[Main Blog Post] The Open-Minded Materialist's Gentle Introduction to Spirituality

[jprussell]

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!

Comments

[deketemoisont]

1) "an extremely uncharitable review a friend of mine shared with me" - Do you remember how to find it?

"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.

[jprussell]

1) It was "The Intellectual We Deserve" from Current Affairs, a quick search of my text message history tells me.

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.

[deketemoisont]

Thanks for the link!