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[Main Blog Post] The Open-Minded Materialist's Gentle Introduction to Spirituality
I've written my first "full" blog post of the year and posted it to my main blog here. If you have any thoughts or ways I might make it better, kindly let me know by commenting here or dropping me an email!
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"Incidentally, a previous draft of this post had a lot more of my "how I got here" in it" - And why did you go to the trouble of cutting it? :) (OK, it may've been too personal.)
"happy, jokey JBP (...) angriest man on the planet" - I saw the first first - and his largely female students (or at least the ones laughing were largely female, but we know how it is in psychology these days) laughing at his jokes - clearly a man who despises women and beats his wife and daughter every day, you know!
2) "Well, I ended up reading every post in the archive of Hotel Concierge instead of doing other work I should have been doing" - Sorry for that part!
"I'm just sad he hasn't posted anything new in so long." - Same here.
3) "there's still got to be vast swathes of interesting stuff from people and fields that just happen not to have noticed JMG or vice versa." - I think that for other occultists using the Internet in English, to not have noticed JMG at all is pretty hard; but for us to get something through his blogs, it'd be a matter of him noticing the others (much easier for him not to, maintaining large conversations with his own readers and preferring to read dead people), or his readers (about which I commented previously).
4) "the basic impression I get is that he is firmly in the little-r "rationalist" camp, has scorn for "mysterians" (folks who believe in non-material causes that affect material reality), and evaluates any "mystic practices" (his seemingly preferred term) on their compatibility with that worldview" - You think I wouldn't take a book on magic from someone with that perspective (sure, not my ideal these days) as smart and unconventional as he is?
"they're not a huge focus for him" - Yes, that's true; however, he supposedly invented some Wicca stuff back then, some of which he might still use sometimes? (A Wiccan I'd listen to! OK, JMG's commentariat has at least 2 - ritaer and Deborah Bender.)
"epistemology and his experience with altered awareness in martial arts" - Well, and if *that* is the non-hacking subject he could be convinced to write a book about ... it's not as if Meditations on Violence isn't one of my (even on a very short list) favorite books.
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2) Naw, that's fine, I think it was worth it
3) Fair enough, though I've adopted something of a heuristic like "folks I'm interested in probably aren't as well-known as I assume" - obviously that applies less within their particular field, but sometimes I'm surprised, like I meet a science fiction fan that's never heard of Neal Stephenson.
4) Yeah, I'd also still be thrilled to read such a book, I just reckon I'd find it far less helpful than I would have five or six years ago.
And hah! Meditations on Violence is great. I don't know how short a list of favorite books it would go on, and I haven't read it in like 10 years, but I remember it being great. I'd also pre-order an ESR book on such topics the moment I could.
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