the realities comprising the external world are not immediately or directly given in consciousness, but are abstractions of them in varying degrees performed by the external and internal senses, and transformed into knowledge of the external world by means of intellectual construction. Continue reading
A mathematician, a carpenter, and a physicist walk into a bar. The carpenter is touching and admiring the bar’s woodwork. The mathematician is siting and thinking, while the physicist was busily doodling on his napkin. After a while, they struck up a conversation. Continue reading
Venus is the source of the power of taste. She governs the stomach whence emerges the ability and taste for eating and drinking. ~ Picatrix Continue reading
Anyone who has acquired a certain clairvoyance does not simply feel that one thing is correct and another incorrect, but he suffers actual pain when confronted by illogical thinking, and a sense of well-being in connection with clear, transparent thinking. Continue reading
One thing that struck me about Descartes, and I’ve remembered it my entire life, was that he was allowed to lie in bed in the morning. He retained that habit throughout his life as he believed it was “conducive to intellectual profit and comfort.” I’ve never had that luxury until the last dozen years or so. Since I am now blessed with insomnia, I awaken early in the morning. I just simply lie still with nothing but my thoughts and prayers. Every now and then a revelation comes to me and a post is born. Continue reading
Once you can survive, once you have achieved some consistency in your life, then what is your best life? Are you driven by the desire to think, to know, to understand, to serve the Good? Or do you prefer to “feel good” by increasing your serotonin levels? Continue reading
Contra all the psycho-babble online, Plato understands “true love” as the willingness to die for one’s love. Orpheus was therefore a coward because he could only sing about it. Continue reading
If I remove the Latin from Maritain’s book and the Arabic from Naquid’s book, the metaphysical principles are virtually indistinguishable. Continue reading
We stress that the discussion is always based on practice. Our approach, the esoteric and traditional approach, is not to develop a model of a person, to “be” a person. The former is intellectual, the latter requires an ontological transformation of one’s state of being. Continue reading
It is said that when you know yourself, you know God. That is not because of human effort. Rather, God is the mirror in which you see yourself in your perfection because you can never see God, just as you don’t see the mirror when you look at your reflection. Continue reading