Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Rather than experience depending on consciousness, consciousness presupposes experience” –Whitehead (PR 83) I have often wondered about the claim (largely found in Eastern spirituality) that Gurus, for instance, can attain a permanent “state” of enlightenment where they are perfectly in-tune with an Ultimate Reality. I confess that I am in large part an egalitarian;…
“Finally there is nature, the physical world proper. Here esotericism differs radically from modern science, which regards consciousness as an epiphenomenon, a kind of side effect, of neurological processes. For the esotericist, consciousness is primary; matter comes after.” –Richard Smoley, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition I’ve been reading Richard Smoley’s book, Inner…
I watched a really funny movie on Netflix over the weekend called The Polka King. (**SPOILERS AHEAD!!**) Beside the fact that the movie takes place in the town where I went to high school (Hazleton, Pennsylvania) and the fact that it has lots of polka music (which I fondly remember my grandmother listening to…
I may certainly be misunderstanding the concept (or understanding it incompletely) but for me, as a process-relational thinker, the pejorative ontotheological criticism/dismissal has never bothered me much in the first place, and as a panpsychically-oriented, panentheistic religious naturalist I again don’t care. A) in the process-relational conception of things the “ontic” category isn’t really meaningful,…
quiet the noise we had a life with with pens on the counter and crumbs on the floor a junk drawer and our refrigerator with magnets holding up our principals there is the nick in the table, the wobbly leg fixed again, and the stain on the rail some marks provide definition and spirit others,…
“In alchemy, alcohol is used to extract the soul essence of an entity. Hence its’ use in extracting essences for essential oils, and the sterilization of medical instruments. By consuming alcohol into the body, it in effect extracts the very essence of the soul, allowing the body to be more susceptible to neighboring entities most…
In all of my conversations with men who own guns for “self-defense” (the vast majority of them being white men, btw) every single one of them comes out at some point trying to save face (presumably not wanting to sound like a complete monster) by saying something like, “I’d never want to kill anyone, it’s…
If I were to quickly describe to someone what I thought good, healthy religion was I would say this: religion is one part art, one part play, and one part contemplation. So, religion is art in the sense that it taps into that same, beautiful, liminal space that good art taps into; I like the…
“In ‘The Death of the Author’, Barthes argues that writing destroys every voice and point of origin. This is because it occurs within a functional process which is the practice of signification itself…A writer, therefore, does not have a special genius expressed in the text, but rather, is a kind of craftsman who is skilled…
“That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out…