Oh Birds, Let My Thoughts Follow You

“Hare in April”, by Catherine Hyde (the painting is from her book: The Hare and the Moon – A Calendar of Paintings)

It is morning

and I´m sitting in my chair.

The night has left

an imprint in my mind

of the moon´s mirror.

The Core in Disorder is Inner Contradiction

“A Study for The Mystic Wood”, by John William Waterhouse

What is the actual core in disorder? Our existence is disorderly, split, we are absent, place ourselves outside, and are classifying life in different rooms, using specific perspectives; we are not a complete nature.

If you the day through are yourself and the surrounding world present, then you will not at all dream in the night

“The May Queen”, by Virginia Lee

How can you as a Life Artist understand the meaning of a dream?

If you are the dream present in passive listening it will uncover its meaning. Dreams are an indication, an exposure of the deeper motives and intentions; the anxiety, which has to do with the separation of the observer and the observed, or differently said: with your self-image and world-image, the discrepancy between idea and conduct of life.

A Mind Without Thoughts Will Show You a Fathomless Deep

How deep can the mind travel?

Most of our lives are very superficial and is it possible to live at great depth and also function superficially? Is it possible for the mind to dwell or live at great depth?

A Vase of Flowers From Ancient Times

Vase With Flowers On the Window, by Paul Gauguin

I meditate in the early dawn.

We Live In A Society Where The Egocentric Pursuit of Fulfillment Has Been Made Respectable

Competition, ambition, and success are the gods of the particularly prosperous society we live in today.

Love is not Attachment. When there is Attachment there is Fear.

You have collected so much, not only books, houses, the bank account, but inwardly: the memories of insults, the memories of flattery, the memories of your own particular experiences, neurotic achievements which give you a position.

To Find Out What Freedom Is You Must Have Tremendous Energy

Freedom from authority is an extraordinary thing. It is called Spiritual Anarchism.

How to Heal Our Disconnection From Nature

Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter

In her elegiac essay "Into the Woods " poet and scholar Ruth Padel writes:

"What would Robin Hood have made of Country Life's recent excavation into the fantasies of British 7-to-14-year-olds concerning the wild life and wild places of their native land? Two thirds had no idea where acorns come from, most had never heard of gamekeepers (do they mug people or protect the Pokemons?), and most believed there were elephants and lions running round the English countryside. A third did not know why you had to keep gates shut -- was it to keep the elephants in (or was some joker taking the piss just then?), or stop cows 'sitting on cars,' upsetting the countryside's most vital beast -- the traffic?

The Connection Between Shamanic Healing and Creative Unfoldment (essay)

Epona, by Susan Seddon-Boulet

...

The Wound is the Place Where the Light Enters You

Rumi

…

In this essay I will present my ideas of the connection between shamanic healing and creative unfoldment. It is something I make aware of in my philosophical counseling practice, which I combine with forest therapy.

When We Remain with our Suffering Totally, then out of that Suffering Comes Passion

Art by Daniel Bogni

The Stoic concept of Apatheia refers to a state of mind in which one is not disturbed by the passions.

A Religious Mind Must Know the Extraordinary Sense of Beauty

You go to the secret valley to sit in peace and ask the philosophical question: What is a religious mind?

The Beauty of Truth and its Subtleties is not in Belief and Dogma

The beauty of truth and its subtleties is like the mist in the old garden. It is not in belief and dogma; it never is where man can find it for there is no path to its beauty; it is not a fixed point, a haven of shelter.

In the final step of meditation, all ideas fall away like leaves in the autumn

Painting by Aert van der Neer

In the final step of meditation, all ideas fall away like leaves in the autumn.

The Faust Syndrome and the End of the Time of Enlightened Masters

Franz Simm: Illustrationen zu Goethes

A phenomenon which I have returned to many times in my books, especially in my book, Lucifer Morningstar – a Philosophical Love Story, is the Faust-syndrome. It is a syndrome which characterizes most Westerners: it is the dangers of ego-inflation in combination with spiritual practice. Ego-inflation is at the same time based on a great denial of our own collective shadow, or painbody, which are rooted in original sin. It is a kind of compensation.

Seiðr Shamanism and the Art of Song Healing

Merlin, by Alan Lee

In Part One of this article, My Life as a Vagabond, I described how I began to use alcohol in order to calm down my kundalini symptoms. In Aalborg, in Denmark, and on vagabonding trips around the world, I actually lived more or less like a "Dharma Bum" for 10 years. The alcohol abuse ended with a liver disease, hospitalization, and a near-death experience.

My Life as a Vagabond

From: The DruidCraft Tarot

In my Ebook, Karen Blixen – The Devil´s Mistress, I described how I began to use alcohol in order to calm down my kundalini symptoms. In Aalborg, in Denmark, and on vagabonding trips around the world, I actually lived more or less like a "Dharma Bum" for about 30 years (in a certain sense I still do, as this article will reveal). The period could be seen as starting in 1990, and ending in 2008, where I published my first book. But the period is actually longer. It started in London in 1985, and ended in 2016, where I was hospitalized with a liver disease. Here I had a near-death experience.

The Matrix Hybrid between Digital Totalitarianism, Surveillance Capitalism and Chinese Communism

When I´m talking about a coming Matrix Hybrid between Western Consumer Capitalism and Chinese Communism this isn´t even a prophesy. We already see the beginning. The Slovenian continental philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, sees the same: “capitalism doesn´t need democracy”, he says in an interview. He says that the economical globalization increasingly will be combined with stronger and more authoritarian national states. That is our future, and we already see it with Trump, Erdogan and Putin, as well as what is happening in China and India; an authoritarian capitalism. And he claims that the one who is the father of such a way of thinking is Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore. When Deng Xiaoping took the power in China in 1978, he went to the authoritarian Singapore and here he saw, how that system functioned. He then decided that it also should be like that in the the future of China, “and it works!” says Žižek. “But do you know what makes me pessimistic about that development? Slowly it happens – and this is very clear – that capitalism in lesser and lesser degree needs democracy.”

My Temporary Involvement with the Italian Mafia

It was in 1990. I had just left my work in Harrods in London in order to pursue a life of freedom and adventure.

My Suggestion for a New Kind of Activism

Mystical, by Kevin Miles and Wendy Schaefer-Miles

We are slaves to the modern culture, we are the modern culture. I have suggested that this culture is characterized by a new mythology, which I have called, The Mythology of Authenticity. This mythology has two specific pedagogic methods: psychotherapy and coaching. These two methods are again rooted in the counterculture, which are inspired by philosophers such as Nietzsche, and occultists, such as Aleister Crowley. Quite central are concepts such as will and choice.

The Spiritual Kindergarten of Ken Wilber

The self-proclaimed “philosopher” Ken Wilber (he dropped out of graduate school where he was studying biochemistry) has sought to bring together the world´s far-ranging spiritual teachings, philosophies, and scientific truths into one coherent and all-embracing vision: the integral theory.

Can you discover or experience something which is indescribable?

Mystical Night, by Michael Z Tyree

It all starts with the Wholeness. The Wholeness is indescribable since it can´t be put in opposition to anything.

In Order to Handle the World Crisis, We Must Find a Common Ground

Yellow Flowers by Krupa Shah 

“You, Bedouin of Libya who saved our lives, though you will dwell forever in my memory yet I shall never be able to recapture your features. You are Humanity and your face comes into my mind simply as man incarnate. You, our beloved fellowman, did not know who we might be, and yet you recognized us without fail. And I, in my turn, shall recognize you in the faces of all mankind. You came towards me in an aureole of charity and magnanimity bearing the gift of water. All my friends and all my enemies marched towards me in your person. It did not seem to me that you were rescuing me: rather did it seem that you were forgiving me. And I felt I had no enemy left in all the world.” 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

Strange Days in Tangier

La Plage de Tangier, by David Minett 

I´m using the Amazon used book market quite a lot. It can be interesting to receive a used book. Someone else has read it, and often it has a smell attached to it, which can bring you to unknown places.

On World Crisis and Responsibility

Art by Susan Seddon Boulet

You and I are walking in the forest. We are taking a journey, together, walking along a quiet path, as if it is a long endless road all over the world where one sees appalling terrorism, the killing of people for no purpose, threatening people, kidnapping them, hijacking, murdering, wars.

In the Dark Forest of Fear

Fur, Feather, Tooth and Nail" by Arthur Rackham

“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”

Keepers of the Stories

Art by Kelly Louise Judd

Have you heard about the Keepers of the Stories?

On a Storyteller´s Night

The Star Fishers, by Jeanie Tomanek

"A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation. Even in silence we are living our stories."

Ben Okri (in Birds of Heaven)

You are lying in bed. You are ill with the modern illness, stress. The doctor has prescribed some pills. It is a summer night. The window is open. Outside is the garden. The curtains are moving.

On Beauty and the Art of Growing Wings

Bouquet of Sunflowers, by Monet

The mind that is whole has a quality of passive listening presence. It cares, and has this quality of a deep abiding sense of love of wisdom.  Such a mind is the whole that you come upon when you begin to inquire into what meditation is. Then we can proceed to find out what is sacred.

The Quest for The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales

"He Too Saw the Image in the Water" by Kay Nielsen (Kay Nielsen spend his last years in poverty since nobody was interested in his works)

In Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales, Sara Maitland writes:

"I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is -- over and over again -- the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to 'happy ever after.'”

Children, Wildlife, and the Art of Shapeshifting

Birdbrain, by Lori Field

Long ago the trees thought they were people.

Long ago the mountains thought they were people.
Long ago the animals thought they were people.
Someday they will say, long ago the humans thought
they were people.

Native storyteller Johnny Moses

In his novel, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J.M. Barrie writes:

Why we shouldn´t seek spiritual experiences as a way to Reality

Painting by Gleb Goloubetsk

We are all seeking spiritual experiences, and we are bragging about spiritual experiences and abilities.

A Celebration of the Brave Old World

'We must go back to freedom or forward to slavery'.

G.K. Chesterton

The British writer and idler, Tom Hodgkinson,  has a relaxed approach to life, enjoying it as it comes rather than toiling for an imagined better future. He is the editor of The Idler, which he established in 1993 with his friend Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

On the Nature of Sensitivity and Beauty

Look at all the birds, the trees, and at the dirty streets. Look at people. Look at your parents and teachers; notice how they talk to you, what kind of words they use.

An Inquiry into Fear and Pleasure

Flower Painting by Anita Nowinska

There is a lot of fear in our lives. But when we talk about fear we must also go into the question of pleasure, enjoyment, joy, and a sense of beauty in which there is no demand for expression.

On the Problem of Belief

Why do you believe anything that you read? It does not matter whether it is in the Bible or in the Gita or in the sacred books of other religions. 

Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth (a Shamanic Ritual)

According to Aristotle (De Philosoph, fr. 8), wisdom (Sophia) covers any ingenious invention and conception (all of which ultimately are gifts, sent down by the gods); therefore to do any thing well, skillfully, according to the divine paradigms and models, is to follow the way of “wisdom” which finally leads to the highest metaphysical goals, to the noetic realms where Wisdom itself, the graceful goddess, dwells. No wonder that every nation loves wisdom and has certain “lovers of wisdom”, be they goldsmiths, artists, healers, singers, priests, or magicians.

Algis Uzdavinys, Philosophy as a Rite of Rebirth – From Ancient Egypt to Neoplatonism

On Spiritual Anarchism

I have told about thought distortions, and how important it is that, seeing how inevitably corrupt the various types of religious, secular, and social organizations are, to belong to any of them not only prevents the unburdening of one’s conditioning but also prevents one from seeing things clearly. 

Storytelling as a Spiritual Exercise

by Carme Magem

In fact, it is only his body that lives and has its residence in the state; his soul, however, holds all this to be puny and meaningless, and contemptuously wanders all over the place, “under the earth,” as Pindar says, and measuring whatever is on its surface, and “above the heavens,” observing the stars, and in general thoroughly investigating the nature of everything that is, but without lowering itself to the level of any of the objects in its vicinity.

Plato, Theactetus, 173c (this is Plato´s description of the philosopher, which, probably with roots in facts, sounds like a description of a shaman. Philosopher in this sense, simply means what the word means: a lover of wisdom. But it also depicts the exercise of a storyteller. Modern philosophers are so removed from this, that it only is the name they have in common). 

Five Basic Exercises in Philosophy as a Spiritual Practice

Streets of Naples, Italy

The hunger after doing something positive, opposite the negative, makes us strive after being something else; in this struggle we feel, that we are alive, that there is a purpose with our life, that we gradually can remove the causes of the conflict and the sorrow. We feel, that if we no longer were active, we would be nothing, be lost, our lives would be completely without meaning. Therefore we continue, and that will say: we continue the divisions, the conflicts, the confusions and the opposites. But in this process we at the same time feel, that there is something more which we all the time lose, that there exists something, which is quite different, something, which is above and beyond all this distress and misery. This feeling is the existential guilt, the guilt over the unlived life. In this way a permanent struggle is going on inside us.

Greco-Roman Philosophy as a Path of Enlightenment

A central inspirator for my philosophical counseling practice is Pierre Hadot. Hadot's recurring theme is that philosophy in Antiquity was characterized by a series of spiritual exercises intended to transform the perception, and therefore the being, of those who practice it; that philosophy is best pursued in real conversation and not through written texts and lectures; and that philosophy, as it is taught in universities today, is for the most part a distortion of its original, therapeutic impulse. 

Thought Training, Incubation and Meditation Upon Death

The Ancient Greek Healing Tradition called Incubation. Incubation was also a spiritual practice.

Question: I have been meditating for many years, and I have had a lot of benefits from it, but now I seem to have reached a point where there doesn´t seem to happen anything further. I can´t stop my thoughts, they keep on repeating the same themes. How can I progress further? 

Meditation as an Art of Life - The Ancient Logos

In my book A Dictionary of Thought Distortions I claim that the Sophists used thought distortions as a way of getting on in the world, while Socrates (the philosopher), used critical thinking. I consider this book to be a kind of philosophical diary on how I, during my spiritual crisis, used critical thinking (elenchos, the art of refutation) to distinguish base magic (New Age), which leaves everything to chance, and may lead its practitioners to consort with falsity and evil daemons, and higher magic or theurgy. 

“Everything is New” – Morning Meditation

Alley Of The Dream, by Leonid Afremov 

Every morning you are born out of Hara.

You come from Omphalos, the Navel of the World. You come from the metaphysical time, the enchanted time. 

Primordial Meditation

Remedios Varo—Solar Music

Our language, all our fictional productions, are reflections of the universal images in the great vision of the creation. They are signs from the metaphysical time, from the enchanted time.