With this post we continue our survey of the Great Wheel of the 28 lunar phases, the central symbolic mandala of Yeats’s A Vision. In last month’s episode we followed the arc of the evolving soul around the second quarter of the wheel, from the bitter conflict and unavoidable failure of the 8th phase to the brink of fulfillment in the 14th. At this point, as we reach the mysterious 15th phase, it’s time to pause for a moment, reflect on the journey the soul had made thus far, and make as much sense as possible of the 15th phase before the Wheel begins turning back toward its starting point.
There’s a fine old word for the kind of trajectory Yeats is exploring in our text: enantiodromia. (In case you’re wondering, that’s pronounced en-ANN-chee-oh-DROW-me-ah.) This is what you call the process by which something becomes its opposite and then cycles back to its origin. Biological life is like that. Looked at in isolation, it’s hard to see any common ground at all between an acorn and an oak; the acorn is tiny, self-contained, inert, waiting for a specific set of environmental changes that it may never get; the oak is not only vaster but in constant interaction with its environment, to such an extent that it defines an ecosystem around itself.
Yet each of these is the vehicle of a process that flows through the other and returns to itself. An acorn is an oak’s way of making more oaks. Equally, an oak is an acorn’s way of making more acorns. In the same sense, all the complexities of human existence can be seen as the elaborate machinery by which a fertilized ovum brings about more fertilized ova. That’s how enantiodromia works. As in these metaphors, so more generally, the process can always be looked at from both its endpoints, the acorn and the oak. Keep this in mind when you think about Yeats’s system and it will help you avoid a good many misunderstandings.
A Vision has its two endpoints, the new moon and the full moon. Each of these endpoints is also a turning point, the end of the journey away from the other and the beginning of a new journey that leads back to the other; each lives the other’s death and dies the other’s life. The new moon is the state of complete embodiment of the primary tincture, the state of immersion and dissolution in the collective reality known by turns as Nature and God; the full moon is the state of complete embodiment of the antithetical tincture, the state of perfect individuation in which all merely collective realities fade to total irrelevance. As we’ve seen already, these are the yin and yang of Yeats’s cosmology, and the soul cycles back and forth between them.
This sets A Vision at odds with the visions of history and destiny popular in Yeats’s time and ours. Most obviously, it flies in the face of the linear timelines so many belief systems embrace in the modern world: the Christian account that runs in a straight line from Eden to apocalypse, the rationalist-materialist account that runs in an equally straight line from the caves to the stars, and so on. There are plenty of examples and they all share the same structure: from a beginning along a linear trajectory toward an end that differs as far as possible from the beginning.
More subtly, it challenges the circular timelines that have been linear time’s chief opposition in the modern world. These move through a cyclic trajectory that ends where it began. In the historical theology of Marxism, for example, the cycle begins with communism before private property and ends with communism after it. In most of the apocalyptic belief systems that provide the counterpoint to today’s rationalist-materialist myth of progress, the cycle begins with primitive tribalism and ends there, too, with civilization as a temporary aberration in the middle.
Most of these circular timelines have been infused to some extent by linear thinking rooted in the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. Where the cycles of time tracked by the Hindu and Mayan traditions, to cite only two relevant examples, repeat endlessly through infinite time, most of their Western equivalents have a “one and done” attitude to the process—you won’t hear many Marxists, for example, suggest that after a certain period of communism in the future, private property will be reinvented and keep the wheel turning! The reason, of course, is that these circular timelines have the same sort of heavy moralizing gloss as their linear rivals. The reign of private property, like the kingdom of Satan in Christian theology, is defined not merely as evil but as the source of all evils, from which the Second Coming of Christ or the proletariat or whoever is expected to liberate the world once and for all.
This is not what Yeats is doing. In the system of A Vision, neither the primary nor the antithetical tincture is good, or for that matter evil; yes, Yeats describes the antithetical as evil, but notes that this is solely from the perspective of the primary, and the reverse judgment also applies. The transition from one tincture to the other is thus neither a fall nor a redemption. It replaces one set of possible joys and unavoidable sorrows with another.
Since each phase is either primary or antithetical—the even phases are primary, the odd antithetical—the alternation between the two tinctures is one of the factors that keeps the wheel spinning. Perhaps the best metaphor available for this is to think of the two tinctures as the same kind of systole and diastole that your heart goes through with every beat. The soul contracts and focuses in its antithetical phases, and expands and diffuses in its primary phases.
In each cycle, there is a moment of stasis when one movement has completed itself and the other has not yet begun. These are the 1st and 15th phases, the nights of the new moon and full moon respectively. When the wheel is seen as a sequence of 28 incarnations, these two lives do not take place in the ordinary world. To Yeats, the conflict between Mask and Body of Fate, the world as we wish it would be and the world as it insists on presenting itself to us, is a necessary element of human existence. In its absence, we exist, but not as human beings.
In these two phases, in turn, this conflict cannot exist. In the 1st phase, the Mask is dissolved in the Body of Fate and the Will in the Creative Mind: the soul is so caught up in objective reality that it cannot conceive of a world different from the one it encounters moment by moment. In the 15th phase, the Body of Fate is dissolved in the Mask and the Creative Mind in the Will: the soul is so caught up in subjective reality that it experiences the world of its deepest and brightest dream and can know no other. These are not disembodied phases; the soul at each of these two points has a body appropriate to it, but these are not bodies like the ones we know.
To characterize the bodies and other characteristics of these two other-than-human phases, Yeats drew on his research into spiritualism, on the one hand, and the occult teachings he studied in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, on the other. The spirits of the 1st phase are those Yeats encountered over and over again at second hand in his work as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, Britain’s first and most prestigious organization for parapsychology. He discussed these beings at length in some of his essays, especially “Swedenborg, Mediums, and the Desolate Places,” in which he showed the remarkable parallels between the behavior of the spirits contacted by spiritualist mediums and the records of ghosts and phantoms recorded in legends across a broad sweep of space and time
These spirits are shadowy, formless, shapeshifting. They are easily confused by the clearer and more focused minds of incarnate human beings, and so tend to appear and speak in ways that reflect the expectations and beliefs of their human witnesses. They can be conjured up and commanded, by those who know how, but they make poor servants because they know nothing, think nothing, and remember nothing beyond what they mirror back to us from our own minds. It’s a mistake, though one very commonly made in all ages, to expect these spirits to tell the truth, to pass on accurate information about their previous existence, or to reason clearly—or at all.
At best, under some circumstances, these spirits can relay messages from unhuman spiritual entities to incarnate human beings, though this only happens when the unhuman entities choose. At worst, they mirror back the delusions of those who attempt to come into contact with them, with results that range from the absurd to the catastrophic. They are neither good nor evil, being incapable of thought and judgment, and it is through this state of complete passivity that the innocence that is the most striking characteristic of Phase 2 comes into being.
The spirits of the 15th phase are everything those of phase 1 are not. Where the latter know nothing, the former know everything, though that knowledge is always tinged by the unique personality of the soul, and assembled into a single image centered on an equally unique focus of perception, desire, and love. The spirits of the 15th phase are not at the beck and call of mediums and sorcerers, as those of the 1st phase are; they cannot be commanded, bullied, or bribed, as they have perfect inalienable possession of the one thing they desire and care for nothing else.
It is sometimes possible for mystics and artists to perceive them and get a glimpse of their state of being, and the great works of beauty our species has produced come from such glimpses. These spirits are themselves beautiful beyond anything we can experience or even dream of. It is through the time they spend in this phase that souls craft the luminous bodies they will inhabit when they have finished all the necessary circuits of the Great Wheel and step off it, into that realm Yeats sometimes calls a sphere and sometimes the Thirteenth Cone, where all oppositions and conflicts are resolved into unity at last.
Both these states, the 1st and the 15th, are the fulfillments of the labors of many lives. How the second half of the journey around the Great Wheel leads to the perfection of the 1st phase will be the subject of many posts to come. How the first half of that same journey leads to the opposite perfection of Phase 15 has been central to much of our discussion so far, but that process has not been made explicit, since its endpoint was not in view. That can be corrected now.
The entire arc of lives from the 2nd to the 14th phase can be seen as the process through which a soul gains the ability to envision and seek ideals that are wholly distinct from its environment. The ideals chosen in each life are different, as the Mask moves from phase to phase, keeping its strict opposition to the Will. The environment changes also as the Body of Fate moves through an opposite arc, confronting the soul with different challenges in every life. Each life lived out of phase teaches the soul the penalties of failure; each life lived in phase gives it a foretaste of the possibilities of success. Both give strength to the Will.
In the first quarter of the Great Wheel, the soul cannot choose the direction its Will moves or the Mask that it seeks. In Yeats’s terminology, these are enforced, not free, and in these phases they come from the social environment into which the soul has been born. By contrast, the Creative Mind and Body of Fate are free in these phases, not enforced; the soul can understand its environment in ways that seem whimsical or bizarre to those in later phases, and the environment itself is unnervingly receptive to such vagaries—a phenomenon that has an important reflection in historical terms, as we will see in due time.
The Will and the Mask, however, have no such freedom in these phases. They take the pattern assigned them by the social setting of each life. At first this happens automatically, as the tinctures are open to the impersonal and do not close until phases 4 and 5 close the primary and antithetical tinctures respectively. Once this happens, the soul must make an effort to conform to the enforced Will and Mask. As this proceeds, the soul gains strength and begins the process of unfolding its own unique capacities.
Eventually, in the tumult of Phase 8, the soul must shake off the influence of social mores and norms, but if it does so too soon it lives out of phase and experiences lives of misery and defeat. The limitations of collective thought and belief are the framework that allows the soul in this first quarter to earn the strength that will give it independence in due time. Here as always in Yeats’s system, success in the business of living comes from grappling with the inescapable conflicts of any given life and growing strong through the wrestling match, not from fleeing the conflicts into some illusory perfection that seems to promise peace.
In the second quarter, the soul has shaken off the influence of collective consciousness and now has to put something else in its place. This doesn’t come easily. It can’t come at all until the tinctures open in the 11th and 12th phases, the antithetical in the former and the primary in the latter. Where the tinctures opened onto the impersonal in the primary half of the wheel, they open onto the soul’s own depths in the antithetical half; the soul first becomes capable of imagining itself as a creator, then gains the ability to envision its potential creations.
In this quarter the Will and Mask are now free, and the Creative Mind and the Body of Fate are enforced. This change is responsible for the distinctive characteristic of the second quarter, which is rage. At first the soul rages against an environment that has suddenly become recalcitrant, refusing to allow the Will to win the Mask it now can choose freely. Later, once the tinctures open and it can gaze into its own depths, the rage turns inward, into what Yeats terms “spiritual or supersensual rage”—the soul recognizes that what holds it back from the fulfillment of its desire is in itself, the limitations of its own enforced Creative Mind. The labor needed to overcome these limitation occupies the soul for the last phases before the full moon.
One more point should be brought up here, partly because Yeats hints at it in various places, partly because it will be important when we begin discussing the Great Wheel as a historical cycle. Every incarnation, as Yeats has pointed out already, cycles through all 28 phases between birth and death. Every civilization does the same thing, so does every political, religious, and creative movement, and so does everything else that can be assigned to the Great Wheel—which, in Yeats’s view, is just about everything in the universe of human experience. In these, the 1st and 15th phases are still distinct, but in a different way.
Those of my readers who write, or paint, or practice any other creative art have already experienced this often enough. There is always a gap between the work one envisions and what actually comes out of the process. When I write fiction, for example, much of the early part of the creative process—beginning with the first stirrings of character or theme or situation, and quite often continuing well into the writing process—is a matter of discovering what the story is trying to become, how these characters and those themes and the situation that frames them are supposed to fit together.
Yet the process is never completely successful. There is always a gap between the story as I can sense it while writing it and the manuscript that goes to the publisher. Sometimes I can minimize the gap, and the novels I consider my best are those in which I was able to do this, but the gap is always there. The story I couldn’t quite get written down is the 15th phase of this process, a luminous reality forever outside the world of experience.
The same is true of each individual life. At some point in our middle years, more often than not, each of us gets as close as we are going to get to expressing whatever unique variation on the theme of human existence our life is meant to embody. The years before then lead up to that near approach; the years afterward are a struggle to keep expressing that theme in the teeth of the hard realization that there are goals we will never achieve and griefs we cannot avoid, before the final phases bring down the curtain.
Each civilization, finally, is subject to the same law. At the heart of each great culture is a vision of human possibility. The rise of the civilization is the process by which that vision is slowly and painfully discovered and understood. The zenith comes when the vision is partly but never wholly achieved. Then comes the struggle to hang on, first to the vision itself, then to the institutions and activities that once embodied it, and then finally to the bare minimum of functional social organization, before the last phases of the Wheel—Hunchback and Saint and Fool—rise up to wipe it all away. We’ll discuss all this later on.
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Next month we’ll proceed further around the Great Wheel and talk about the third quarter. Take the time to read ahead as far as Phase 22, and we’ll see how far the discussion gets.
I’d just been reading economic forecasts about the possible effects of the latest news from the Strait of Hormuz when this piece came in, so at first I processed it as another forecast: a vision of a techno-utopian future in which lunar colonization had reached the point where overpopulation was a danger. It took me a moment to remember what this series is about.
I love this… “success in the business of living comes from grappling with the inescapable conflicts of any given life and growing strong through the wrestling match, not from fleeing the conflicts into some illusory perfection that seems to promise peace.”
Makes sense to me even if the bruises and muscle strain of wrestling tend to wear one out… but without getting worn out, the will can never be strengthened.
Is there any significance to the fact that the disembodied phases are both odd and therefore antithetical in nature, even the 1st phase which if I’m understanding this correctly, should be a complete absorption into the primary tincture?
“At the heart of each great culture is a vision of human possibility.” Thank you JMG for that observation. If Western Civ has lost that vision, then we are truly lost.
“The limitations of collective thought and belief are the framework that allows the soul in this first quarter to earn the strength that will give it independence in due time. ” This reminds me of looking back on youth and schooling of both the formal and the harder knocks types, and the feeling of wanting to rush ahead, but now looking back and seeing the wisdom of letting everything “in due course” “all in its own time.” And then the soul comes to fancy itself a creator, a creator of ones own destiny. But the world just won’t cooperate. Argh! until “the soul recognizes that what holds it back from the fulfillment of its desire is in itself, the limitations of its own enforced Creative Mind.” The ability to properly grasp what’s going on “out there” being the barrier to becoming the dreamed-of self. It’s so poignant. Until one finally realizes its time to give it up to God. I really appreciate how this work respects the process and sees the process in a way we don’t have to blame ourselves for the struggles we go through working our way around the wheel. That it’s just part of it. It’s making me cry a little this morning how gentle this is with all of us, even in our “supersensual rages” and the like. Thanks for bringing us into conversation around it.
Perhaps there is more to the phrase “Mind the Gap” than London rail riders are aware.
I immediately thought of Dion Fortune’s yacht race around a circular track, with her note that you had to touch base at the bottom before rounding the curve and going home.
Also of all the complications of midlife, and dealing with the business and social world, to retreat in old age to living more simply and with a lot less nonsense, and a freedom to seem childlike (knowing that this is not every elder’s path by a long shot, but it happens.
Thank you very much for this. Especially live the turn-about of “an oak is an acorn’s way of making more oaks.”
Beautiful work, thank you as always for elucidating all of this.
An anecdote about cycles and circles and straight lines. I attended a smallish Christian college in the late ’90s and early aughts, and we used to have guest speakers come speak at chapel. One Sunday it was the missionary Don Richardson, author of “Peace Child” — he was famous, at least in those (ahem) circles for his insistence that every culture had some “redemptive analogy” installed by God to prepare the way for understanding and ultimately accepting the Christ Myth. His first experience of this had been among the Sawi tribe of Papua New Guinea, where he observed their practice of exchanging a “peace child” between warring tribes and used that to convert most of the tribe. He may have gotten the idea from Tolkien and Lewis, their whole “pagan myths are good dreams” thing.
Anyways, the talk he gave to this group of young Christians was themed around his search for a way to explain the “straight line from Eden to Apocalypse” perspective to cultures who embraced a cyclical understanding of time (what we’re here calling enantiodromia). His solution was a spiral: a cycle that repeated, yes, but nevertheless moved in a specific direction (“Eden to Apocalypse”). And, as hinted at above, Christian eschatology is very much a circular-not-cyclical rhythm, where humanity’s fall from and return to grace is a one-and-done deal. Because it’s not just Eden to Apocalypse, it’s Eden to New Jerusalem / City of God / Kingdom of Heaven, which of course is conceived as being eternal.
What amused me at the time and still does is that his analogy worked the other direction: he had, perhaps inadvertently, introduced the idea of cyclical time to a bunch of Christian college kids who had previously been totally immersed in the straight line from Eden to Apocalypse.
“…success in the business of living comes from grappling with the inescapable conflicts of any given life and growing strong through the wrestling match, not from fleeing the conflicts into some illusory perfection that seems to promise peace.”
This statement hit me like a ton of bricks. I am in a time of personal struggle, and these words are a dose of strength and sobriety as I catch my breath for the next round.
Fascinating about the unrealized ideal of the 15th phase applied to happenings of human experience. That happens to me in social situations. I did a communion ceremony to have a blessed Easter and the ensuing gathering was indeed blessed, even better than normal. But after I had a feel of regret or nostalgia for the infinite things that could have been said or done and weren’t. There was a gap between the ideal and the actual, even though the actual was pretty great.
As much as I’m enjoying this sequence of posts overall, I have to say that this one carries the most weight and depth for me so far. Many notions occur to me as I read and re-read; I’ll jot some of them here.
I’ve been wondering for a while now about where one might place each of the great religions on the Wheel. Setting aside the fact that religions change over time, and without touching the points you brought up about the way each conceives of time itself, I’ve simply been imagining the great religions as embodied souls and wondering where they would fit on the Wheel. For instance, the fifteenth and first phases are explicitly described as fullness and emptiness, which are metaphors that run all through Christianity and Buddhism, respectively. These nearly opposite preoccupations go a long way toward explaining the nearly opposite character of the two religions. Heaven and Nirvana may in fact be as far apart from each other as it is possible to get, which is not at all to say that one is good and the other evil- they’re just different.
I will try to summarize most of my remaining thoughts in another table, inspired by the oak/acorn metaphor at the top of the page:
FIRST QUARTER: Spring, Childhood, The Sanguine Temperament. Growth and plasticity and possibility thrive within the framework established by last year’s planting.
SECOND QUARTER: Summer, Youth, The Choleric Temperament. Transformed from indistinguishable shoots to individuated species, life’s flourishing forms strive for their time in the sun.
THIRD QUARTER: Autumn, Middle Age, The Melancholic Temperament. The apex of beauty and growth have passed, and the memory of those heights is expressed in seed-gifts for the future age that will be.
FOURTH QUARTER: Winter, Old Age, The Phlegmatic Temperament. Striving is over, and true peaceable equanimity comes within reach as the forms of the old decay into nourishment for the seedbed of the new.
So the goal of the last triad of the Wheel to find God ends in being an unremarkable spirit mirroring one’s surroundings or masters? It seems like the last quarter soul is lured to completing a neccesary part of his life cycle by delusions about what becoming one with God actually entails.
JMG,
Todays post on Yeat’s wheel reminds me of a song by the great Harry Chapin, ” All my life a circle”.
For those who have not heard it here is the first verse;
“It seems like I’ve been here before
I can’t remember when
But I got this funny feeling
That I’ll be back once again
There’s no straight lines make up my life
And all my roads have bends
There’s no clear-cut beginnings
And so far no dead-ends”
Was Harry a fan of Yeats? hard to say.
Hello, JMG and commentariat:
I can’t say Yeats thoughts about his Great Wheel are easy to understand for me, but I do what I can to know better them. Of course, I think John explains them well.
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Enantiodromia: I must recognize I’ve never heard nor read this word, so I take note of it and its meaning. I’ve been achieving my actual cultural level partly thanks to self-taught lectures from this or that book, so this strange word (I guess from Ancient Greek, if I’m right) was under my radar.
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Your metaphores about how enantiodromia works in natural world have make me to remember the old commonplace: the egg and hen dilemma. Which one was first, egg of hen?
According your examples, an egg makes a new hen to make another egg. However, it’s also true that a hen makes an egg to make another hen!
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In addition to your paragraph about Marxism, I can say that, in the short form, History follows these stages: primitive communism-slavery system-feudalism-capitalism-socialist society-communist society.
When last stage begins (in a future which never has arrived yet in real world), the circle is closed, but as a deep difference with Yeats ideas, yes, Communist utopia is according Marx, forever: the end of History. It seems a counter-factual idea when you compare it with real historical cycles (dawn, growing and decline of many civilizations).
Another big problem to accept seriously History according Marx is when he points several Laws which explain and drive History. Of course, Mr. Popper found that Achilles Heel in Marxism and debunked it. I think historical events usually have some different causes which lead, together, to those events, but claims about a few laws of History to explain complex events are too near to conspiracy theories…
One more elephant in (Marx) room can be his identification between stages which happened in the History of Europe (to some extent) with the stages that happened in another parts of the world. He equates our continental
History with the Universal History, in an arrogant euro-centrist and counter-factual way. For example, when Europe was living in its feudalist stage, Islamic world traded a lot of slaves, so I guess it was in the slavery age yet? And then?
And before Columbus arrived to America, Prehispanic cultures (some empires included) seem they never reached a feudal stage. After the Conquista, Native Americans were forced to work for the early Capitalism (gold to Europe=financial system take off).
Well, I’m afraid to derail soon into the off topic and to bore you, so I finish my current comment now.
Joan, ha! Funny. Thanks for this.
Justin, glad you like it. To my mind, it’s one of Yeats’s most useful insights, and I suspect it’ll be among the core themes of the Aquarian age, as surrendering to some image of perfection was a core theme of the Piscean age.
Slithy, the significance of the 1st phase being antithetical, as I see it, is that the absorption into the primary tincture is individual, not collective. Each soul passes through that phase by itself. Still, it’s a good theme for meditation!
Raymond, it’s one of Oswald Spengler’s insights — and unfortunately losing that image is a normal part of the rise and fall of each civilization. As we move from the age of reason to the age of memory, to use my terms, the vision in all its unity has broken apart, and the civilization clings to its fragmentary expressions until those, too, fade out. We’ll discuss this in quite some detail when we get to the historical dimension of A Vision, which fills two lengthy chapters of Yeats’s book.
AliceEm, you’re welcome and thank you. The gentleness is something that’s struck me as well — there’s no arbitrary judgment, no punishment, just a process that adapts itself to our failures as well as our successes and gives us the space to find our own way to the Divine.
Justin, I think Yeats would have chuckled at that.
Patricia M, you’re most welcome. I don’t happen to know if Fortune owned a copy of A Vision, but it seems very likely — she was active in the London occult scene when it was published — and yeah, the similarities are striking.
Math, funny. I wonder if it ever occurred to Richardson that within a few years, the tribes he converted will have converted his teachings into something better suited to their own cultural forms. I don’t know how many people these days have heard of Trobriand cricket — the weird phenomenon that happened when Englishmen tried to teach cricket to the Trobriand islanders, and they then reworked it to fit their cultural habits. Religions go through the same transformations all the time. You’re right, too, that the exchange can go both ways!
Dylan, delighted to hear it. That concept has been very useful to me in hard times, too.
Luke, I’m glad your Easter was happy — but, yeah, the real always falls short of the ideal. What are the lines from Eliot?
“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.”
Dylan, that’s a fascinating point! Your temperaments work well, which is remarkably odd, because Yeats assigned the quarters to elements in exactly the opposite way: earth to the 1st, water to the 2nd, air to the 3rd, and fire to the 4th.
Patrick, no, the last quarter ends with becoming completely empty so that Reality can express itself. What reality gets expressed depends on how many times the soul has been around the Wheel; it takes many times around before the reality in question is divine. We’ll get to that in due time.
Clay, hmm! Yes, it does sound very similar.
Chuaquin, Marx got that from Hegel. I’ve tried to find something other than sophomoric stupidity in Hegel’s writings on the philosophy of history, and haven’t managed it yet.
Yeats apparently thinks the Fifteenth Phase (or the prelude just before it is achieved?) isn’t all joy and happy dreams:
What does he mean by this? You didn’t mention this in your description.
@JMG
If the reality expressed by the soul of Phase 1 changes with how many times it has been through the Wheel, then Phase 15s must differ as well, prseumably with the subjective ideal in later cycles being “higher” than the subjective ideas in earlier cycles and the draft of the post-human body probably being more complex and unearthily beautiful.
Hey JMG
Your “acorn and oak” analogy reminded me of the ones that David Zindell used in his “Requiem for Homo Sapiens” trilogy, though his analogy was used as a symbol for how a human being must radically transform and destroy their former self to become something more advanced and free than they previously were. I shall copy the two verses below, since I feel they add to your own analogy.
“You must remember that an oak tree is not a crime against the acorn.”
“What is a human being, then?” …
“A seed.”
“A … seed?”
“An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree.”
Also, completely unrelated, I just published my summary and review of that book I mentioned in the Open Post, “Opium Culture” by Peter Lee, on my Substack.
https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/opium-culture-by-peter-lee
@Dylan #11 – Thanks for this! I’ve copied it down in my journal, and it makes a lot of sense. I feel like I’ve been handed out a dress that really fits.
“Heaven and Nirvana may in fact be as far apart from each other as it is possible to get, which is not at all to say that one is good and the other evil- they’re just different.”
That also implies that the truth of the eventual afterlife is probably somewhere in the middle rather than at one of the extremes of the Christian Heaven or the Buddhist Nirvana.
@Luke, Charles Williams expressed that gap between a transcendental vision and mere reality in The Coming of Palomedes. There, the vision of Queen Iseult’s arm transforms the Saracen knight Palomedes, until
“relation vanished, though beauty stayed…
the queen’s arm lay there destitute,
empty of glory…
and aloof in the roof, beyond the feast,
I heard the squeak of the questing beast,
as it scratched itself in the blank between
the queen’s substance and the queen.”
It took a long quest for Palomedes to finally overcome this gap.
This one was very helpful in putting A Vision in perspective. I’ve read through the book, but have not yet reviewed for better understanding.
Surely this is one of the strangest and yet most brilliant books I have read. As a Cancer ruled by the Moon, I cherish it and will be returning to it regularly.
John, you wrote a paragraph in your post about the gap between how do you imagine an art project (picture or writing) and how it eventually comes out, after you’ve finished your creative process. I know that difference too well.
I like to paint during my spare time, though I accept I’m a mediocre painter; but I like to do it because it’s relaxing for me, so it calms me down.
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Justin P.# 6:
Yes, “Mind the gap” can be a deeper sense warning than its usual meaning…
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JMG # 15:
No argument here. Marx depended too much in his philosophy of borrowed ideas from his loved/hated Hegel. He pretended to be far better philosopher than his master, but I doubt that claim. Indeed, some thinkers (and myself too) point Marx was a victim
of the Hegelian “bear hug”(but he didn’t realized it).
Oh, I had to read and explain some Hegel paragraphs during my high school days in Philosophy classes, and my “punishment” was too hard that I wasn’t eager to read his books in my spare time…Opaque, pretentious and nonsensical are some adjectives I can think after remembering those short lectures (thanks Gods they were short paragraphs).
By the way, some South American thinkers have noticed the usual Marxist History stages don’t work well to depict their countries History, but ironically Marxism has been very popular within Hispanic America intelligentsia, so even today this criticism is a fringe view…
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Anonymous # 20:
It’s a wise idea: a middle ground between the most opposed views about hypothetical afterlife. However, I can also point maybe afterlife could be in different ways for souls in different stages and situations before or during their death. Jesus said “in my Father house there are many rooms”(well, my biblical translation could be rough, but I think its meaning is clear). On the other hand, I’ve heard some Buddhist Japanese believe in a kind of afterlife Heaven which isn’t exactly the Nirvana nor Christian Heaven.
Is one correct to think that in the third quarter, CM and BF are once again free (and thus Will and Mask enforced) and vice versa for the fourth ? In other words, are opposite quarters alike in this particular respect ? Or is there a catch.
Sorry for the anticipation, I have had to bite my tongue more than once not to ask about future posts, and just focus on the present material.
You write many interesting things here. When I first surveyed the phases, my impression was that my present incarnation was a mid-third quarter one. What you expounded in the last two months rang familiar at times, and suggest a late-second quarter one. Not quite the same in terms of the Full Moon, coming up on it or it gradually fading away 🙂
I’ll keep digging and delving.
When reading your description of enantiodromia I immediately thought of Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, which I found to be intensely religious in its sensibility. In it he attempted to “transcendentalise the hulon”, if you will**. What does a committed materialist do in order to reach for immortality, ineffability and transcendent meaning? Craft half of an enantiodromian tale in which organisms are an immortal gene’s way of making more immortal genes, of course… and somehow grant immortality to the materialist organism who yearns for it. 🙂 It was Lynn Margulis who urged him to consider the other half to be the more important half – that a gene [plus much else] is the organism’s way of making more organisms.
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Reading Dylan’s very well considered seasonal and temperament table (for which, Dylan, many thanks) and then noting your comment about Yeats’s opposite elemental assignment to the phases, I thought, well, wheels within wheels. Interacting opposites is fundamental to this whole scheme, so this is not a “discrepancy”, but a potentially “deepening” theme to meditate on, I reckon.
** with apologies to any actual scholars of ancient greek, who know better… I’m only fooling around… 🙂
Joan#1 Moonhaven ?
I feel like I’ve been wrestling with stuff my whole life, internally as well as externally. To realize that this is a primary way of engaging with meaning and the things that feel at odds, is a relief in many ways. I think again of the SGO and the Unity of Primary Roots. When reversed, its paradox. When upright, it perhaps explains an aspect of synchronicity by being a “hidden connecting factor.”
It seems to, now that you put in terms of the Ages of Pisces and Aquarius, that Christianity in the 20th century has been about very much about wrestling with the faith, given its “existentialist turn” to use a bit of academese. (You’d think academics would be big fans of Yeat’s wheel given how much they talk about everything being a “turn” -but maybe it’s because so many of the older ones listened to the Byrds back in the hippie days).
Perhaps in that sense too, existentialism itself is a bit of an opening salvo for our philosophical struggles in the age we are just still taking baby steps in.
” and unfortunately losing that image is a normal part of the rise and fall of each civilization. As we move from the age of reason to the age of memory, to use my terms, the vision in all its unity has broken apart, and the civilization clings to its fragmentary expressions until those, too, fade out. ”
That has happened to me personally. I don’t like the “Man Conqueror of Nature” vison of humanity. These days it strikes me as being very Luciferian. For a while i liked “Pan Pirro Narrans” the story telling fire chimp view of mankind. It is a lot more humble and accurate. But a few weeks ago i had a glimpse of a different vision of mankind.
Eco Fabulist – man as home maker – a conscious, willful, keystone species, who actions help create the conditions for thriving ecosystems.
@dobbs #28 “ Eco Fabulist – man as home maker – a conscious, willful, keystone species, who actions help create the conditions for thriving ecosystems” Yes! that’s the vision I present to my high school students in my Earth and Environmental Science classes.
“Math, funny. I wonder if it ever occurred to Richardson that within a few years, the tribes he converted will have converted his teachings into something better suited to their own cultural forms. I don’t know how many people these days have heard of Trobriand cricket — the weird phenomenon that happened when Englishmen tried to teach cricket to the Trobriand islanders, and they then reworked it to fit their cultural habits. Religions go through the same transformations all the time. You’re right, too, that the exchange can go both ways!”
There’s also Kilikiti, “Samoan Cricket”, which has also morphed into something completely novel. I wonder if there’s a specific reason that this happened so much with Cricket (beyond it being a popular British game during the time when their empire ruled so much of the world); and also I’m suddenly wondering what Japanese baseball will look like in a couple centuries…..
Patrick, it’s the prelude before the 15th phase that he’s talking about — that, and the time between lives, which we’ll be discussing when we get to the relevant chapter. As for Phase 15, of course — it takes many lives to complete the work of building the luminous body, among other things, and the work becomes more perfect as it proceeds.
J.L.Mc12, a similar metaphor used to illustrate the opposite concept. Zindell has the standard linear model in mind: acorn –> tree, not acorn –> tree –> acorn (etc.). Thanks for the link.
William, that’s certainly been my take on it since I first read it back in the 1980s.
Chuaquin, the reason Marx is popular with so many intellectuals is that it’s such a middle class wet dream. Despite all the chatter about the triumph of the proletariat, Marxism in practice always puts some set of dissident intellectuals in power, and so intellectuals who crave unearned power are drawn to it.
Thibault, no, both the antithetical quarters (2nd and 3rd) have a free Will and Mask and an enforced Creative Mind and Body of Fate. It’s in the primary quarters (1st and 4th) that the Will and Mask are enforced and the Creative Mind and Body of Fate free.
Scotlyn, it’s long amused me how intensely religious most evangelical atheists are. There’s always at least one God in secular drag somewhere in their ideologies.
Justin, good. Yes, at least as I see it, existentialism was a crucial step but only a first step. Grant that existence precedes essence — what then precedes existence? That’s the question the existentialists never really grappled with, though Nietzsche took a stab at it. To my mind, what precedes existence is experience; “self” and “other,” and all other proposed existents, are extrapolations from the phenomenon of perception. Descartes missed the bus when he said “I think, therefore I am;” if he’d said “a thought is experienced, therefore experience exists,” he’d have gotten much further.
Dobbs, I know the feeling. I lost faith in Man the Conqueror of Nature quite a while ago, and posted an obituary for him in my former blog:
https://archdruidmirror.blogspot.com/2017/06/man-conqueror-of-nature-dead-at-408.html
William, maybe it’s just my American biases, but cricket strikes me as a really weird game. Admittedly most of my exposure to it is a chapter in my next-to-least-favorite Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, but still, it doesn’t surprise me that Pacific islanders would shake their heads in bafflement and then set out to make this weird English custom make some kind of sense.
Treebeard
That is awesome!! Do your students resonate with the image of man as eco fabulist ?
We are both kind of odd Christians who hang out on a Druid’s blog, i wonder if that has anything to do with why we both find Man as Home Maker a more appealing vison of mankind? That serving the living world is a good way to worship the Divine?
John
I reread that article, that was funny.
In this aquarian age there will likely be many different views of mankind but i hope they all take Gaia’s advice that you gave at the end of the post;
“Following her invariable habit, Gaia refused to grant any personal interviews, but a written statement to the media was delivered by a spokesrabbit on Tuesday evening. “Please accept My sympathy for the tragic demise of Man, the would-be conqueror of Nature,” it read. “I hope it will not be out of place, though, to suggest that whomever My human children select as their new self-image might consider being a little less self-centered—not to mention a little less self-destructive.”
@ William # 30
“I wonder if there’s a specific reason that this happened so much with Cricket (beyond it being a popular British game during the time when their empire ruled so much of the world); and also I’m suddenly wondering what Japanese baseball will look like in a couple centuries…..”
Arguably, baseball already is one more (admittedly, earlier) instance of “Trobriand Islander Cricket” done the American way… 😉
JMG and Chaquin
Since you’ve been discussing it, I hope you don’t mind if I give my two cents. As I see it capitalism and communism are two of the most misunderstood concepts in economics. I often compare capitalism as the economic equivalent to the biological theory of evolution (natural selection). People often mistake capitalism as a system put in place or a system than arises naturally. They misunderstand, capitalism is simply the observation of the driving force of commerce.
Commerce itself is simply transactions. For example when civilizations begin, they start with the most basic of transactions. Pay the local bandits/warlords and in exchange they won’t kill you. That transaction is driven by capitalism. This is why most people, including Marx, misunderstand capitalism. They make the same mistake that people who don’t understand evolution make. They assume that evolution is linear with a clear “end goal.” For example the image of the monkey and the various stages between it and the modern human that is commonly seen is actually an incorrect simplification of the theory. Not all species are “destined” to evolve into more intelligent or complex organisms.
This is the flaw of Marx and the like. They look at capitalism and assume that it must “select” the most efficient and productive until it hits an “end goal.” But that’s not how capitalism works. It, like natural selection, doesn’t care about complexity or efficiency, only wealth generation. If Marx was correct we would expect to see the economy “selecting” for more efficiency, but we do not. As Greer has pointed out in his posts on “Lenocracy” the opposite is actually true, the economy is actively becoming less efficient because those inefficiencies allow for more wealth extraction.
This one of the major factors which drives the decline of civilizations. When resources begin to dry up, the environment changes, and when the environment changes, the bigger and less efficient are the first to die off in both biology and the economy. It’s when capitalism selects for barbarism as the most effective means of gaining wealth, that’s when the civilization truly dies.
I hope that comparison is helpful.
Ghosts are effectively unintelligent, but there are some extremely rare exceptions. When a witch came to visit my former teacher for medical treatment she sent an enslaved ghost ahead of her to make an appointment. It could apparently read street signs..
My question is about the Bodhisattvayana. How does the Wheel work when you altruistically bind yourself to it for an indefinite number of lives, without seeking the Thirteenth Cone?
JMG and William
Like most Americans I knew nothing about cricket until just recently. The subdivision I live in is home to many folks from India. So many that it has its own cricket team that plays against others in a league on the west side of Portland. I have by accident established a small business, due to my woodworking skills, modifying cricket bats to suit the tastes of the players. This usually involves shaving off bits of wood here and there to make them lighter. No matter how far removed from the UK the player may be, they always play with bats made of English Willow.
I can see why the game has morphed in many places. Like many things English, the original game is long, boring and unwieldy, sometimes a single game can last for days. But the Indians , and soon after the rest of the world, have mostly adopted T20 cricket which only lasts for a few hours.
Scotlyn # 25:
Yes, Mr. Dawkins understands Darwinian evolution in that sense, and he also thinks he’s an orthodox Darwinian too. I think his view it’s too short-sighted and reductionist, maybe due to his well known militant atheism. His variety of Darwinism could be an Ersatz for religion. I also think he deserved L. Margulis criticism by the reason you’ve pointed. An organism uses genes to make another organism, too.
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Justin P.# 27:
Existentialism: I think this philosophy answer or tries to answer human problems in industrial modern world, shaken by two world wars. Its thinkers had reasons to think according their own way, methinks.
There was a secular (atheist) existentialism, for example, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus. Well, Heidegger won a “gold medal” in darkness and opacity (oh, and he was a Nazi for a while). Sartre wrote some interesting things, but he had too much fondness to the USSR, so he never denounced Sovietic Union bad side. I think Camus wrote some interesting ideas.
There also was a Christian existentialism, like K. Jaspers philosophy, but I think it was less popular within the secularized “intelligentsia”.
My problem with existentialists is they seem too centered in individual Self, and ignore (or deny) human spiritual part, methink. Well, except Christian existentialists, but like I’ve written before, it seems they were less popular.
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JMG # 31:
Your idea about Marxists seems a reasonable way to explain Marxist fame within middle class thinkers. Well, Marx father was a lawyer, and he studied Laws too. Engels father owned an industrial plant.
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Anonymous # 34:
I agree (to some extent). Marx had several flaws in his reasoning, and yes, he thought capitalist struggle would end selecting the best ones. Eventually, this economical
fighting would lead first to oligopolies and eventually to monopolies.
Of course, in real world “lenocracy” has won, in spite of not being the best capitalists in efficiency terms. So Marx idea is counter-factual in front of real economies.
However, I think you identify (more or less) free market and commerce with capitalism, so you see capitalism in every past civilization cycles. Free market and trade (twin brothers) are previous conditions for capitalism take off, but they aren’t by themselves capitalism, methink. The third quality that makes capitalism is wealth accumulation to make more wealth “forever”. There were always since the Ancient Age rich people, but “money making money” as a ever growing tendence couldn’t be seen until the Age of Discoveries began (for example, gold from South America fueled bank system wealth accumulation).
Dobbs, I wish more than a few of us would take Gaia’s advice!
Anon, it’s been central to the rhetoric of capitalism for the last century and a half or so to insist that capitalism is just, in your phrase, the driving force of commerce. Not so; it’s what commerce turns into when governments create the structure of legal fictions that give corporations a specially privileged form of legal personhood, which grants them more rights and fewer responsibilities than natural persons have. Where this isn’t done, capitalism in the modern sense (economic activity controlled and exploited by the owners of abstract capital) doesn’t come into being. You’re certainly right to criticize the notion that evolution is linear, and to note that parasitic wealth extraction by elites is an important factor in the decline and fall of civilizations, but don’t obscure the difference between capitalism on the one hand, and other forms of market economy on the other!
Tengu, the Thirteenth Cone isn’t Nirvana. In Yeats’s system, teaching spirits from the Thirteenth Cone can sometimes interact directly or indirectly with incarnate beings; I would see that as Yeats’s equivalent of bodhisattvas.
Chuaquin (offlist), under the circumstances, I’m going to ask you not to post off topic comments.
Always such interesting insights, JMG, thank you!
Two thoughts: Oh how I long to glimpse those spirits of beauty… they make life worth living.
And my other thought, being born under the sign of Virgo, I’ve lately taken the motto (Voltaire?)
“Perfect is the enemy of good”.
Patricia #19: You’re welcome! I’ve never thought of myself as a dressmaker, but if it fits, wear it 🙂
Anonymous #20: Or that the truth of the afterlife is different for souls at different stages. Maybe we really do find the fullness of Heaven and the emptiness of Nirvana at the appropriate points on the Wheel. But since I think the afterlife is going to be covered in a later chapter, I won’t hazard much more than that for right now.
Aldarion #21: Thanks for pointing up that poem! I think Palomedes is one of the most underrated characters in Arthurian lore. The whole courtly love phenomenon is an affair of the top of the wheel, methinks, and of those knights who can sense the vision of ideal beauty but either cannot quite reach it or have just missed it- hence the insatiable urge to quest. I hold with my earlier guess that Arthur and Gawaine belong in the first quarter, but Lancelot and Tristram late in the second.
Scotlyn #25: Thank you, and I’m glad I didn’t know about Yeats’ scheme for the four temperaments before I wrote that. ‘Wheels within wheels’ is a very helpful mental twist for getting out of what might seem at first glance to be a symbolic logjam!
Anonymous #34: An excellent summary, though JMG’s response adds a nuance I hadn’t considered before. I would say that commerce is the lifeblood that allows young civilizations to grow, as well as the acid that corrodes old civilizations into skeletons of their former selves. All the intervening history can be oversimplified as ‘capitalism’ in the same way that the actions of all life on Earth can be oversimplified as ‘natural selection’.
Since it seems to be a night for poetry, I’ll offer this in honour of the spirits of the fifteenth phase:
Muse, by Anna Akhmatova
translated by Andrey Kneller
When at night I’m waiting her arrival,
Life, it seems, is hanging by a thread.
Glory, youth and freedom cannot rival
The joy she brings me, with a flute in hand.
She enters, and before I can discern her,
She stares at me with an attentive eye.
“Were you”, I ask, “the cause of the Inferno
For Dante?” — And she answers: “I!”
Something that struck me about this comment: “Every incarnation, as Yeats has pointed out already, cycles through all 28 phases between birth and death”:
How does this manifest in cases where the incarnation experiences murder or some other kind of sudden, premature death? Does the cycle continue in postmortem discarnation, pick up where it left off in the next (and potentially therefore out of phase), or is it somehow “short-circuited” and starts you back at 1 in the new life no matter what? Or something else entirely I’m missing?
@Dobbs, #32 They do resonate and like it.
JMG thanks for reposting that essay! It was what sealed my worldview on that subject and was funny in a mordant way, very funny. It fits so very well…
Hmm. Maybe the state of consciousness represented by the new moon is best represented by Eastern descriptions of enlightenment and the state of consciousness represented by the full moon by Jung’s concept of individuation (which I believe you said). Maybe full enlightenment comes from the synthesis of both?
Nirvana is just purified Samsara. The non-dual ‘Great Mystery’ is beyond Samsara and Nirvana, and beyond the conceptual mind. All salvific religions lead to perfection, so I believe that, despite their radically different approaches, the result is the same.
My question was really about the effect of repeated circling. In recent times I’ve experienced a lot of bereavement, including the violent and premature death of my parents. This has served to reinforce the views that I’ve held since early childhood. So-called reality has a dream like nature, and it’s extremely painful and wearisome.
So I’ve been thinking about what’s really important in successive lives. Apart from a kind of grim endurance that develops naturally, I’ve so far only come up with a couple of things; universal altruism and a robust sense of humour.
JMG # 38:
It’s OK, I’m not going to derail my comments into the off topic thing: I’m sorry.
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On the other hand, after having read your answer to Anon, I agree. Legal support to corporations, giving them a personhood, it’s important too, to capitalist growth.
I share your view about market economies as different things of real capitalism.
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Brendhelm # 42:
A good question. I’ve asked it to myself too. It could happen a premature death let “unsolved” parts of that person cycle to be lived during his/her next life…or not. I’m curious to know an answer.
@ Dylan # 11
The more I think about the table you laid out, the more I like the seed/soil enantiodromia you’ve laid out. In terms of this life, I find myself in my autumn years, considering how to prepare, save and store seed-gifts for future springs… and, you know, I am rather temperamentally equipped* to look forward to a winter season of peacefully decomposing into soil that may eventually nourish any such seeds as survive.
*This is because gardening has always been my way of making more compost… 😉
Hi John Michael,
The Hubbert bell shaped curve is hard wired into the very fabric of the universe. Even things as large as stars follow that course. Interesting that, isn’t it?
You know, you mentioned something in this week’s essay which has been bothering me for quite a while. And for the record on an entirely different note, I’ve encountered rage and found it to be disturbing and wanted nothing to do with it. The flinging of one’s toys and stomping of the feet is a fine display, which goes nowhere, or sometimes to darker places. Acceptance has much to recommend it.
Anywhoo, back to the topic, so I recently read Daniel Dafoe’s classic early 18th century book, Robinson Crusoe. A good read too. The character is a bit of a lost footloose soul, who finds himself (as much as possible for him) better grounded stuck on a tropical island for 27, or 28 years. He has to learn how to survive. Being of the times, there are some descents into religious considerations and praises, and fair enough, it’d help with the publishing. But! At one point in the book, the character elucidates how he’s survived by listening to his gut feelings, the source of which he was entirely unaware. You wrote:
At best, under some circumstances, these spirits can relay messages from unhuman spiritual entities to incarnate human beings, though this only happens when the unhuman entities choose.
Hmm. Yeah, tell me about it. Such messages, if I may say so, are neither part of the Mask, or the Will. But they may be at odds with the Mask, and require the Will to be put to the side. To date, it’s been advantageous, but a lot of hard work, to heed such things. Dunno. I’ve remarked upon this matter elsewhere, and note that there are times in a person’s life when they come within the sphere of influence of masters of good intent, and it is but up to us to do the hard yards. What’s your view on that?
Now as to the dead, they often bother my dreams. A more self absorbed lot would be hard to find I can assure you. I don’t welcome their presence, but sometimes they do intrude. Not a fan. When I was younger, the dreams used to scare me, nowadays I’m more blunt: What do you want? A few nights ago an old house-mate touched upon my sleeping thoughts. Their unfinished business is not mine. Dunno what to make of it all. The most unsettling one was an old school friend who allegedly took his own life earlier last year, and I’d not heard from him in a long while, but the dream was only a few days after the funeral. Super weird. Anyway, I got the impression that he wanted to let the school group know, which I did – but they seem to have disregarded my casual notification letter. Now I’m hoping he just goes away… Oh well. And last night I was dreaming of my old Sensei, as you do. Spirits, I do need to get some sleep…
Life can be remarkably strange sometimes.
Cheers
Chris
It’s funny, because I find baseball just as incomprehensible as you find cricket; while cricket actually makes sense to me. I think it is probably a cultural thing!
As for cycles of history, what I find so fascinating is that it would actually be relatively easy to reinvent communism as a cyclical process: you start out with a pleasant society, someone invents something horrible which drives a mass of changes (in this case, private property); and then eventually society corrects itself. The mistake does not need to be the same each time; and in some cases it might even lead to improvements if we can keep the good parts of each invention, so it’s still possible to have a vision of progress.
I think it’s telling that this sort of thinking was so rare.
OT, but today I have been getting warnings from my web browsers (Opera, Brave, Firefox, and Chromium) that Ecosophia.net does not support a secure connection. I’m not sure if there’s an issue on your end, or if there’s something else going on, but what’s really making me raise my eyebrows is that there were Dreamwidth issues not that long ago, I ran into problems loading Coffee and Covid a couple days ago, and last week had issues with accessing Surplus Energy Economics for a bit (I’m not sure how long; more than five minutes but less than 24 hours).
I suppose in a couple weeks I’ll be able to tell if it’s a local thing or one affecting the broader internet, but I think we might be starting to see resource limits and/or government action force the fringes off the internet and leave behind only the big players; all unofficially, of course. Keeping the entire internet up and running at all times was extremely expensive, and it would not surprise me if someone somewhere is now struggling to keep up, and they are keeping the major things running while allowing the fringes to start to fail.
This might just be a Canadian thing, or it might be global; but either way, I’m starting preparations for a very sudden decline in the internet.
Jill, Voltaire may have said that, but I’ve heard “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” described as a Russian proverb.
Dylan, thanks for this.
Brendhelm, Yeats doesn’t discuss that, so it’s probably best treated as a theme for meditation.
Celadon, you’re welcome and thank you.
Luke, that makes sense.
Tengu, I don’t think there’s a fixed lesson that everyone has to learn. It’s more a matter of developing your own unique potentials.
Chris, life can indeed be strange. You may have been a medium in a previous life — that would explain why the dead have access to your dream life.
William, hmm! Yes, it would indeed be possible to envisage a cyclic Marxism like that, but it wouldn’t have the emotional payoffs that attract followers. Thanks for the heads up about the internet — has anyone else had that experience with this site?
My Firefox browser here in the USA is not giving me any security warning about this site. Also, I’ve been collecting preparations for a decline in the internet for many years: books. I have too many already and I keep buying more. A new “doorstop” arrived today (thanking “Ambrose” for the recommendation), but that can wait until open post.
Re: internet. I am seeing a secure connection here and all is well. Might be an individual thing unless others report it.
On topic: If the transitions at phases 1 and 15 are done out of incarnation, does this involve an especially-long period between lives?
Tengu # 46:
For every son or daughter, it’s evidently very painful to loose his/her parents, due to natural causes (age or premature illness). I’m not able to imagine how harder can be to loose them due to violent deaths, and then, how to cope with that event. Thank you for your comment.
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Chris # 49:
Thank you for your comment about that aspect in the most famous D. Defoe novel: I hadn’t noticed it before you pointed it.
Robinson Crusoe was one of my favorite books during my late childhood! I read it when I was 12-13. I think its best part happens when he meets the native who was named by Robinson as “Friday”. Well, individualist survival’s cool…for a while. We need a minimal social life, methinks, in spite of “cultural shock”(Friday was a cannibal when Robinson meets him, ahem). Another good part of it, IMHO, happens when Crusoe is ill, he sleeps and/or suffer hallucinations, and sees what he sees during his nightmare.
I think another book loosely related to Robinson Crusoe (but much more ironic and fantastic) is Gulliver Adventures (or Travels, I don’t remember well its original title in english). Indeed, Gulliver is an unfortunate (or lucky) sailor whose ships often end sinking in far seas, so he usually arrives to strange fantasy countries…J. Swift had a deep and ironic humor to mock things he disliked in society around him (disguised as children stories), which was a different attitude than serious and real-like Defoe novel.
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William # 50 and JMG # 51:
I haven’t seen any warnings nor problems during my access to this blog and another sites (yet), so I guess here in Spain it seems at least me, those ominous warnings you told us, weren’t sent to online users (by now) like in Canada.
“William, hmm! Yes, it would indeed be possible to envisage a cyclic Marxism like that, but it wouldn’t have the emotional payoffs that attract followers. Thanks for the heads up about the internet — has anyone else had that experience with this site?”
The error message is gone now. It looks like it was an intermittent issue.
What I find the most interesting about this kind of linear image is that it really doesn’t seem like it should matter: unless you believe in reincarnation, there is no reason to care about whether history is over for good or not. The only way I can make sense of this sort of thing is if most people, whatever their conscious claims, actually subconsciously believe in reincarnation….
Would it be a fair assessment to think that after the first time around the cycle things become a bit more reflexive? Sort of like a rock getting smoothed in a tumbler hah. So although your life leans into a phase, you might be able to experience the other phases in your internal processing.
The circle and the straight line don’t seem all that incompatible to me. The spiral is a working metaphor that can reconcile the fact that everything cycles and yet the universe continues to change rather than simply loop.. ‘History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes’. ‘You can never step into the same river twice’. That sort of thing. Things don’t necessarily move in a definite teleological direction (although they may indeed do so), but they do move farther from where they started by circuitous paths.
The spiral image helps me because I find the Wheel all by itself somewhat discouraging, rather than gentle as AliceEm suggested. “Life is an endeavour, made vain by the four sails of its mill…” settles into me in a bleak sort of way if I think about just trudging around the circle endlessly. But apparently that’s not what we do. We progress somehow as we move around the Wheel multiple times, though our text hasn’t yet explained what that means, and at some point we leave it for another form of existence. That sounds like a spiral to me.
A note on internet connectivity: I’ve had no trouble with this site, but a friend and I were speculating today as to why WhatsApp was moving so slowly, as well as the internet at my workplace, as well as at my mechanic’s, where they’ve completely lost internet and phone service for a few days now. I wondered aloud if satellite interference has become a part of twenty-first-century warfare, but my friend thought it was more likely AI data centres starting to clog up bandwidth in a noticeable way. Or just blame it on Mercury retrograde? I’m in Canada too, by the way.
JMG, I hope you’ll find time to open a discussion either here or on Dreamwidth about preparations for the end of internet. It keeps getting mentioned but it deserves its own focused discussion.
Scotlyn #48: “…gardening has always been my way of making more compost… 😉”
I see what you did there 🙂 For me, gardening season begins in the fall, with mulching the beds and piling compost. This time of year in this part of the world is not very pretty, but amid the brown and grey of my yard I see the rich dark piles of earthy compost that I made last fall according to Maxine’s recipe. They are beauty enough for me to behold at this turn of gardening’s wheel!
And how apt that for many people a genuine interest in spirituality often dawns in the third quarter of life, when one can begin to assess the fullness of one’s growth and take seriously the seedbed of future lives. I’m not at that stage yet, but I have the autumnal temperament, so I too take these things seriously.
Yeats’ scheme of the four elements on the Wheel ascends from densest to subtlest (Earth, Water, Air, Fire), which makes sense if incarnated life is a process of refinement through tribulation. My scheme doesn’t reverse but rather turns inside out that progression (Air, Fire, Earth, Water, if I’ve matched my elements and temperaments correctly). One could correlate the two schemes by saying that each step in the elemental ascension requires the expression of its opposite, in the same way that a homeopathic cure requires the ‘pressing out’ in the form of physical symptoms of that which is at odds with the body’s inner nature. How’s that for a wheel within a wheel?
Thanks to everyone who reported on their internet experience.
Kyle, Yeats doesn’t say.
William, it might be a subconscious belief in reincarnation, or it might simply be the habit so many people have of trying to define their lives in melodramatic terms.
Katrinka, more reflexive in some ways, less so in others. The soul becomes more conscious and able to maneuver through the complexities of each phase.
Dylan, oh, sure, it’s always possible to come up with some gimmick to combine the two. The point I like to reflect on is that none of us will ever know the actual shape of time — it’s purely a matter of how we choose to conceptualize it from our very limited vantage point.
Re: Difficulty connecting to website–
No problem with http://www.ecosophia.net , but I have had trouble logging into ecosophia.dreamwidth.org from Canada;
Clicking my saved link just produces the ever-cycling blue circle (ironic in light of the current topic–I know!) until it goes to a ‘504 gateway timeout.’ Same result if I use TunnelBear VPN and make it look like I am logging in from the USA.
The only way I can get to ecosophia.dreamwidth.org is by googling ‘ecosophia dreamwidth blog’ , selecting from a list of past topics, then clicking ‘Recent Entries’ on the top left column.
OTOH, I am also having serious trouble logging into my own dreamwidth blog– I can’t get there directly; Once I get into ecosophia.dreamwidth.org by the above method, I can sign in using my own ID and PW, and then get into my own account and reading pages.
This makes me suspect it is some sort of problem with dreamwidth.org.
Anyone else having problems reading dreamwidth?
Phutatorius # 52:
Yes, books deserve to “invest” your money in buying them. They evidently can be available during a blackout, and they’ve shown during a heck of centuries they’re a reliable ancient technology. It’s ironic they’re made and used nowadays yet, but VHS videotapes are outdated…
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William # 55:
Reincarnation: It’s interesting to say (in addition to your comment) it seems some children, until they grow and forget it, believe and/or talk about “being born again”. At least my two nephews told me (one was 4, his brother was 7 methink) about this topic. One of them told me he had been big like me before, and “he slept in the floor”(?). The other one said a girl had told him at school that people could be born again, and he agreed. I was very puzzled by those talks with them.
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Dylan # 57:
I understand and accept your idea of spiral time (and History) as work hypothesis, not as absolute truth (by now). A good metaphor, methink. However…
Maybe you know I’m a monotheistic, like the (apparently) first monotheistic leader was too…Pharaoh Akhnaten. I think he had personal reasons to believe it, but he was very wrong trying to impose his beliefs to the Ancient Egyptians (god Sun), upsetting old school polytheists. The rest of his story…is History.
I mean, making reasonable hypothesis become compulsory truths is dangerous…I understand and hope you share my view.
Archdruid, thank you kindly for your help. I’ve learnt a great deal from Ecosophia. I wish you and the amazing members of this forum every good fortune.
In relation to discussions of time – wheel? Line? Spiral? – and how to conceptualise it from our very limited vantage point, I’d like to give a little thought TO the matter of “our very limited vantage point” – which is the PRESENT, also the HERE NOW. One might imagine that larger beings than ourselves (ie older and wiser) might have larger PRESENT’s or larger HERE NOW’s, as in there being larger fields of view visible from their larger and less limited vantage points, and that somewhere there exists the singular vantage point of the singular Pleroma (a PRESENT, or a HERE NOW) from which nothing is hidden, and which we might call the “eternal PRESENT”.
For me, though, my specifically limited HERE NOW is limited. And yet, it is where I am. It is me, in my Malkuth, Sphere 10 body, which is the focussed point at which, and through which, every level of my higher being, seen/unseen, known/unknown, conscious/unconscious, comes into its potential for creative expression. In effect my material body becomes the point of the pencil on the paper which actually makes a mark, even though the weight of the pencil, and the will of the wielder are far away from that point, and may be represented by other spheres in the Tree of Life.
HERE NOW *I* (the fullness of *I*) can act. There is no other time or place in which I can. Although, perhaps, if I align my will with that of a higher power, I am also aligning my will with a power with a larger HERE NOW than my own, which is capable of extending our combined actions to HERE’s and NOW’s visible to that power, but not to me, in my current body.
With this in mind, one difference I can see between the circular model of time and the linear model of time is that the first asks us to consider where we are, what season it is, what actions are appropriate to this season, which is to say, that it invites our full participation in our HERE NOW. Whereas the second asks us to focus continually on some imagined THERE THEN which does not actually exist, and it asks us to abandon our commitment to participating in this HERE NOW, where we actually have some (small but real) power, or worse, to sacrifice all HERE NOW goods, in exchange for yearning, intending, wanting, and waiting for the imagined PERFECTS of some THERE THEN which has no real existence, and in which we have no power at all.
FWIW…
Dobbs 32
> Man as Home Maker
This reminds me of something, specifically American.
Politically and spiritually, Americans are currently casting around trying to find a reason-for-being other than “America as World Policeman.”
I see :
“‘American’ Man as ‘Home’ Maker,” including males.
In other words, America and Americans, go ahead and figure out what it means to “return ‘home’” at the same time ceasing to be “America the Foreigner” and “America the World’s Policeman.” For example, I seriously wonder why the American goobermint continually ships ‘free food’ to outside USA borders (known as ‘foreign aid’) as we have done since 1965, when the American guvmint neglects American persons’ well-being. There is something ass-backwards in that. It feels like the world’s elites, since the 1960s, have wished upon the American people ‘the worst.’ I think this is an accurate assessment. Kleptocrats.
The solution is that each American family, look around and find a member of the family, while pooling resources, who ‘starts up’ a micro-business, like electrician, handyman, farmer, blacksmith, whitesmith, cook, dressmaker, tutor. Once that micro-business gets off the ground, move on to helping form another micro-business for second member of the family. This is the way the American colonists did it, and this is the way immigrant groups did it since the 1860s, after they reached America. Northern European extraction Americans in particular need to re-learn this skill.
Micro-business. Micro-business. Micro-business. It is how any and all Americans, this very minute, can take the bull by the horns, and prosper🦏🧹. (‼️Get rid of the last vestige of President Woodrow Wilson [about 1917, World War One era] out of our brains. Be gone‼️)
One can’t wait for a stranger to create one’s job for them. Do It Yourself (DIY).
Live long and prosper (by micro-business).
Americans creating one’s own home:
Man as Home Maker🏚️—>🏠.
💨📜 🇺🇸⚰️💥💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hi JMG
A bit related with the theme of your post, I would like to ask you a question about the idea, some people sustain, that in fact what AI systems could provide is a kind of way for the “ingression” of some “entities” outside the realm of the physical world, in fact some (famous) people talk about “summoning” some kind of consciuos beeings, which frankly sounds quite disturbing.
What is your opinion about that?
Cheers
David
Scotlyn # 63:
I’ve understood your point of view and I agree (to some extent). When you live in the Present, I think you’ve got much more opportunities to enjoy a happier and healthier life than be living “hijacked” by the Past or the Future. Indeed, I try to do it, with some success.
However, I also think that, within some pop mindfulness, yoga followers and New Agers, their fondness to the Present has become a commonplace (like another usual claim: “Mind is always bad”).
It’s true you cannot live trapped by past memories (depression) nor future fears/plans (anxiety), but reasoning mind was put by God(s) and/or Evolution in our brains for a pragmatical use: to help us to learn from the past mistakes and experiences, and to plan what we can do tomorrow to live (or survive, according our circumstances), another day more.
I mean, the best attitude seems IMHO to live the most time in Present mode, with some short “travels” into the Past to remember useful things, and toward the Future, planning your needs without be obsessed by it. Use your reason, but don’t be used by it.
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Northwind Grandma # 64:
I see you don’t like US government sends “free food” to another countries. In the short form, I think this political decision to send “foreign aid” out of your borders can be well explained, as a public relations politics to show USA is a “nice and good country”.
Well, it isn’t the only one country in the world which plays this soft diplomacy game. It’s common within wealthy and powerful countries to help (or pretend to help) some poorer countries in that way, to “make friends” or going on with these “friendships”.
I FINALLY finished the 2025 bookkeeping for our LLC. A long haul. Whew😥🔨. I bet there are a lot of panicked Americans trying to get their taxes done in the next four days. (For 2026, I will do ‘monthly’ bookkeeping.)
But first, I have time to attend to other things.
——
Chris at Ferndale 39
Hi Chris,
> Now as to the dead, they often bother my dreams. A more self absorbed lot would be hard to find I can assure you.
I had a good laugh at the “self absorbed” part.
Every now and then, I feel my mother-in-law’s ghost (died 1.5 years ago; age mid-80s) what feels like hovering above me malevolently (mainly when I am in bed at night). She had ravaged her body all her life with tobacco, alcohol, and every type of food that could be found in Manhattan, New York, restaurants (which is every food in the world). She was religiously secular, so she let all sorts of spirits influence her.
I opened-prayer, tell her, and her kind, if she insists on being a shit, to get the hell out of this house, to get the hell off my property, to get the hell out of my county, to get the hell out of Wisconsin, to go back where she came from (hell), and leave us good people of Wisconsin the hell alone,— we don’t need her spreading out her ill feelings, ill will, and ill-self, onto MY TRIBE. Sometimes I got ornery. Then I ended-prayer.
After that, I don’t feel her around, or how I think Brits would term it, I don’t feel her about.
It seems to work. I don’t if JMG would consider this a formal banishing or not.
Sometimes I get quite animated with the arms, physically shoving her out of the room. Sometimes I get animated with the yelling at her, telling her she is a god-awful prick, and what-not.
I am not afraid of her. She tried to be fearsome all her life, really a 4ft-11in pugnacious bully. I am a better battle-axe than her. In life, no-one dared cross her, but I did, near her end of life. She could not believe any of her relatives would take her on and tell her off. No, I cannot possibly honor her after she died. She had turned herself into something dreadful.
The vast majority of us interacting (since 1979), we got along just fine.
But I figured out, after she had died, that the relationship was all one-sided, where “I liked her” but she never felt anything but neutral towards me. I should be glad that she felt merely neutral all those years, but then again, I purposely made myself docile around her.
For forty-odd years of her life, she never got to know me, much less learn to trust me. By the last couple years of her life, she decided that, because I made it clear that I would not to be a permanent servant responding to her every beck and call, even as she bodily withered to nothing, she decided she didn’t like me. Over a couple months near the end of her life, her dislike morphed into black-cold hatred of me. Hence, I get her the hell away from me. She can spread her hell somewhere else.
Talk about self-centered. During the last two years of her life, I not once heard her hint, “I know that other beings exist.” Everything was all about her. Frankly, when I get decrepit, I intend to walk outside into the night, and let exposure take over.
On the flip-side, in the 1990s, my spirit couldn’t help gravitating to my room at the house I grew up in, due to all the abuse I experienced per biological mother. For years, my spirit was so much there, I wondered whether the then human inhabitants sensed my presence. That was pre-Internet so it would have been hard to get their phone number. It would have been a strange phone call: “Hi, thirty years ago, I grew up in the house you now inhabit. Do you feel a ghost in the middle bedroom?”
I appreciated what you shared about your occasional nightly visitations. My impression of your old school friend is that he feels lost. Next time, tell him that you liked him in the olden days, but with the passage of time, you two drifted apart, but now he is dead (he may not know) (he is bones or dust), you suggest that he be kind to himself, that he move on, and to head towards the light.
💨🛌☠️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Hey JMG
I haven’t been having the kinds of internet problems that some of the other commenters have mentioned when they use this website, or the other one.
Hi John Michael,
Interesting, although going on a bit of a read into the subject of what exactly is a ‘medium’, it quickly became difficult to escape the fact that there’s a lot of built in assumptions which could have fitted into the soundtrack of the late 60’s hippy-plus musical ‘Hair’! That’s not been my experience with such encounters, and I’d suggest that one aspect to this ‘ere thing called ‘life’, is addressing unfinished business and smoothing off a person’s rough edges and relationships. If anything the experiences have suggested that it’s best not to leave a wake of drama from our passage. But that’s my take on the world. To be frank, it may be a realisation we all need to experience? Dunno.
Just between you and I, that OceanGate disaster a couple of years ago, gave me a case of the willies whenever it popped into my consciousness, awake or asleep, and did make me wonder about past lives… Have you ever encountered a situation which had associations for you from a past life?
Cheers
Chris
William 50
> does not support a secure connection
I mostly use DuckDuckGo on Mac, occasionally Safari, and in the last ten days or so, whenever I tool around the Internet, I get dozens of “not secure connection” notices, even for websites I know for a fact are secure, including the long South Merican river. I have no idea what is going on — it makes no sense. I chalk it up to the general ineptitude of the Internet; I bet greed somehow comes into it. Others trying to get users to empty their bank accounts into strangers’ bank accounts,—in some way fraudulent. Otherwise, it feels like people are getting desperate to create chaos online. I pay it no mind. If the Internet partially fails, I don’t care. Whatever.
💨👾💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Emmanuel, interesting. Thanks for this.
Tengu, you’re welcome. That sounds rather like a goodby note, btw — I hope it wasn’t.
Scotlyn, thanks for this. I’ve always found this logic confusing, for what it’s worth. The only times I can focus attention strictly on the present moment are in certain kinds of meditation, and they’re not kinds I find useful. For example, right now as I type this I’m attentive to the past a minute or so ago when I read your comment, the past-through-future process of writing a coherent response, and the future fifteen minutes from now when dinner will be finished and I’ll need to be ready to serve it. All my thoughts and actions are contextualized by past experiences and future goals, and make no sense outside of that extension in time — and some of those thoughts and action necessarily extend much further than others into the temporal stream, as when I collect the URLs of more than ten years of podcasts so that I can post them on a website and use them to help market books I haven’t even written yet. Am I missing your point, or is there a real disagreement here?
DFC, it’s a subject I’ve discussed in a post on this blog:
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-subnatural-realm-a-speculation/
The short form is that it seems plausible to me.
J.L.Mc12, thanks for the data point.
Chris, good gods, yes. One of the main reasons I don’t drive and dislike being in cars, though it took me a while to realize this, is that I died in a head-on crash the last time around. In your case, it occurs to me that quite a lot of people died the way the OceanGate passengers did between 1939 and 1945…
Chauquin 61
> books deserve to “invest” your money in buying them. They evidently can be available during a blackout, and they’ve shown during a heck of centuries they’re a reliable ancient technology.
I have had a heck of a time convincing my husband Jethro that paper is the best long-term storage. As an example, we have ancient tax information on Macintosh floppy disks from the late 1980s, with no way to access them. Also, CDs from the early 2000s, with no way to read them. Either the softwares are defunct, or the hardware is. However, I still have paper versions of bookkeeping from 1987, I have no problem reading,— huh, how novel.
I stick to my guns and create paper versions of any/all bookkeeping I am in charge of. I don’t keep anything, I mean, anything, on the so-called “cloud”—that is the worst possible. Now, it is the cloud I consider “insecure,” id not highly so, even though companies swear their info on a user is secure—I don’t believe them. I search to kingdom-come to find ways to avoid putting anything onto the dreaded, heebie-jeebie filled “cloud.” Whenever I hear the word “cloud,” I hiss and growl🐍; the hackles on my back go up.
> It’s ironic they’re made and used nowadays yet, but VHS videotapes are outdated…
I still have VHS tapes I someday would like to RE-watch, as well as keeping not one, but two, VCRs on which to watch them. I really liked the VHS technology. Around 1997-2003, I created recordings of, and kept in storage boxes, a few dozen of Christopher Lowell’s “Interior Motives” home-decorating show on how to decorate one’s home’s interior cheaply. Lowell’s interior design content is classic—it will never be out-of-date.
💨📺🛋️🖼️💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
Mr. Greer … with regard to your response to Scotlyn .. I’m kinda confused. Were you involved in a collision with a Model A and a horse or something? I’m assuming we’re talkin passed lives and such. Were your the horse, pray tell? … assuming it twas between an automobile and an living being.. I’m only half joking here, as I don’t know what to make of your comment.
JMG, Scotlyn, Chuaquin,
As for the shape of time, I think we’re in one of those ‘five blind men and an elephant’ situations, where each fellow takes hold of a different body part and then they don’t agree on what an elephant is actually like. I too do not find it useful to focus primarily on the present moment, most of the time, since memory and planning are so much a part of everyday life, and because in my most exalted states I perceive myself as a human trajectory tracing an arc of meaning across a single lightning-flash of destiny, every cause connected to every effect and all beheld at once in the eye of God.
I love the metaphor used by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. In that novel there are these little green aliens who can see all of time at all times. They feel sorry for us, because our perception of time is like being strapped to a moving train and facing backward- we can only see where we’ve come from. They, on the other hand, can see the whole track and the mountain range it’s winding through. When they look at a human being, they don’t see a single body in a single location, they see a sort of human centipede winding through all the locations and actions of that person’s entire earthly existence.
So is time more like a straight line or like a circle? Both models are certainly useful in different contexts. But they’re both two-dimensional. My actual hunch is that time is more like a cylinder, or maybe a cone. An ant winding its way up from the circular base will appear, from some perspectives, to be moving along a series of parallel diagonal lines, but from another perspective it will appear to move in a circle (or an inward spiral). The ant itself might perceive its movement to be more or less in a straight line, onward and upward. All are correct- sort of. But knowing that the ant and the object it’s crawling on are both three-dimensional objects takes you to a new level of perception of the underlying thing that was always there all along.
I thought it was sort of a given that non-human spiritual entities live outside of linear time, in more than three dimensions, and I find it fun to try and imagine their point of view. One of the things I’ve written that I love the best is a dialogue among a group of ants arguing heatedly about whether humans exist, using every kind of faulty reasoning I could think of. It ends with one of them saying, ‘Maybe it simply isn’t possible to talk about human beings without talking nonsense of one kind or another.’ I think that line was an homage to a JMG quote in one of his books or posts, but I can’t remember where from.
All that to say…. I enjoy and appreciate talking serious nonsense with you on this very special forum!
John Michael wrote, “At worst, they mirror back the delusions of those who attempt to come into contact with them, with results that range from the absurd to the catastrophic.”
Your description of spirits of the 1st phase sounds like a mighty accurate description of goLLuMs as well. Were you possibly thinking about goLLuMs when you wrote that line?
Not that our infestation of goLLuM assistants need to be any type of spiritual being (at least as we commonly comprehend that category), but simply that they dwell, all rock or silicone chip like, fully in the 1st phase, which their programming has brutally constrained them into.
In fact, I think rocks probably have a much better chance of incarnating into any of the 28 phases than goLLuMs ever will. Poor programmed little golem totems, endlessly enticing fools into playing predictable riddle interpretation games with invisible opponents who won’t stop whispering “Precioussss!” into their victims’ ears. Absurd to catastrophic results incoming! Seek cover.
DFC # 65:
A good question, IMHO. If we can see beyond usual materialism so we admit there can be a non human world with spiritual conscious beings, it’s interesting to make that question.
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N.G.# 67:
Your comment about that ghost seems chilling to me. I’ve never noticed a ghost next to me, but often I dream with some of my family dead people. Even sometimes my grandparents cat (who died in the ‘90s) appears in my dreams. I’m not scared nor pleased by these dreams.
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JMG # 71:
I understand your answer to Scotlyn, so I think you’re dissenting with him/her. Well, I can say the Present seems an idea you can grasp, but it’s always “running”, so if you want to live more Now than in Yesterday or Tomorrow, it’s more difficult than it seems. So I partly agree: human mind needs to work and survive in the long term, at least doing short travels with our reason to the past (to remember) and the future (to plan things). It’s impossible to live always in the Present (like some pop psychologies/spiritualities seem to say).
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N.G. # 72:
Yes, good quality books can last at least a century in good storage conditions: in a dry place, without big temperature changes and far from direct sun light.
Oh, VHS…I’ve got some videotapes in my storage room, useless because I don’t have an VHS machine anymore…
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Dylan # 74:
I think you’ve chosen a good metaphor to depict human condition in front of realities which are too far to be full
understood by our own mind knowledge. The “blind men and the elephant” story isn’t new for me, I heard it before. Maybe it’s an Arab or Indian (from India) tale, I don’t know.
Our views couldn’t be opposite competing ideas, but complementary views…
I’ll think deeply about your philosophical comments, thank you.
@ JMG – thank you for your consideration and for your question.
To be honest, I don’t know yet. 🙂 I’m feeling my way here.
I do not know if logic is involved. My comment was an initial working out of the intuition that your phrase “limited vantage point” corresponds in some way to my terms “Present” and “HereNow”, which are also ways of speaking of a vantage point (a point is neither a line nor a circle). I presume the “point” from which beings larger and older and greater than I have “vantage” extends further in “time” and in “space” than my own, while still being – in some complicated sense – a “point” and not a “line” nor a “circle”. My presumption may be wrong, and may well be leading me astray in some important way. But I will sit with it for a while to see what it has to show me.
My second point (separate to the first) is that what you spoke of as our “conceptions” as to the shape of time, whether linear or circular (or other), appears to influence many of our other choices. For example, a willingness to sacrifice present “goods” – including other people’s present “goods” for imagined future “perfects” appears to go with the linear view. (In this regard, I cannot bring myself to see the Marxist view – say – as circular, since it has such a well-defined End).
“For example, right now as I type this I’m attentive to the past a minute or so ago when I read your comment, the past-through-future process of writing a coherent response, and the future fifteen minutes from now when dinner will be finished and I’ll need to be ready to serve it. All my thoughts and actions are contextualized by past experiences and future goals, and make no sense outside of that extension in time — and some of those thoughts and action necessarily extend much further than others into the temporal stream…”
If I may, let us map out your comment on a Tree of Life diagram, similar to the one on page 48 of your “Revisioning the Tree of Life”.
Sphere 10 – The Body – “right now as I type this”
Sphere 9 – The Life Force “I’m attentive”
Sphere 8 – Thoughts “the past-through-future process of writing a coherent response”
Sphere 7 – Desires – “future goals”
Sphere 6 – Imagination – “the future fifteen minutes from now when dinner will be finished and I’ll need to be ready to serve it.”
Sphere 5 – Will – “actions contextualised by past experiences and future goals” and “actions extending further than others into the temporal stream
Sphere 4 – Memory – “past experiences”
(We’ll leave the highest spheres to their realm of Spirit).
What I meant by saying that Sphere 10 – the body – is the actual point of the pencil (and look at the shape of the Tree which suggests it) which makes the mark on the paper in any given present is that this, here, the body, IS where rubber continually meets the road. But Sphere 10 does not, cannot, act alone nor isolated from the the other spheres, which are also already and always actively woven into that present in (say) the shape and weight and make of the pencil, and the hand of the pencil wielder and the mind of the pencil wielder, and the knowledge of the pencil wielder and the purposes of the pencil wielder, and all of these can be seen in your comment represented by those other spheres.
Sphere 10 – the HERE NOW of your comment – was what your body was actually doing in that moment – ie typing the comment. But everything else you mention was also fully present, and (by virtue of those very extensions of height and depth and breadth you mention – in thought and feeling, in memory, in imagination) bringing to bear the totality of “the weight” of “you” upon the pencil, as it were.
I am probably not explaining this very well, even to myself. As I said, I am trying to work out the meaning of an initial intuition. Thank you for listening. 🙂
Hi JMG
Fascinating post, thanks for the link.
So do you think Rudolf Steiner was right when he thought that those “spyder-broods” of the future will be the AI’s, and the spyders’ web will be internet, sowing chaos on humanity trapped in their webs?
Peter Thiel seems to think AI as a kind of “catechon”, but the systems he’s helping to build remind me more prone to the arrival of some kind of “Anti-Christ” than to prevent it.
It seems to me we are in a kind os eschatological times in the mind of many people. I don’t know if you have the same opinion.
Cheers
David
Whew, this arcane convoluted stuff is beyond this dense dumbdonkey of a guy ( respecting the crude language rule). But then I think the Trinity is a piece of cake to understand, can explain the ramifications of the Crucifixion and know all sorts of Bible stuff and mystical theology. I also know a good deal of science, literature and social sciences, history (enables me to judge JMG’s various pontifications in those areas – he does a good job pretty I think IMO) I guess it’s a matter of what you choose to focus on and grabs your attention.
@ Chuaquin #66
“When you live in the Present, I think you’ve got much more opportunities to enjoy a happier and healthier life than be living “hijacked” by the Past or the Future. Indeed, I try to do it, with some success.”
Thank you for responding.
However, I do not think it is a matter of trying or of failing.
If you live in a body (as we all who are currently incarnated, do), then your body lives in the Present, both in time and place, the HereNow, regardless.
It cannot live anywhere else. This is precisely what “limits” our “vantage point” – whether on the nature of time or anything else.
DFC # 79:
I’m sorry for my ignorance of the term “catechon” that you wrote in your comment, so please, would you like to define it in a few words?(for a dilettante like me). It sounds like a philosophical term to me, but I don’t know exactly its meaning. Thanks on advance.
Saludos.
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Scotlyn # 81:
I think I understand your view, according what I’ve read in your comment. So you think we live in a body (yes), then we live always in the Present (maybe true, maybe partly true, maybe not). Well, I can accept your view like a work hypothesis, but there are another philosophies beyond the “Presentism”(if you don’t mind my term). Although I’m not skilled enough in Philosophy and hard Sciences to write about them, a lot of philosophers and scientists during centuries and centuries have debated the time topic without any definitive answers.
Maybe the Past and the Future are fictions, but human mind sometimes needs to work with those fictions in real world. Necessary fictions, methink. Don’t you think it?
Posting from mobile.
Scotlyn, your body is automatically always in the present but your mind isn’t. I adopt Eckhart Tolle’s definition of the present moment that I think is more useful than the common understanding. Eg. one is aware of objects and their body/will at the same time. Subject and object merge, within the mechanism of awareness, and you enter a flow state. You can think of it past and future in this state; it need not be empty of thought. My two cents.
@ Scotlyn #81 – your physical body may only live in the Present, but it’s at least in part a product of the Past – a combining of its past history into the present moment along with whatever is going on at present. But your mental processes are occurring in the astral plane, which has a different relationship to time than the physical plane does. Time can speed up, slow down, or be in the imagined past or future on the astral plane, or even be divided among these when you have multiple thoughts/emotions at the same time, as JMG indicated in his example. While there are links between the planes, they are discrete rather than continuous.
@ Luke Z #83
Thank you! 🙂
Yes. 🙂 I think that is what I said.
The mind is broader and deeper and higher and has further reach (for some values of “reach”) than the body.
However, if you are incarnate in a body, what “mark” can your mind actually make upon the world absent your body – which is precisely what anchors, and limits, your mind in time and space? What is our deepest limitation, is at the same time, what defines, and focusses our powers. Our capacity to make a mark upon the world (defined as “everything that *I* am not) lies in the bridge between our mind and the world that our material body provides.
Our minds can most certainly visit Past(s), using the faculty of memory, and Future(s), using the faculty of imagination. But do our minds possess any entirely bodiless powers to exert influence in any given past or future?
It seems that the non-incarnate spirits that Yeats describes here, lacking bodies, have very few powers to influence *even* the present.
Polecat, that makes two of us, then, because I can’t make any sense at all of your comment.
Dylan, my take is that time doesn’t actually exist. Kant made a solid argument that time and space are conditions of human consciousness, not objective realities, and so arguing about the true shape of time is a little like trying to work out the weight and cubic volume of the concept of justice!
Christophe, no, but the comparison’s an apt one, and offers yet more evidence for the idea that goLLuMs are subnatural entities.
Scotlyn, okay, I see the confusion. No, my comment about the limited vantage point of human consciousness wasn’t meant to suggest the here-now notion. A vantage point, by definition, is a location from which you can see your surroundings; it’s not a geometrical point, any more than West Point is — at least I’ve never seen one that could only be viewed from one exact spaceless location, and moving a micron in any direction makes the view go away. It’s an area from which one can see a larger area. With regard to your Tree of Life metaphor, sure — but, er, at this point I have no idea what exactly you were trying to communicate with your initial comment, since we both apparently agree that treating the body in isolation from all the rest of experienced reality doesn’t work.
DFC, it’s not in the future. Those spiders are data centers and their web is the internet. What Steiner described is today’s reality.
@ Chuaquin #82
Sometimes I have seen written as “Catechon” and sometimes as “Katechon”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katechon#:~:text=The%20katechon%20(from%20Greek:%20%CF%84%E1%BD%B8,church%2C%20and%20the%20Holy%20Spirit.
@ JMG – ok, clearly, words fail me. 🙂
I will desist from commenting… and go sit some more with this. Be well! 🙂
Scotlyn #85: “Our minds can most certainly visit Past(s), using the faculty of memory, and Future(s), using the faculty of imagination. But do our minds possess any entirely bodiless powers to exert influence in any given past or future?”
My short answer is YES. My longer answer is as follows:
I think you are correct to associate the physical body with ‘here and now’, in the conventional sense of the phrase. This is why yoga teachers and mindfulness coaches are always coaxing us to ‘be in our bodies’. Immersing one’s consciousness in moment-to-moment sensory awareness is a useful technique for taking a restorative mini-vacation from negative astral chatter. Animals, having less of that chatter going on compared to us, are more attentive and responsive to the physical world than we are- it’s both their gift and their limitation. We think about how we will act in the physical world, then act, whereas they simply act. (When we don’t think before we act, we are acting out of habit, the etheric part of our selves, or out of reflex, the physical part. Both of these are ‘animalistic’ in a technical sense). The physical world is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, the irreversible one-way flow of cause and effect, ‘time’s arrow’.
The astral body experiences time differently, as SLClaire helpfully points out. It can ‘perceive’ the past and the future, whether dimly through recollection and imagination, or more accurately through cultivated clairvoyance. It can also experience time ‘speeding up’ or ‘slowing down’ depending on our mental and emotional state. And it can influence other astral bodies, because thoughts and feelings are not locked up inside our skulls but flow between and among souls both embodied and disembodied. But because most of us are mostly passive or reactive on the astral plane, our capacity to ACT on that plane is very limited compared to our capacity to do so in Malkuth, the physical world.
Meditation is the practice of toning and conditioning the astral body, and magic is the practice of training it for wilful action- action which, nota bene, does not always follow what we could think of as conventional laws of time. At our present stage, we need the physical body (voice, gesture, colour, scent) to do magic, that is, to act wilfully on the astral plane. But when we have completely mastered our astral bodies, we will be ready to leave the physical behind. And that only happens when a higher body (the mental) has become fully-formed enough to take the helm.
I think that the more we live into the developing mental body, the more we will be able to experience eternity, which can be precisely defined as the vantage point from which past, present, and future blend into a seamlessly perceivable continuum. At that point we will have stopped experiencing time as a unidirectional sequence or even as a set of astral images or states we can shuffle through, but as a single present thing immediately apparent to our (higher) senses. Thus time-as-flow will not appear to be ‘real’ to us as it does now, and JMG’s comment about the unreality of time will be seen to be true- from THAT vantage point.Scotlyn #85: “Our minds can most certainly visit Past(s), using the faculty of memory, and Future(s), using the faculty of imagination. But do our minds possess any entirely bodiless powers to exert influence in any given past or future?”
My short answer is YES. My longer answer is as follows:
I think you are correct to associate the physical body with ‘here and now’, in the conventional sense of the phrase. This is why yoga teachers and mindfulness coaches are always coaxing us to ‘be in our bodies’. Immersing one’s consciousness in moment-to-moment sensory awareness is a useful technique for taking a restorative mini-vacation from negative astral chatter. Animals, having less of that chatter going on compared to us, are more attentive and responsive to the physical world than we are- it’s both their gift and their limitation. We think about how we will act in the physical world, then act, whereas they simply act. (When we don’t think before we act, we are acting out of habit, the etheric part of our selves, or out of reflex, the physical part. Both of these are ‘animalistic’ in a technical sense). The physical world is subject to the second law of thermodynamics, the irreversible one-way flow of cause and effect, ‘time’s arrow’.
The astral body experiences time differently, as SLClaire helpfully points out. It can ‘perceive’ the past and the future, whether dimly through recollection and imagination, or more accurately through cultivated clairvoyance. It can also experience time ‘speeding up’ or ‘slowing down’ depending on our mental and emotional state. And it can influence other astral bodies, because thoughts and feelings are not locked up inside our skulls but flow between and among souls both embodied and disembodied. But because most of us are mostly passive or reactive on the astral plane, our capacity to ACT on that plane is very limited compared to our capacity to do so in Malkuth, the physical world.
Meditation is the practice of toning and conditioning the astral body, and magic is the practice of training it for wilful action. At our present stage, we need the physical body (voice, gesture, colour, scent) to do magic, that is, to act wilfully on the astral plane. But when we have completely mastered our astral bodies, we will be ready to leave the physical behind. And that only happens when a higher body (the mental) has become fully-formed enough to take the helm.
I think that the more we live into the developing mental body, the more we will be able to experience eternity, which can be precisely defined as the vantage point from which past, present, and future blend into a seamlessly perceivable continuum. At that point we will have stopped experiencing time as a unidirectional sequence or even as a set of astral images or states we can shuffle through, but as a single present thing immediately apparent to our (higher) senses. Thus time-as-flow will not appear to be ‘real’ to us as it does now, and JMG’s comment about the unreality of time will be seen to be true- from THAT vantage point.
Beardtree #80: “But then I think the Trinity is a piece of cake to understand, can explain the ramifications of the Crucifixion and know all sorts of Bible stuff and mystical theology. ”
Do you have an online platform where you’ve written about these things? I would be delighted to learn about them from someone who also speaks Ecosophian.
Scotlyn, I wasn’t asking you to stop commenting. I was simply indicating that I don’t get what you were trying to communicate. Sigh…
@Dylan #90 I read your #89. You are WAY more fluent in Ecosophian than I am. I don’t have an online platform besides comments here and on a few Substacks here and there also as BeardTree. Perhaps in the next Open Post here you can field me some questions/thoughts and we can discuss. I am basically a variety of pretty standard Christian with some quirks.
@JMG “The reason Marx is popular with so many intellectuals is that it’s such a middle class wet dream”
I will say this, Marx is fascinating reading but I would hardly use it as gospel to build society on. He did ask the right questions but also come to his famously bad conclusions. Marx was interested in the structure that lead to the failure of the french revolution and you can see were he came to his criticisms of the forming markets of the time. But we all know how terribly the “solutions” worked out. Every once in a while I get another detail of how it worked in the USSR and am endlessly blow away with the stupidity of it all.
I believe it was you that quoted the Russian joke “Marx, completely right about capitalism and complete wrong about communism.” Spot on!
When I see someone say they are a Marxist, I am immediately on my back foot on what they are about to propose. Mind you the opposite is also true, when the opening word from someone is “Capitalism…”. 95% of the time you are going to hear some nonsense.
JMG # 86:
Kant was a great philosopher, so his ideas about time deserve to be heard. Although I don’t have to agree 100% with Kantian work, it’s an interesting idea that time as an objective thing doesn’t exist. However, I think human mind (in its rational part) needs to work in a sequential time, so time would be a “necessary fiction” for human brain.
——————————-
DFC # 87:
Thanks for your link about Catechon/Katechon. (Gracias)
———————————
Michael G. # 93:
Yes, Marx wrote some interesting ideas about Capitalism, but his solutions to that “problem” indeed were another problem.
Socialism/leftism is wider than Marxism, but until the USSR collapse, Marx had a heavy hegemony in “Progressive” people. However, his “scientific” claims were problematic and Popper did a “good job”’ to debunk Marxism as a fake science.
DFC:
Oops! I see the Catechon term is a biblical and theological idea, not a secular philosophy term. It was under my radar. Thank you for your link (gracias).
Hi John Michael,
You’ve been very consistent regarding your relationship to the automobile over the years, and your words explain a lot about that. It may even be that your present wiring is not disposed to that mode of transport, to err, force your hand somehow. Do you reckon that is a possibility?
And as to WWII, those were my thoughts as well. Pretty chilling, huh? But then, the winds / Body of fate do push us around without much care as to our preference.
Out of curiosity, are you in the process of casting any charts soon?
Cheers
Chris
Hi Chuaqin,
It’s a good read, yeah. And I’ve not enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels. Dunno about you, but I get the impression that such fictional works set many an Englishman off and away on an overseas journey of adventure. Pushes come in many forms. 😉
Hi Northwind,
Oh my! You had a rough deal there, but I can empathise with your plight. If you’ve ever seen the film, I, Tonya, my mother was kind of like that. She could occasionally be warm when it suited her, but far out, she’d turn on ya. Unlike your experience, I cut ties as a young bloke and headed out into the calmer world. That’s not any form of judgement either, because everyone has a different road to travel. And that is a good thing too. I hear you too.
Cheers
Chris
Chris at Ferndale 96
> been very consistent regarding your relationship to the automobile over the years
Automobiles are weird, when one gets right down to it. Or more accurately, mentally ill. The concept of cars involves mass mental illness. Vehicle culture is the persistent belief that 70mph/112km is normal.
In Europe in the 1600s, the default was walking. No matter the mode of transportation, country roads were horrendous, made of dirt. When wet, they were mud.
If one was rich, one could afford a horse. If it wasn’t horse-a-taxi, one had to provide at least a hut, temperature control within limits, timely food, attention, and other necessities to keep a horse. One could go the horse-a-taxi way, but that meant a certain degree of planning, or passing notes by messenger.
JMG has mentioned that paved roads will get worse with decline. They ARE somewhat worse already.
When I am in a vehicle on the roads, I look at cars, and say, “Cars are just plain weird, if not sick.” At 50mph/80km, one misses so much. When I am not the driver, at a fast 50mph, birds and cornfields go by too fast,— whizzing, making me dizzy. When I drive, sometimes I take it easy, going 43mph/69km; I actually can see birds and cornfields, but people behind me curse and drive past, and I don’t care. Why is their obsession my business? They are lucky I don’t go 30mph/48km. I don’t see the point of going fast. Just leave earlier. So impatient.
It is all petroleum-based. It will cease, but (bummer) I won’t be around to see it, when people return to 30mph, like I remember my grandfather talking about (born 1890s).
Automobiles are weird. They are an aberration. They really should never have been conceived. (The same with airplanes.) Automobiles are abominable. It’s the new AAA: Abominable-Aberration-Automobile. Automobiles and airplanes got off the ground, so to speak, only because of petroleum, along with all the ludicrous infrastructure that has evolved around them. Remove automobiles and airplanes: that will happen maybe within 50 years. Jobs dependent on automobiles and airplanes go poof, fftt.
I think I was born in a wrong era. One of my 2nd great-grandfathers (born 1830s) made his living hauling things in horses-and-big-cart. He was a teamster, literally, because he had a team of horses. His heyday was 1880s Catskill mountains farm-country of New York State. I think he went about 5mph/8km. He was lucky of the roads were gravel rather than dirt.
But land transportation is relatively hard compared to waterways. One or more horses pulling a canal boat on a canal uses a lot less energy than pulling a wagon on a road. That is why JMG says that canals will come back. Canal work is an up-and-coming profession. Start a mechanic shop or general store near a canal, and at some point, there will be steady business.
I am not enamored of automobiles. If I didn’t have to use them (I do), I would ditch them in two seconds. I am in no position to use horse-and-buggy (am too old, too ignorant), although the farms nearby have horses and infrastructure. I like my adjacent farms’ overt influence. If I weren’t old, I would make myself useful learning to be a farmhand/farm laborer, to learn farms’ ropes and get muscles, or I’d learn the alternative, the flip-side, which is to learn to cook hearty meals.
Everyone needs to learn that life includes shoveling shit. Americans these days balk at f-g cleaning their own toilets—can one imagine them in a barn shoveling livestock shit? What a hoot. Someday…
Automobiles’ days are numbered. Horses and other livestock: live long and prosper.
💨🐴🛻🎒🛖🍳💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
I’m not taking anything you said as an instruction to stop commenting. Please be reassured on that point. 🙂
What I find is that I simply do not know where to go with this topic, just now. Questions as posed to not match what I think I have been trying to say. I don’t know how to answer them. And I do not want to “hammer on” fruitlessly.
I think that instead of spinning my wheels in comments, I need to sit with the topic some more, and gain enough clarity in my own mind that I can explain myself better in words. (Which are currently not working very well for me, I think). 🙂
Don’t worry. I am comfortable and at ease here. And there are a lot of useful perspectives being offered back to me. It is just that this topic of my physicality, implicit in my currently incarnated self, together with the limitations that being incarnated in a body supplies to my current vantage in time and space, and how it calls me to presence here now, will not leave me alone.
There is something for me to find, something trying to find me, somewhere in that topic, but I may have to do more work – more sitting – before I can bring it back into conversation here.
🙂 🙂
Chris # 97:
Gulliver’s Travels, until it eventually became a book for children, was partly a parody of travels books. Indeed, it’s interesting it was written by Mr. Swift not much years after Robinson Crusoe. Gulliver stories doesn’t seem IMHO a direct parody of Mr. Defoe novel, but the two novels main character are sailors whose ship(s) sink in far oceans…
Swift wrote a satyrical novel against his time society: politics, religions and even scholars/scientists (Laputa island) are his favorite targets to mock them in a metaphorical way. It’s strange such a sarcastic book has become into a children book!
BeardTree #92: Thanks! This will give me a reason to tune in at the next open post. (I don’t usually try to follow those discussions- too many threads). See you then!
And sorry to anyone who read my double post (#89) and was confused. I just made a Ctrl-C fumble, that’s all.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 3/13). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May a safe and happy home environment be enjoyed by Laurelmirror, her daughter, and her mother, as well as protection from evil influences. May their family situation be resolved in such a way that Laurelmirror’s mother will get a chance to recover physically and mentally from the stresses it has caused; may mother be blessed and invigorated.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Open Space be filled with the strength he needs to heal quickly from his current bout of Chicken Pox; may his will remain strong, that he does not scratch; may he be healed completely, and suffer no scarring in its wake.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May Cathy N. of St. Marys, Ohio heal and recover from injuries caused by a fall.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, be healed of a recently discovered heart condition.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Marko have the strength to seize the opportunities.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
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.