The second Hermetic principle is called Correspondence. As above, so below; as below, so above. As within, so without; as without, so within. The principle derives from the Emerald Tablet, one of the most compressed documents in the Western esoteric tradition. The full text runs…
There is a definition of the human being that has held for two thousand years. Aristotle gave it. Philosophers repeated it. Scientists inherited it without examining it. The definition goes something like this: the human being is a rational animal. Reason is the distinguishing feature.…
The Milesians found soul distributed through matter. Heraclitus found the soul participating in governing logos. Anaxagoras found an unmixed intelligence standing apart from everything it organizes. Each step located the animating principle at a higher level of organization, with cleaner distinctions and more structural clarity.…
For twelve years, Immanuel Kant lectured, corresponded, and went on his famous walks through Königsberg at such exact intervals that neighbors set their clocks by him. Philosophically, only silence. After reading Hume he stopped publishing. Stopped claiming to have answers. He went inside the problem…
There is a pattern in the history of ideas that is rarely talked about directly. A thinker produces something genuinely new. Something at a different structural level entirely, a framework that the existing structure cannot hold without cracking. The institution encounters it. The institution is…
Link to YouTube Video Imagine you decided to carry an infinite universe inside your head. As a living, navigable structure, something you can move through, something whose parts remain in relationship to each other, something that doesn’t collapse into a single flat summary every time…
Link to YouTube Video The first of the seven Hermetic principles is called Mentalism. All is mind. The universe is mental. The principle derives from the Corpus Hermeticum, the body of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Great. The oldest of these texts, the…
Five thousand years before Donella Meadows wrote a word about systems, a Sumerian encoded the complete structure of systems collapse and reconstruction in a myth. The myth is the Descent of Inanna. The myth is systems thinking; the same structural logic, the same sequence of…
Link to YouTube Video The Milesians asked what soul is made of. They answered with substance, water, air, the intelligent breath holding the cosmos together. And they were right about one thing, whatever soul is, it is everywhere. The world is alive. The animating principle…
Link to YouTube Video There is a question that science has been avoiding for three hundred years. The idea of the neutral observer. The idea that knowledge is something a mind acquires from outside the world it is describing. One man made it his life’s…