Suppose you were confused or just plain curious as to the reality of human free will. Where would be a reasonable starting point to look into this topic? And where would likely be a clusterfuck waste of your precious time?
Category / Essays
Meditation On Chalk
There is a subtle distancing effect which our numerous online devices and other technologies foist upon our minds regarding the world of everyday objects. Left unchecked, we develop a disregard and disinterest in things and their nature, reflected in the disposable stance many ‘movers and shakers’ adopt towards articles of utility. But imagine if the surrounding world of objects could be reunited with their rightful depths of significance, qualities, and history! Suppose you had to think ONLY about a piece of chalk, to take a mundane example, for 10 full minutes. How difficult would it be, and what could be recovered?
Do This Before Waking
There is a country with exceedingly fuzzy borders we all traverse and meander about each night between definitely awake and definitely not awake. Dream state consciousness researchers call this fluctuating interim the hypnogogic condition. But there is also hypogogia: the transition phase between not yet awake and awake every morning. An equally evasive experience, but easier to empirically study on one’s own, I find. Whoever explores this persistently can more easily catch pictures of how altered consciousness looks, because the mental energy is increasing and refreshed in the mornings as opposed to night times. It is a matter of building technique…
Clairvoyance in Mark’s Gospel
I want to open a space in your imagination concerning the Gospel of Mark. A vessel of considerations for a different way to think about what concepts like ‘revelation’, ‘salvation’, and the entire idea of religious striving means. I hold that the usual and widespread way of looking at these sorts of things are extrememly unfortunate and guarantee confusion. We’ve been sold a bogus conceptual framework by the ‘experts’, the theologians, evangelical pastors and institutions espousing church dogmas. Often but not always this falseness has been inadvertant. The remedy for this must be individual and entirely reject anything smacking of received authority.
Nagel vs. The Uber-Narrative
Lots of intellectuals presume they ‘know’ it is impossible to deconstruct the received wisdom about how Darwinism, the natural worldview, and science are intertwined. Truth is, it requires patient dedication and a wide-ranging inquiry. But it is not really rocket science. The big obstacle is not the intellectual immensity of the endeavor, but the scalding ridicule and heresy indictments you will have to endure from the orthodoxy police if you ever speak up about it. I first wrote this in 2015. Before this blog took a sort of — poetic — turn.
Three Approaches to Ethics
I originally worked on this essay seven years ago. I decided to re-blog it because, still timely, it represents my roots in some ways at the very beginning of SWR (along with a second essay which I will re-blog next month), and has been seen by few if any current readers… There is a legend regarding Da Vinci’s Last Supper which I quite like:
Each one of the twelve apostles embodies the perfecting and expressing of a single different one of the twelve virtues. Achieving divine initiation is said to consist of perfecting the cultivation of all twelve within one’s being or soul, harmoniously, over the course of many lifetimes. Which is exemplified by Christ.
A-i-t-S 3B : Across The Lake
This is the final episode to be posted in my series describing personal experiences venturing beyond the veil of the obvious. It takes place in a wilderness setting in the autumn, in the northern part of Alabama. Look here if you want to gain an overview and rationale about the entire “Adventures in the Supernatural” series.
“People sacrifice the present for the future. But life is available only in the present. That is why we should walk in such a way that every step can bring us to the here and the now. Many people are alive but do not touch the miracle of being alive.” – Thich Nhat Than
CONDENSED VERSION: Lovers of brevity might feel relieved that years ago I expressed all of this in a haiku instead. 🙂
ACTUAL VERSION: Continue Reading.
Know Way (Act 1)
A-i-t-S 4 : Final Visitation
The fifth in a series venturing beyond the veil of the obvious. The point of this series has been to illustrate, drawing upon actual events in my own life, situations and occurrences which cast definitive doubt upon the conventionally accepted rational materialistic worldview. I hold that the only honest and plausible explanation for the kinds of events depicted here is that the realist consensus is wrong and must be replaced by a spiritual worldview — and it is at our collective peril that we persist “forward” wearing our status quo blinders. The previous episode can be found here. A useful explanatory orientation to the entire series with links for each episode is also worth seeing.
A-i-t-S 1 : The Bouquet
This was the 1st in a series venturing beyond the veil of the materialistically and naturalistically obvious. It was first written in 2017. I’ve mentioned that I am posting all six of these true stories, which are events taken from my own experience, during the final month of this year, including several which have never before appeared in print. The purpose of the series is to show actual events from one biography — my own — which illustrate the demand for the abandoning of the orthodox worldview thrust upon us by materialistic science and modern education in favor of one which includes acknowledgement of spiritual reality. Before it’s too late! Read this for an orientation to the entire series.
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