Tag Archives: psychology

Philo on The Name: Panpsychism and Panentheism

Philo was a Jewish philosopher living in Hellenistic Alexandria, Egypt, of the Roman Empire around 20 BCE to 50 CE. He thought of “Logos” [1] along the lines of Plato’s “theory of Ideas” or “theory of Forms” [2]. These are related to panpsychism [3] and the role of archetypes in that consciousness context. For more on that subject, see the post All is Mind.

Philo identified the metaphysical “Logos” with HaShem [4] (an ineffable name of G-d, Hebrew for “the Name”, Tree of Life). Following these connections is one clue connecting the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with a metaphysics of panpsychism and mystical Jewish panentheism [5].

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Logos
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Knowledge_of_Greek_and_Hebrew
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

Image via https://update.gci.org/2017/10/primer-on-panentheism/

Thanks to the Source. A little more info about Philo:

“Philo visited the Second Temple in Jerusalem at least once in his lifetime.[10] Philo would have been a contemporary of Jesus and his Apostles. Philo along with his brothers received a thorough education. They were educated in the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria and Roman culture, to a degree in Ancient Egyptian culture and particularly in the traditions of Judaism, in the study of Jewish traditional literature and in Greek philosophy.”

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Life

Point Pros of Animism

  • Poetry and singing prayer and blessing for food and all other things to be thankful for. May it be healthy, come from good health, and go forward in good health. May it be for the best, may it be of minimal suffering.
  • Ancient and prevalent tradition of theurgy, as in Greek cults bringing statues to life with spirits of the gods, or Jewish Kabbalists trying to repair the world by awareness of the oneness of the spheres of the Tree of Life. Visualizing the color of an object as blue red and white is one simple theurgic exercise, serving as a means of conveying blessing to minerals, plants, animals, and humans (practice patiently in that order). Imagine practices along those lines and Greek mystics animating statues, or mystic Christians seeking connection with their higher self in All.
  • Connection to place, relationship with being. Even the ________ (e.g. toaster oven), what is one’s relationship with it? What is its Source? What are its connections? In oneness one recognizes the valuable ripple effects of mutual benefit.
  • Focused gratitude and well-wishing for the well-being of an entity. As in the exercise of imagining the highest and best potential for ___________ (e.g. land as in ecological restoration), casting blessings from an animistic awareness can help bring about a better world.
  • Lessons from ecosystem restoration: “Connection to place”, “Love”

Sincerely Heart Felt

Laughter and tears. How many days have both? Of those days are they mostly good or bad?

It’s not far to access both. How many thoughts and activities can bring you laughter? What puts a genuine smile on your face and giggle in your heart? How many tragedies and traumas bring tears to your eyes? How many deep and awe-some beauties bring tears to your eyes?

Be Sincere

Kepheru Nu Ra – The Evolutions of Ra

I begin by giving thanks to the Source.

What follows are instructions for adorning the sun at each of its quarters following the spiritual currents of ancient Egypt. This is one of many techniques for adorning the Sun. Solar adorations have direct and subtle effects, perhaps most importantly for beginners is calibrating one’s many layers of mind, spirit, and body to Sol ☉ and renewal or building momentum of one’s spiritual ethos. More can be read about this in Israel Regardie’s “The One Year Manual” and other sources on Greco-Egyptian Wisdom Schools.

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All is Mind

“THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental.”–The Kybalion, The Seven Hermetic Principles

“The Universe is Mental–held in the Mind of THE
ALL.”–The Kybalion, The Mental Universe

All creation is one person, one being, whose cells are connected to one another within a medium called consciousness.

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, via Lights of Kabbalah

Scientific American recently published an article by Bernardo Kastrup about the mental universe, or information realism, titled “Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind”. Information realism is, well, inherently hard to pin down. Basically it’s the idea that the only fundamentally real thing is information itself, and the author argues well that it isn’t information itself that’s so fundamental but the idea of information itself, since information is a concept that is abstract and not explicit in itself. This draws the author to an important conclusion:

At the bottom of the chain of physical reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”—abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.

…

The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism.

This last paragraph of the article is what spurs me to note the similarity between “what physics is leading us to” and what Hermeticism and Alchemy have worked with for centuries, if not many millennia. Distilled in the opening of The Kybalion’s Chapter 5, “The Universe is Mental–held in the Mind of THE ALL.”

Treat one’s mind wisely with love, inside & out.

And with that and thanks to the Source, I offer a prayer:

Peace, peace, peace, One Love

Peace of Mind
Peace in speech
Peace for body
One is The
Love is All

Crazy ∨ Clarity of Chaos

If {
} else {
}

“You’d have to be crazy not to be crazy!”

What is the difference between a blurred vision and a belief, verses wisdom from within? Is it a fine line, does it rhyme, where’s it begin? Going in

To the point of insanity, some find great wisdom. Mystic seekers, mad(hu)mans, shamans sages stages of life. One’s environment within and without have a great effect on oneself. DO you have magic in your environment, without and within?

Is it a matter of sight? Night? Might? Right? Light? Fright? Plight? Bite? Off more than you can chi. Ratherly what have ye, is the clear vision of convention or conviction, contrition or constriction? “I love you, I’m sorry, please forgive me, I thank you” I rank you O Hawaiian wisdom, offering a scion, a fission, a vision – for what else is it to truly give thanks? To listen deeply to the ranks? Of the Source, of the Course, from whence 1 came forths?

Less, but Better

Inspired by https://www.wired.com/story/dieter-rams-documentary-gary-hustwit/

Less, but Better applies not only to design but also to behavior.

Do less, do it better. What kind of better? What kind of less?

Better in terms of doing, primarily not related to what one is doing but the act of doing itself. Do you do it with your whole self? Are you engaged in an act with body, emotion, and mind? Often we eat only with our body, read and listen only with our emotion, reason only with our mind; the lack of wholesome engagement of all our primal components can be a source of devastating dissonance over time. Do it better.

“If I do less, I’m left with more gaps, more empty space to fill.” Is that so? What if what one does is done better? And in doing better, time is filled in a different way. There are more moments to sieze. The dross of daily drudgery is shed to reveal the essential, whether that essential be simple or monumental. How many moments do you experience in a day? 24? 1,440? 86,400? 1.6×1048? What if you do it better?

You can have anything, but you can’t have everything.

Do less, do it better.

Tuning the Antenna

“There is a common misconception that the good things in life come from being in the right

place at the right time. In truth, everything that is good comes from being on the right channel with the right reception.

This is what the sages call z’chut—sometimes translated as “merit.” What it really means is a kind of fine-tuning of the soul.

How do you fine-tune the soul? You have three knobs: What you do, what you say and what you think. Adjust them carefully for static-clean reception.”

Rabbi Tzvi Freeman

via http://facebook.lightsofkabbalah

With that, and the following observations at my station, I took a step back from Facebook, though I do appreciate some of its services as human networks are indeed wondrous! Wondrous in a way as to remind me of a quote dubiously said to be spoken by a king, “My magician’s have their heads in the highest heavens and their feet in the lowest hells!”

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