When consciousness is different; when people do the same things, they get different outcomes.

That is pretty obvious in some contexts - but not in others. It's pretty obvious that when some people read Lord of the Rings they experience a very different "outcome" than do others; and the same replies to other works of ...

On October 19, Bruce Charlton posted "Americans are *mental*, when it comes to politics," in which he for some reason repeatedly referred to Donald Trump as "DF." When I asked in a comment why he was calling him that (and guessed that it might be some kind of "Literally Hitler" joke), Bruce didn't explain, but just ...

The first time he left his body he was in elementary school. Before that he had spent his days in his grandmother’s house. There was a garden and the neighborhood was safe, there were kids his age or thereabouts, there was a television and toys, there was a dog and a cat, there were parks and gardens and even an ...

Of course this world is - well, at least on the face of it - a mixture of things going wrong (degeneration, disease, death and destruction), and things going right.

There are many ways in which people try to make sense of this.

Should we be most amazed when things go wrong and life is bad; or is it more accurate ...

When was the last time you ran across a reference to someone’s heart being on the right side rather than the left? Not every day, right?

Yesterday I happened to check Arts & Letters Daily, which I haven’t really followed since the 2010 death of its founder (and an occasional email correspondent of mine), ...

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Carl Gustav Carus - Tintern Abbey - Unknown date Carl Gustav Carus's Tintern Abbey provides a good visual representation of the current state of Christianity's externals.

More precisely, external, conventional, everyday Christianity is breaking up . . . has broken up. All of us are the ...

I was in my study reading a commentary on the Book of Job when the name Seymour Glass (a J. D. Salinger character) suddenly popped into my head, seemingly out of nowhere. Try as I might, I couldn’t trace its origin in my train of thought. I got to thinking about the name and connected it with Gotthard Glas, the ...

I dreamed I was taking my sister to a restaurant in Taiwan. Before entering the restaurant proper, there was a small stone building you had to pass through first. I went into this building through an open arch, and my sister waited outside. I got a piece of chalk and wrote on the stone wall, inside but where she could ...

Little Miss upon a stool(Possibly a tuft of grass)Sat and ate her dairy gruelTill disaster came to pass.Up beside her crept a spider,And when Little Miss espied her,Just imagine, if you can,How she dropped her whey and ran!

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I have used the Texas Sharpshooter idea to describe how modern pseudo-science does research that it gets paid for, then uses Public Relations and advertising to convince people that whatever-is-discovered is actually just whatever people most want and need.

This applies to public policy, in its ...

At six things do I stand in awe;Yea, seven are beyond my grasp:The starry sky, the moral law,The weaving worm, the leaping asp,The growth of seeds, the flight of birds,And clear-eyed Homer’s wingèd words.

For those who reject Creation, freedom amounts to little more than a mix of chaos and randomness, with a bit of conditioning and determinism thrown into the mix. Whatever the case, what Creation-rejecters believe about the nature of freedom is irrelevant because life, the universe, and everything have no real purpose. ...

Fuzzy Wuzzy was an ursidWith a lack of fuzz accursèd,Which implies he wasn’t very,If you think about it, hairy.

If you look up at that rubric that tops this post, you'll find that it's a word-for-word copy of a bit from Arthur Gordon Pym's famous composition "That Black Bird," which notoriously abstains from using a particular symbol -- viz., our fifth Latin glyph. In that way it is similar to this introductory paragraph. I ...

Americans are even further from the needful awakening than the rest of the West, because they (unlike Europeans or the Brits) continue to be optimistic about the possibilities of politics in general and elections in particular.

This seems almost incomprehensible, but it does seem to be true - not least as evidenced ...

Existentialism became increasingly evident in public (and, more, private) thinking through the middle twentieth century, with roots that were probably strongest in Nietzsche. It was a valuable - perhaps essential - consideration of "the human condition", of what it was like to exist.

Yet it was partial, radically ...

Comments are back on.

Mortal life is about spiritual learning.

Peaks and valleys.

Mostly valleys. Rocky valleys.

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Carl Gustav Carus - Pilgrim in a Rocky Valley - c. 1820 Yet the valleys serve a purpose.

​Without them, we would likely not contemplate let alone comprehend what we may have experienced ...

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This famous painting by Winslow Homer from 1899, has commonly been mistitled "The Gulf Steam", when it is clearly intended to be the immediate precursor to the approaching water-spout (back, right) sucking-up the killer sharks (in the foreground), together with the boat and its oarsman - before ...

It is often said that there is nothing esoteric in Christianity. Everything is public and out in the open, and there are no hidden secrets divulged only to higher level initiates. It is true that Christ did exteriorise the mysteries, enacting literally what had taken place symbolically in those ancient rites and so ...

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what Jesus did was ensure defeat was not inevitable. which is something entirely different from ensuring victory.

questionable morals in this life will become answerable in the next one

the car is not self driving, it just won't be you driving it. etc etc. funnily enough, this is an old linguistic problem: ...

Edited from this post and its comments:

...‘wrt. the evolution of consciousness’ and "final participation"...

The first bit that seems important to me is that [modern consciousness] is not a general state, by which I mean, it’s not defined by the age but it depends on the people. Not every human alive ...

Chipmunks and Chip Monks have been a major theme lately, especially over at Bill's blog, so when I happened to check Clickhole today (which I don't do very often, since it long ago crossed that fine line), this caught my eye:

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The article itself is stupid and unfunny, but it does confirm that the ...

today’s post is a recommendation, or rather two. two articles from two of my favorite bloggers.

they were published a day apart, and seemingly unrelated, but in my opinion they are very much related, and the ideas in them underpin my own worldview, so i thought it worthwhile to recommend them.

the first one, ...

Most Christians are aware that this is a spiritually dangerous world, but grossly underestimate the dangers. The dangers of this world are ubiquitous - everywhere and cannot be avoided.

There are no safe guides and there is no safe path.

It is impossible to avoid dangerous churches, dangerous religious practices, ...

He was nominated first, but the lot fell to Matthias. That was the story of his life, condensed and compressed and summed up with sarcastic humor into a single, miserable, ridiculous event. Perhaps it was his name that made him unattractive to lady luck, so that lord fate could have no word in the matter, we know who ...

In his September 2023 post "Asenath vs. the Son of Baal-ox within the Sawtooth Mountains" (on the old, public blog), William Wright tells a story, which he believes took place in 2020, about Asenath defeating a Balrog in the Sawtooth Mountains and successfully bringing out what he was then calling the Sawtooth Stone. ...

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When a tortured romantic relationship goes bad... Hermione and Birkin from the movie of Women in Love

Romanticism has a bad name among most Christians, probably because it is regarded as being emotional and sensuous rather than metaphysical.

This is likely due to the fact that we are emotional ...