Happy midsummer frens

As we celebrate Summer Solstice, may you know joy, warmth, brightness, vitality, longevity, virility, strength, love, and meaningfulness ☀️

image: Dorje Yudronma, https://www.vajraweb.org

"Instead of asking "what is philosophy?", one should perhaps ask what kind of contents, i.e., what kind of mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioral and ritual patterns may be subscribed under the name of "philosophy" when understood in the ancient sense of the way leading to wisdom... the main task of this philosophy remains essentially the same: to change perverted human nature, to transform it, eventually leading it to happiness and to a restored divine identity. This task is in fact directly inherited from the ancient "philosophies," that is, from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and the related cosmogonical theories, systems of archetypal symbolism, and ritualized exercises of the "normative divine life."

~ Algis Uzdavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth: From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism, 2008

A System of Caucasian Yoga
Count Stefan Walewski

In the early fifties of the last century, a strange book ennoscriptd A System of Caucasian Yoga appeared in the United States. The book was written by Count Stefan Colonna Walewski, a Polish diplomat who claimed to have received its contents from a mysterious neo-Zoroastrian brotherhood located in the remote Caucasus.

Soon after the manunoscript was published in 1955, the members of an esoteric association – those who met them recalled their name as “Mazdaznan” – considering the disclosure of its secret practices dangerous, had the book withdrawn from the market by court order. Of the original printing only three hundred copies survived.


https://tradition.st/a-system-of-caucasian-yoga/

"You must remember that there is nothing dead or inanimate in nature. Everything in its own way is alive, everything in its own way is intelligent and conscious. Only this consciousness and intelligence is expressed in a different way on different levels of being—that is, on different scales. But you must understand once and for all that nothing is dead or inanimate in nature, there are simply different degrees of animation and different scales."

~ G.I. Gurdjieff

Dennett is Cringe.

On the Acquisition of Esoteric Knowledge

You have 3 sources of knowledge:
-from the senses
-from reason (deductions, logic. Etc.)
-from a secret 3rd thing.

The point isn't that one is "better" than the other. It's that all three are used to "triangulate" Truth.

The 3rd thing can begun to be understood as an Understanding that is "Meta-Rational".

Take telling a Joke for example: You tell a joke, someone "doesn't get it", so you explain the logic of the joke. They still don't get it. But! After a few moments they have an "Aha" Moment and get the joke.

What has happened here?

They've heard the joke (senses - hearing), you've explained the joke (reason - logic), but it's after this that something else happens (Understanding - ?????????)

Humans have a 3rd faculty with which they interact with the world/nature. If the senses are closed, and the rational mind is slowed down then the 3rd thing can "activate" and you may experience an "Extra-Normal Phenomenological Experience" which may represent itself as a vision, a voice, or a sudden spontaneous intuition that nestles in-between within a constellation of ideas suddenly illuminating the connections to you. etc. etc.