An Astrological Interlude: Aries Ingress 2018

John Michael Greer166 Comments

This fourth Wednesday of the month would normally be an open post for readers’ questions, but I’ve been asked by quite a few people at this point to cast and delineate a chart for the 2018 Aries ingress, and this is as good a time as any. Aries ingress? That’s the technical term for the…

The Twilight of Authority

John Michael Greer250 Comments

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the need for a rhetorical education—that is, an education that doesn’t presume to lay down the law about what’s true and what’s false, but instead teaches each individual how to understand and assess claims about truth and falsehood. That’s a concept many people find challenging these days.…

March 2018 Book Club

John Michael Greer129 Comments

This week’s post is the ninth of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Spiritual Ecology of Magic” (pp.85-99). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments focused on that…

A Rhetorical Education

John Michael Greer261 Comments

Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.  Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.  Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate…

February 2018 Open Post

John Michael Greer456 Comments

As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month (well, more or less) to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill…

The Babbitt Fallacy, and Other Ways to Lose

John Michael Greer330 Comments

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about some of the habits of thought that form, or rather deform, the collective conversation of our time. Partly, of course, that’s because here in the United States, the collective conversation of our time has reached a level of weirdness that would make a surrealist gasp. Has anyone else…

February 2018 Book Club

John Michael Greer126 Comments

This week’s post is the eighth of a monthly series of open-discussion posts focusing on books I’ve written. Our theme for the present is Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth, and this week we’re discussing “The Seventh Law: The Law of Evolution” (pp.72-84). I’d like to ask readers to keep their questions and comments focused…

Zeno’s Laughter

John Michael Greer267 Comments

We really are going to have to start a conversation about ethics, aren’t we? Last week’s post on the fallacy of claiming that there’s one and only one proper diet for all human beings everywhere brought a pretty fair barrage of pushback. Now of course this wasn’t any kind of surprise; it’s an odd fact…

The Dream of a Perfect Diet

John Michael Greer408 Comments

I’d meant to spend the last couple of days writing an essay about the astral plane, because this is the fifth Wednesday of the month, and we’ve established an informal tradition on this blog that my readers get to suggest topics for fifth Wednesday posts. My muse, though, is an opinionated lady; she inspires what…

January 2018 Open Post

John Michael Greer419 Comments

As announced earlier, this blog will host an open space once a month (well, more or less) to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers, and this is the week. All the standard rules apply — no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill…