Touched By Your Presence, Dear: Ex-Blondie songwriter and bassist Gary Lachman (aka "Gary Valentine") blogs (and is interviewed) about his books on Jung, Steiner, Ouspensky, and Sixties mysticism, and his time spent toiling in the fields of Crowleyana and The Gurdjieff Work.
posted by darth_tedious
on Sep 14, 2010 -
20 comments
Acousmata is a unique music blog devoted to "idiosyncratic research in electronic and experimental music, sound and acoustics, mysticism and technology" with special focus on the early history of electronic music.
posted by speicus
on Jul 30, 2010 -
16 comments
Yesterday was the birthday of
Dr. John Dee (1527-1609) (
wiki). This
extraordinary and brilliant man was a
mathematician,
astrologer, astronomer, navigator, map maker, alchemist, hermetic philosopher,
and adviser in matters practical
and arcane to Queen
Elizabeth 1st.
History has sometimes
been unkind to him because he
embraced science and mysticism together (
previously), believing both to be facets of the same universal thing. His unfortunate
experiments in conjuring angels
with the alchemist
Edward Kelley are probably to blame. Kelley
asserted that the angel Uriel had instructed him to swap or share wives with Dr. Dee. This, unsurprisingly, led to the end of their association.
16th century celestial wife-swapping was going too far.
However, Dr. Dee was a
true Renaissance man and a
gifted scholar. You can visit his black obsidian
magic Aztec mirror at the British Museum.
posted by infini
on Jul 14, 2010 -
50 comments
Savitri Devi Mukherji. Born Maximiani Portas in 1905, this French woman of Greek and English extraction would, in pilgrimages to Palestine and India, experience a series of strange awakenings - that she was a National Socialist, that she was a Hindu, that the two were entwined in the struggle against the Judeo-Christian order, and that
Hitler was the living incarnation of Kalki the Destroyer, the final avatar of Vishnu. Known to many as "Hitler's guru," she stood at the forefronts of Hindu nationalism,
Nazi mysticism, Holocaust denial,
animal rights, and the international Neo-Nazi movement.
The Lightning And The Sun, her most famous work, most directly espouses her philosophy, but perhaps the best place to start would be
Long-Whiskers And The Two-Legged Goddess, which is her autobiography as filtered through her many cats. Her nephews were Communists; her own mother was active in the French Resistance; and according to some, the daughter would have shot the mother dead for it. The world is not be a better place for the Savitri Devis of the world, but her presence made this world
like none other.
posted by Sticherbeast
on Sep 10, 2006 -
22 comments
A landmark rigorous
study, 36 years after Walter Pahnke's
Good Friday study ocuments the ability of psilocybin - the chemical in "magic mushrooms" - to trigger mystical experiences. 16 of 24 participants, who had no history of psychedelic use, rated the drug episode (after 2 months) to be among the 5 most meaningful experiences in their lifetime. A longer 40-year
follow-up by MAPS on those who took LSD under the supervision of psychiatrist Oscar Janiger in the 1950s, found qualitatively the same result.
posted by daksya
on Jul 10, 2006 -
236 comments
The Meaning of Life according to various rather famous people (Dennett, Fukuyama, etc). I'm watching the Dennett video at the moment and it starts rather weakly, but, by midway through, is rolling along nicely. With topics like "being good without god" and "the anthropic principle" it struck me as relevant to a couple of recent
askmefi threads.
Dennett: [pause] i guess i'll say it again, more slowly...
(oh, and the player interface is rather delicate - give it time to load and click play a few times...)
posted by andrew cooke
on Oct 1, 2004 -
17 comments
Dear Leo, Dear Mohandas "The longer I live -- especially now when I clearly feel the approach of death -- the more I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else... the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries. Love... the highest and indeed the only law of life".
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (full text available) is
Leo Tolstoy's tractatus of "
Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life", a primer of (among other things) the doctrine of
non-violence. Among the many
fans of the 1894 book was an
imprisoned Hindu barrister, a
"half-naked fakir" if you want, a certain
Mohandas K.
Gandhi who was fascinated by
"the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness" of the
book. So he ended up writing fan letters to the great Russian man: who warmly wrote back to his young Indian "friend and brother". The old wise
Christian anarchist literary
giant and the shy, insecure
young man who sparked a revolution: to paraphrase another wise,
badly-dressed , pacifist old man, "Generations to come, it may be, will scarcely believe that such men ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth."
posted by matteo
on Jun 17, 2004 -
16 comments
Our discussion of the human condition centers around a basic but seldom accepted or understood idea: We are "asleep", compared to what we could be. We are caught in illusions while thinking we are perceiving reality.On
Waking Up by
Charles Tart, who provided my introduction to
Gurdjieff. I am currently reading his
Living The Mindful Life. As a perusal of his site will reveal, he is interested as well in the psychedelic experience, altered states, the paranormal, psi, out-of-body experiences, near death experiences, remote viewing and the whole woo woo schmear. All these are of less interest to me. He does provide a good introduction to Gurdjieff, however. There are more links within.
posted by y2karl
on Jun 15, 2004 -
19 comments
Out of the mist of the beginning of our era there looms a pageant of mythical figures whose vast, superhuman contours might people the walls of another Sistine Chapel. Their countenances and gestures, the roles in which they are cast, the drama which they enact, would yield images different from the biblical ones on which the imagination of the beholder was reared, yet strangely familiar to him and disturbingly moving. The stage would be the same, the theme as transcending: the creation of the world, the destiny of man, fall and redemption, the first and the last things. But how much more numerous would be the cast, how much more bizarre the symbolism, how much more extravagant the emotions!
Hans Jonas
Into the
Gnostic.
Of magicians, miracle workers, saints and sinners of early Christianities and other mystery religions--including but not limited to
Valentinus,
Simon Magus,
Mithras,
Marcion,
Manicheans,
Mandeans, the
Winged Hermes, the
Gospel of Thomas and the
Gospel of Mary, among many other
Apocrypha and
Pseudepigraphica, the
Cathars and
Apollonious of Tyana. Not to mention
Philip K. Dick.
posted by y2karl
on Nov 30, 2002 -
11 comments
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Charismatic and controversial, infamous for introducing the
enneagram, claimed by the
Sufis, linked to the little known
Yezidis, (More
here),
Gurdjieff--and his
school--have their detractors, whether
religious or
skeptic. His ideas can be
difficult , abstruse and are ultimately beside the point. His thesis can be reduced to
this: We are asleep, mere machines, acting from habit rather than volition. The goal then is to wake up and stay awake. And that is where the
Work comes in. ( A bit more within)
posted by y2karl
on Aug 6, 2002 -
20 comments
