My last post, "Apple of ashes, brine to the burning throat," mentions that in the Book of Mormon, Lehi sees a tree with white fruit but does not mention the color of the tree itself, while Nephi, wishing to have the same vision, sees a white tree but does not mention the color of its fruit. It also notes that this ...

A lot of modern people are(or claim to be) averse to the exclusivism of "Christianity".

By "exclusivism" they usually refer to some particular self-identified Christian church, or denomination, or a selection of such churches.

And by exclusivism is meant a collection of various ideas that limit salvation: for ...

Can we genuinely - by making wise and responsible lifestyle choices - fight The System, and thereby work incrementally towards a Good, a Christian, world?

The true and ultimate answer, the answer from Jesus Christ, is: No, we cannot.

(Also; even if we could truly make a better this-world by our choices; that would ...

I just read this in Orson F. Whitney's Elias: An Epic of the Ages. The poet is apostrophizing worldly fame and commenting on its futility.

Apple of ashes to the longing lip!Brine to the burning throat and thirsting soul!Phantom, delusion, misty ghost of fame!Voidest and vainest of all vanities!

Whitney's intended ...

Just a few days ago, I was searching for pictures of a bowl of soup and got a skeletal humanoid deer creature. Today I was again searching for something completely unrelated and got the Hermit card of the Tarot.

I saw this on /pol/:

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It shows image search results on Google for star wars jew ...

It is a simple fact that the supporters of "AI" are thereby supporting global totalitarianism's Core Project - and the project that the totalitarians have-been, and currently are, expending more resources and money upon, than any other of their strategies of evil.

Supporting "AI" is therefore rational and ...

My last post, "You have bound yourself with oaths," brought the Moody Blues back into the sync stream. Remembering that I had posted about the anagram Embody the Soul before, I looked it up and found this: "The Moody Blues, Embody the Soul, snails and ammonites, stars and stones, blue ball of light" (September 2023). ...

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This is notice of a TV series called The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin that I am currently watching on Amazon Prime; adapted from a fantasy novel series by Stephen Lawhead. I have, so far, seen three episodes of seven.

This is, by some margin, the best fantasy drama I have seen on TV; very ...

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This is notice of a TV series called The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin that I am currently watching on Amazon Prime - I have seen three episodes.

It is, by some margin, the best fantasy drama I have seen on TV; very powerful and intriguing, beautiful and moving; very well written and ...

I dreamt the following lines, sung to the tune of "John Brown's Body" or "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Unfortunately certain key words have slipped out of my memory.

You have bound yourself with oaths the ... take.You have made the ancient covenant the ... make.

My sense is that the first lacuna was 'sons ...

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 he implies 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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Nikolai Gogol - an irrelevant portrait (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 ...