More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dean Radin
Read between
February 2 - February 13, 2020
The term grok, from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land, also gets at this idea.
Neoplatonism proposed the existence of deep interconnections among all things, including what is normally viewed as the distinction between mental and physical phenomena.
ego-based state of awareness (I’ll call this personal form of consciousness [c]), mind and matter appear to be fundamentally different. But from the rarefied state of gnosis, which provides direct access to higher states of existence (I’ll call this state of Universal Consciousness [C]), the apparent distinctions between mind and matter, or space and time, are revealed as illusions.
Neoplatonism
Regarding magic, he wrote: “Without doubt magic arose in Persia with Zoroaster. On this our authorities are agreed, but whether he was the only one of that name, or whether there was also another afterwards, is not clear.”
Pliny the elder
Elaine Pagels’s book The Gnostic Gospels provides an excellent description of the discovery and mysteries of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts and their influence on understanding the origins of Christianity as we know it today.
The Cathars were a group of Gnostic Christians in the town of Béziers, in southern France. The thirteenth-century pope Innocent III was increasingly annoyed by the Gnostics because their criticism was becoming a major challenge to his authority.
During the siege a soldier asked Amalric how were they supposed to tell who was a heretic and who was a proper Catholic. Amalric famously replied, “Kill them all. Let God sort them out.” All twenty thousand people in the town were massacred and the city was burned to the ground.
Hermetic cosmology contends that reality consists of a single Universal Consciousness, known by many names: the One Mind, the Divine, the Tao, Brahman, Allah, God, Source, and so on. To avoid religious connotations of these terms, I’ve referred to this concept as consciousness with a big C, or [C].
[C] appears in two complementary aspects, like the two sides of the same coin. One form is a manifested, primordial, “plastic” energy, sometimes referred to within the alchemical tradition as the One Thing.28 The other form is a non-manifested, transcendent element known as the One Mind. The One Thing reacts to and is shaped by the One Mind.
It is the omnipresent, all-penetrating existence. Everything that has form, everything that is the result of combination, it is evolved out of this Akasha. It is the Akasha that becomes the air, that becomes the liquids, that becomes the solids….It cannot be perceived; it is so subtle that it is beyond all ordinary perception….At the beginning of creation there is only this Akasha.
Like Akasha. The big C
the One Thing is viewed as a consciousness-shaping “substance,” its appearance depends on who’s looking and what they’re expecting to see.
Mathematical universe. The concept of observation
On October 13, 1917, three children near Fatima, Portugal, saw the Virgin Mary, while tens of thousands of others who were present witnessed anomalous lights and atmospheric effects that seem very much like what we’d today describe as a UFO.
when [c] influences the physical world outside of the body, which it can do because [c] has properties similar to [C], then that’s called magic.
The Corpus Hermeticum manuscripts were originally imagined to be ancient, harking back to the time of Plato or even before the Greek philosophers, but modern scholars now consider them most likely to be a combination of ideas from Egypt and Greece from the first and second centuries.
But Ficino’s translation was not forgotten. Ficino was one of the first to popularize the idea that there was an ancient secret wisdom at the core of all the world’s religions. This philosophia perennis would be the fundamental, first-principles truth around which the whole universe revolved. This idea was so appealing that it never faded away.
Pico della Mirandola’s synthesis was part of a long line of syncretic efforts, meaning a fusion of different religious ideas. Examples of popular syncretic rituals include Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and Christmas. All of these holidays are hybrids based on a blending of pagan and Christian rituals.
Paracelsus stressed that exercise of the imagination was the beginning of all magical operations. For the youth of the early twenty-first century, Paracelsus is perhaps better known as a character on one of the collectible Chocolate Frog Cards in the Harry Potter novels.
Paracelsus
Even Einstein didn’t like it when he was confronted with the idea (from quantum theory) that uncertainty rules the universe. He refused to believe it, responding with his famous retort, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
in 1936, economist John Maynard Keynes bought an obscure collection of Newton’s personal papers and discovered to his and everyone else’s amazement that the earlier biographies of Newton as the idealized scientist left out the majority of what Newton was really interested in.
Then, in the spring of 1744, when Swedenborg was about fifty years old, he had a mystical experience, one of many that would dramatically change the course of his life. Those experiences sparked an interest in esoteric concepts, and they eventually led him to write many books on mysticism, magical correspondences, and conversations with what he perceived to be angels.
Mesmer’s idea was similar to Paracelsus’s “cosmic fluid” or archaeus, the yogic concept of prana, the Chinese chi or qi, the Lakota tribe’s wakan, Greek philosopher Pythagoras’s pneuma, Austrian psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich’s orgone, and so on.
Many prominent scientists and philosophers of the day, including William James, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Rayleigh, became members of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in London in 1882.
The SPR remains a vital organization in the twenty-first century. Its peer-reviewed academic journals report an unbroken line of scientific studies about psychic phenomena, and its online encyclopedia, launched in 2016, is a valuable resource for those interested in learning more about psi research.
Carefully controlled scientific experiments are artificial constructs that require psychic effects to occur on demand.
In 1879, Patterson founded a religious teaching that included a mental-healing practice; she called it the First Church of Christ, Scientist, better known today as Christian Science. By then she was using her married name, Mary Baker Eddy.
Fortune authored many popular books on magic in the 1920s and 1930s, including titles such as Esoteric Orders and Their Work in 1928, Psychic Self-Defense in 1930, and The Mystical Qabalah in 1935.
in his 1904 book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Steiner
one of Gurdjieff’s main contributions was the idea that esoteric ideas were not beyond the reach of the ordinary person. Through disciplined effort, transformation could be achieved by nearly anyone. In his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff
Peter Carroll. His development of “chaos magic,” named after the new field (at the time) of chaos mathematics, was introduced in a 1987 two-part book entitled Liber Null & Psychonaut.
Transpersonal psychologist Arthur Hastings, in his book With the Tongues of Men and Angels, surveyed the history of channeling.
The British poet William Blake wrote his epic poem Jerusalem by listening to the dictation of an inner voice.
Two of the more influential channelers of the twentieth century were academic psychologist Helen Schucman (1909–1981) and author Jane Roberts (1929–1984). Their channeled books, A Course in Miracles and Seth, respectively, have sold millions of copies.
Your thoughts, studied, will let you see where you are going.
MEANING
They point clearly to the nature of physical events. What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule….
One of the first examples was As a Man Thinketh by James Allen, published in 1903.
“As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,”
man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts….Let
Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.
Other successful works along these lines include It Works! by Roy Herbert Jarrett, published in 1926. This little booklet sold well over 1.5 million copies and has remained continuously in print since it first appeared.
How to Win Friends and Influence People, published by Dale Carnegie in 1936, is ranked as one of the top twenty bestselling nonfiction books of all time.
Think and Grow Rich, published by Napoleon Hill in 1937, has sold over 100 million copies worldwide.
How to Manifest Your Desires by Neville Goddard in 1948.
The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincen...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightin...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Hidden Power for Human Problems by Frederick Bailes in 1957.
The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy in 1963.
if you have very clear goals, concentrate on them, and unquestionably believe that the goals will manifest, then they will.
Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires by Esther Hicks in 2004,
the worldwide bestseller The Secret by Rhonda Byrne in 2007,
The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, published ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
