If beings are the reality, then the first step in anything is the freedom of some Being as expressed spiritually; and that is not "a" cause. It can be thought of as some kind of action of their "self", their ultimate nature.

This ...

"When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The ...

Altruism - helping others, especially at the expense of oneself - is widely regarded as the highest human value.

This is especially on the Left, but in a modified form also on the self-styled Right - and very commonly among self-identified Christians (who may even claim that helping-others is the single core and ...

In 1964 a hospital in the United States carried out a series of experiments on dream telepathy. While one person slept, another person would attempt to transmit telepathically a randomly selected image. The sleeper would then report his dreams, and a panel of judges would decide which of eight possible target images ...

I was re-reading the Introduction I wrote for the second edition of William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness (2019).

In this writing I am explaining Arkle's spiritual philosophy, to the best of my ability - and Arkle has been a significant influence on my own understanding over the past fifteen or so years. ...

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tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of the fire. that’s the famous dictum. i know it’s not fair to dissect a metaphor, but maybe i can learn something by it. so what are the requirements of preserving a fire.

you have to get some firewood. that involves planting trees (and that ...

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There is some kind of a consensus - especially among Christians - that Western Civilization is ending, and that this multi-stage collapse is substantially self-inflicted - partly suicidal due to hedonic materialism and cowardice of the unreligious-aspiritual masses; and partly the outcome of deliberate contrivance ...

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As I was contemplating the Three of Pentacles, two lines of an otherwise forgotten song began playing in my mind:

All the pebbles I have seenPrecious stones for Colleen

I began to hear it in my head as a round, with two voices repeating the two lines endlessly, but staggered, so that one voice ...

As I was falling asleep, I thought of a scene from Flight of the Gargoyle in which a girl had an improbably large percentage of her body eaten by a demonic creature (a razor-toothed "mermaid" with the lower body of a leech rather than a fish) while the girl herself remained alive and conscious. I thought, In real life ...

Our creator is a loving God, and the divine creation is "built" with love; so to be on the side* of Good is to live from love.

A person motivated by love, thinks and does things for other people (and other beings), because of love.

This means that the Good person will often do something that sacrifices his own ...