I featured Ivan Aivazovsky's painting Chaos a couple of years ago. At the time I thought it did a good job depicting creation from chaos rather than creation from nothing.

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Chaos - 1841 Of course, I don't believe Aivasovsky shared that assumption. Nor do I think that he imply such through ...

my characters tend to like what i like, both in general and in details. but sometimes i try to give them this or that taste (say, their favorite musician is this or that) and it doesn't work. i know it and they know it. or i know it because they know it. then i find the answer, and through this process i even discover ...

I ran across this image on an old 4chan thread.

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It caught my eye because of the red and blue spectacles and because the character's name, Hermione, suggests (but is etymologically unrelated to) Hermit. Then I realized that the wat spelling in the meme matched the actress's surname, Watson, and I ...

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An irrelevant portrait of Nikolai Gogol - apparently channelling his inner Benny Hill

For those too young to remember; the search engine that also hosts this blog and which I will therefore call Gogol, was launched in the late 1990s; and developed over the next years into one of the great ...

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The above are marks inscribed on the door jamb of the entrance to the beautiful and fascinating church of St Andrew's, Hartburn, Northumberland.

The marks may have been left by members of that much-discussed organization The Knights Templar, who were certainly active locally. Three were tried in ...

The way things have been shaping over the past years; I think that the biggest spiritual challenge is related to social institutions; specifically the question of whether or not people (including you and I, as individuals) are going to root our fundamental understanding and support of reality in a social ...

This is a follow up to the previous post which stated that Christ can operate through avenues other than mainstream Christianity. This is because Christ is not only the historical Jesus. He is also the eternal or archetypal pattern of divine truth which can appear wherever a form is open to it. In fact, this inner ...

I had had a meeting scheduled for this afternoon, but the client called to ask if we could reschedule it to 7/22. Minutes later, I was reading White Crows, and one of the characters checks the time and says, "It's seven twenty-two now."

Now, about an hour later, as I'm typing this, the Global Goblet is on the TV ...

In the early 1970s, it was a standard aesthetic criterion that "development" was a good thing, a necessary thing - and that the developed was better.

I first came across it in pop music. e.g. The idea that The Beatles were good because their music developed, from album to another the style (and subject matter) ...

But Men shall remember Atlantis's nameCome hell or high water! Sith both of them came,It rests unforgotten, and what we now tellSkills not to be stop'd by high water or hell.We bow to no ban, and though new Men or Old May presume to forbid it, the tale will be told.High water, freeze over! and hell, do your worst!Let ...

The sync fairies just will not let up on this theme. I found this while searching for a clip-art image of a bowl of soup.

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Update: The humanoid deer creature in this post is labeled GRIM STONE. apparently the stage name of a Canadian musical artist. WG left a comment saying that a character in one ...

this post was inspired by a question asked me. essentially, how to like jazz.

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when had me on his podcast one of the first things he asked me was, What’s the deal with jazz. this is actually a question i’ve encountered before. being into jazz is not the same as being into this or that genre of pop ...

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We are born with secure knowledge that "we are not alone" but inhabit a universe of other beings, some like ourselves, some different.

This knowledge is built-in, not a product of experience (which might, after all, be misinterpreted or delusional).

This built-in-ness is why the existence of ...

The history of the circulation of blood may be summarized as follows:

4 → 2 + 2 → 3 + 1

Blood is made up of four constituent parts. In the beginning, these were united in a single corpuscle, the 4-corpuscle, which you can picture as four small spheres agglomerated together into a single body, like a ...

I was at a restaurant, and the Alan Walker song "Faded" came on. I've heard it before but never paid enough attention to the lyrics to realize that it's actually about Atlantis:

Where are you now?Where are you now?Where are you now?Was it all in my fantasy?Where are you now?Were you only imaginary?

Where are you ...

Earlier today, I ended my post "Decorations from a Tree of Acorns" with two lines from "The Allansford Pursuit" by Robert Graves, for no other reason than that they had popped into my head, despite the fact that I last read that poem in 2001.

Cunning and art he did not lackBut aye her whistle would fetch him ...

Bill left a comment at 12:22 p.m. on "The white caribou" relating a dream he had had:

I was sitting in a church chapel, which also seemed to be some kind of library or study hall, as I was sitting toward the back at a large table, while trying to read or study or something like that. At the front of the chapel ...

Here is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer, which I most recently posted here in "The hermit, the magician, the owl, and Hieronymus Bosch" (July 4).

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And here is a photo I took today (July 11) of a decoration on the exterior wall of a vegetarian restaurant.

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I dreamt that I had bought secondhand a very rare privately published hardcover book titled Decorations from a Tree of Acorns: A Version of "The Paper". Its orangish-brown cover, with the title written in gold inside a black rectangle, seemed to be imitating the aesthetic of the first edition of the Book of Mormon. No ...

​Youth is wasted on the young.

Everyone has heard the phrase and understands what it expresses. The seemingly limitless vitality, energy, vigor, time, curiosity, bravado, and optimism inherent in a stage of life are also tainted by a glaring failure to capitalize on those attributes due to a lack of experience ...

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From today's church-hunting at St Michael and All Angels, Felton, in Northumberland.

What is very unusual is that the whole tracery design at the top, including an eight-pointed flower, was carved from a single piece of sandstone.

A lovely and architecturally fascinating (surprisingly large, ...

I took this photo this past Wednesday (July 8) outside Caribou Cafe, which is also where I took the June 15 photo is "Humanoid deer creatures."

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The white hart -- or white caribou, I suppose -- is stationed in front of a door, or portal.

The fact that it's specifically a caribou, or reindeer, led ...

There is a sentence in the Fourth Gospel that contradicts the argument and multiple statements of the rest of the Gospel, and which I assume was a later and alien addition...

But which (with, perhaps, a terrible and malignant inevitability) became standard orthodox compulsory dogma in many Christian churches (at ...

Does History unfold according to a plan?

I think not.

But History does have a direction, and this direction is a bottom-up kind of thing: I mean the shape of History is a consequence of the cumulative development of individual Beings.

And that development of Beings is a matter of increasing consciousness.

God ...

There is a very strong tendency among anti-Establishment radicals (and indeed among Establishment-supporting radicals - the legions of deluded Leftists) - that true information can, and shall, defeat the distortions of censorship and untruthful propaganda.

That is the theory, but you may have noticed that this does ...

I am sometimes asked "What are you?", meaning am I a Christian, a Buddhist, Theosophist, esotericist or pagan of some kind, whatever it might be. I always find it difficult to give a proper answer to this question since in a way I am all of these and yet none. That is to say, I have learned from many spiritual ...

The juxtaposition of a hermit with a hart, sometimes merged into a single "humanoid deer creature," has been a sync theme recently. Thus this sign caught my eye as I passed it on the road this morning:

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It says DeerHer, written as a single word with no space. If Her is understood to be a truncated ...

It is striking (to me) how the ideal values of worship and obedient service have declined to feebleness - or else to a legalism of worship and obedient service that disguises a pleasure-seeking/ fear-motivated loyal conformity to societal power.

Worship-of and obedience-to God are the Old Testament ideal that ...