Steven > Recent Status Updates

Well, I take back what I said about the authors making claims to a tradition that isn't very old. It's clear that they've done their research into connections between current grimoiric traditions and Greek antiquity. From a Buddhist perspective, though, their claims about the death process are not accurate. Typically there is only a period of 49 days before a mindstream is reincarnated. Will say more in final review

These authors are already trying to make it appear as though they belong to a tradition that is older than it actually is--British esotericism has no roots beyond the Victorian era of Waite and Crowley, full stop. It is a revival tradition and it has no empirical links to an initiatory tradition that stretches back earlier than that.

Planning on speed reading this one in less than 48 hours, if I can. I'm not looking to conjure spirits; I'm very at home in my Buddhist practice right now. I'm always interested in what the western esoteric tradition has to say about it though, especially since their accounts of conjurations are... Less than convincing, sometimes

This author is doing something that many Western Occultists do that I hate, which is that he's referencing quantum physics without an advanced understanding of the field. I would recommend that people not do this, because quantum physics and quantum mechanics are incredibly nuanced and not very amenable to informal interpretation. Stick to philosophy if you want to interpret occult phenomena.

Am I reading too many books at one time? Well, yes, but this is a title I couldn't resist. I'm ready to be impressed, and if it doesn't impress me, I will stop reading it

This book is doing something that I hate, which is that its introduction is the verbatim outline of the book. This means that while reading the book, you are forced to read fragments (or sometimes long passages) of the introduction that you've already read.

If it's already in the introduction, do you really need to quote it later in the book? You couldn't find a way to paraphrase it?

I'm enjoying the fact that this author covers the successes in addition to the failures of the Soviet Union. My primary college professorial advisor was expelled from the USSR in the mass expulsion of 1974, which he mentions in this section of the book. It also means that I've heard an exceedingly negative account of Soviet society for most of my life. I would like the account to be more balanced.

This is the first of two gigantic books on the Soviet Union that I plan on reading (listening to). This one is an archeological look at the Soviet way of life through artifacts, and I'm loving what little I've read of it so far--The author seems to have a great reverence for the interdisciplinary study of a society that no longer exists, but rather haunts the modern world in myriad ways.

Am I reading too many books at one time? Yes. Do I care? No and I will also probably not finish all of them. Hopefully I actually will though

This previous chapter discussed the ways in which female slave owners owned their slaves and practiced slave discipline in their own right. It seems that a lot of sexist ideas have pervaded the historical research about this topic, which is a shame, because it distorts the picture we have of the culture of slavery. Not only did white women punish their slaves, some did so with exceptional cruelty and violence