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A Brief Hiatus

John Michael Greer31 Comments

I’m going to be taking a week off at this point. No, nothing’s wrong — I ended up having an unexpected opportunity and need more free time than my schedule usually permits to take advantage of it. I’ll be back with an open post next Wednesday, and continue with the current sequence of posts on March 1st. See you soon!

31 Comments

  7. John, enjoy your opportunity/break.

    A recent somewhat mainstream article titled *The thin line between science and magic* echos statements you have made concerning an empirical side to magic.

    https://iai.tv/articles/the-thin-line-between-science-and-magic-auid-2382

    Some excerpts:

    > We often think of the scientific revolution as having displaced a belief in magic, the supernatural, and the occult. But paying a closer look at premodern writings on magic, we find that they explicitly reject the supernatural. What is more, the key figures of the scientific revolution like Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, and even Isaac Newton, all believed in the occult. According to Newton, gravity required the supernatural. Even today, philosophers of science have a hard time demarcating science from pseudoscience or magic, argues Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm.

    > Similarly, the so-called “father of modern science”, Francis Bacon, argued that “Magic aims to recall natural philosophy from a miscellany of speculation to a greatness of works,” which was exactly what he was trying to do with his own project, as is clear from his definition of magic “as the science which applies the knowledge of hidden forms to the production of wonderful operations; and by uniting (as they say) actives with passives displays the wonderful works of nature.” Magic was a pragmatic or instrumentalist form of natural philosophy of exactly the sort Bacon saw as missing from scholasticism. Moreover, although Bacon often gets accused of despiritualizing nature, in texts like Sylva Sylvarum and the Historia vitae et mortis, he described a natural world overflowing with spirits with their own particular powers and appetites. Science, in this account, was the manipulation of spirits, not their elimination.

  9. The BMJ article is a good read. If you are in withdrawal DTs from no JMG article this week, it discusses concepts central to us here. Nice to see it being recognized elsewhere.

    The reference to JMG:
    “The American essayist John Michael Greer distinguishes between a problem and a predicament. A problem can be fixed. It goes away. A predicament, in contrast, has no solution. You have to live with it and can do a better or worse job. What we are living through is a predicament not a problem to be fixed.”

  11. To those who are interested, here are all of the requests for prayer that have recently appeared across the Ecosophia community. Please feel free to add any or all of them to your prayers.

    If I missed anybody on the full list, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom you hold power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below and/or at the prayer list page.

    I would like to draw special attention this week to two prayer requests this week.

    First,
    sdi    ‘s wife gave birth to a baby early Monday morning     amidst regular cursing by a bad actor in their life; the baby seems healthy except a heart defect, possibly due to the heavy medication the mother was given in her hospitalization a couple of months ago. There is a possibility the heart defect may go away on its own, and
    sdi requests     prayers for their protection and healing, particularly the baby.

    The other is Lp9’s
    prayer request on behalf of their hometown of East Palestine, Ohio    , where in the aftermath of the train derailment and (“controlled”) explosion, there are already very troubling signs of environmental devastation whose scale may turn out to far exceed what was originally expected.     (There is also the high weirdness factor of East Palestine being the location of a film about exactly such a train accident which was released last year.) Palestine has less than 5000 residents and yet we happened to have a reader connected with that community asking for us to pray on its behalf well before it became national news. As Ecosophia centers around nature spirituality, I hope many of you reading this will join us in prayers on behalf of all living things being affected by this accident, with prayers for their protection from and healing from the harmful chemicals that are spreading through the surrounding area.

    Finally, if there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological Hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.

  15. Well deserved! I am glad to see you taking time for priorities and yourself, but also look forward to your return.

  21. @JVP,

    Thanks for the article. I didn’t know any of that about Bacon. Fascinating stuff, and it adds a few new layers to the scientific revolution for me. I had assumed Bacon was the grandfather of modern materialism. And maybe he was, but it wasn’t necessarily his own view.

  26. May you have a great week, and plenty of chances to sleep in if you so desire. May your pursuit of the new opportunity be blessed.

  31. Constructive feedback to podcasters: if you invite JMG onto your podcast, it would be great if you could stick to asking short questions and let JMG finish speaking a train of thought.
    So many times it seems like the interviewer is trying to impress JMG by talking about all these things that they know. And JMG is just sitting there going “mmhmm, mmhmm, mhm …” boring!
    I know each podcaster is free to do whatever they want; it’s their show. But frequently these days I don’t even finish listening to the episode.

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