Last week’s post on the spooky dimensions of reading—the one-on-one encounter, in the silent places of the mind, with another person’s thinking—sparked a lively discussion on the comments page, and no shortage of interesting questions. One of the points that was brought up repeatedly, though, focused on one of the points that I didn’t address…
The Taste of Another’s Thoughts
We’ve taken a somewhat rambling route in our discussion of how each of us can haul ourselves up out of the swamp of abstractions in which modern industrial society is sinking fast, and find our way to the solid ground of things that actually matter. I know some of my readers have been baffled or…
May 2018 Book Club
This week’s post is the latest of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written or recommend. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Spiritual Ecology of History” (pp.119-131). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments focused…
A Tune for Mountain Dulcimer
For some time now I’ve been thinking about one of the core patterns underlying recent history here in the United States. It’s a pattern that can be traced from colonial times onward, and it offers unexpected insights into the mess the United States is in just now; the one difficulty with it is that nearly…
April 2018 Open Post
As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month (well, more or less!) to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill…
Returning to the Commonplace
There are times when the twilight of the American century takes on a quality of surreal absurdity I can only compare to French existentialist theater or the better productions of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and this is one of them. Over the weekend, in response to a chemical-weapons incident in Syria that may or may…
April 2018 Book Club
This week’s post is the tenth of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Spiritual Ecology of Initiation” (pp.101-118). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments focused on that…
The Truths We Have In Common
In recent posts here on Ecosophia.net, I’ve sketched out the way that the era of abstraction in which we’ve all grown up has foundered, following patterns that were old before our civilization was born. We’ve talked about the way that the abstract generalizations that started out helping to make sense of on-the-ground realities have been…
An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018
This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any. Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the…
The Twilight of Authority
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the need for a rhetorical education—that is, an education that doesn’t presume to lay down the law about what’s true and what’s false, but instead teaches each individual how to understand and assess claims about truth and falsehood. That’s a concept many people find challenging these days.…