The historical accounts of Bruno’s personality are remarkably consistent. Brilliant. Difficult. Impatient. Unable to suffer fools. Prone to public quarrels. Incapable of the diplomatic performance that academic life required. Willing, even eager, to attack the intellectual authority of people who had done nothing to earn…
Bruno walked fourteen cities across fifteen years. Geneva. Toulouse. Lyon. Paris. London. Oxford. Wittenberg. Prague. Helmstedt. Frankfurt. Zurich. Padua. Venice. And finally Rome, where the walking ended. Each city was a world. A complete, self-contained system of belief, authority, social organization, and intellectual permission. Each…
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…
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…
Link to YouTube Video There is a difference between thinking about a subject and thinking from a position. Thinking about a subject is what most of us do most of the time. Gather information. Weigh arguments. Compare positions. Reach conclusions. The process is essentially curatorial,…
Link to YouTube Video There is a moment, and if you’ve ever experienced it you know exactly what is being described, where you realize you have already left. Internally, the departure has happened. The frame you were living inside has become visible to you as…
Link to YouTube Video There is a particular kind of education that is so thorough, so rigorous, so complete in its ambition, that it accidentally produces the very thing it was designed to prevent. It gives you every tool. Every method. Every tradition of inquiry…
Link to YouTube Video There is a specific kind of loneliness that comes not from being alone, but from knowing something that the world around you has no container for. This is not a secret or a belief. It is a knowing. And once you…