1310. Paris. A woman named Marguerite Porete is burned at the stake in the Place de Grève. Her crime: writing a book called The Mirror of Simple Souls, a mystical treatise describing the soul’s union with God in terms the Church found intolerable. She had…
In the early fourteenth century, in the northern regions of what is now France and Belgium, a woman wrote a book. Her birthdate remains unknown. Her appearance, unrecorded. The details of her daily life, lost. What survives is the book. And what the book cost…
Francisco Varela was born in Chile in 1946. He trained as a biologist and mathematician, arriving eventually in the laboratory of Humberto Maturana at the University of Chile. What he found there would define the first major arc of his intellectual life. Maturana had been…
The third Hermetic principle is called Vibration. Nothing rests. Everything moves. Everything vibrates. The principle appears in the Corpus Hermeticum as the description of a living, animate universe; a cosmos in continuous motion at every level of its expression. The Kybalion states it this way.…
Hegel read Kant and felt claustrophobic. The way you feel in a room when someone has locked the door and told you the view through the window is the best you’ll ever get. That the thing on the other side of the glass, reality as…
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…
There is a question underneath all of Western philosophy that is rarely asked directly. If the ground of being is complete, perfect, self sufficient, lacking nothing, why does anything exist at all? Every major tradition in the West assumed creation as a given and worked…
Link to YouTube Video The brain has a relationship with open loops that is almost adversarial. Incompleteness registers as a problem. Problems get solved. Loops get closed. The dopamine system rewards the closing, so closing this constantly, automatically, often before knowing what is closing, seems…
Link to YouTube Video Plato and Aristotle opposed each other for 2,400 years. They built two of the most complete philosophical systems in Western history. They disagreed on almost everything fundamental: the nature of reality, the direction of truth, where knowledge lives, what the world…
Published on consciouschoicemastery.com | Approx. 14-16 min read Shakespeare’s Macbeth has been read for four centuries as the definitive study of ambition destroying a good man. The standard interpretation is clean, teachable, and wrong. Ambition didn’t corrupt Macbeth. Something more structural happened, and understanding what…