The Weekly Eudemon

The Gnostic Believes His Paradise is an Historic Inevitability and His Movement Will Bring It About

An Analysis of Eric Voegelin’s 4th and 5th Gnostic TraitsShow notes here

The Gnostic is a Believer

Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers...

Why We Judge. And Why We Need to Stop

This is a podcast episode from “Outside the Modern Limits,” a newsletter geared to help people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here.

The Gnostic Never Blames Himself

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” RousseauRousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social...

These Six Traits Make a Person a Gnostic

A Diagnostic of the GnosticEric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.The...

A Dozen Quotes from Prometheus Bound: A Play about Spiritual Disease

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The Tao: Your Transcendental Router

For the fortunate few, that router is hard-wired with fiber optic. Most of us only get a wireless connection, and a wobbly one at that.Show notes here

Voegelin's New Science of Politics Put Gnosticism Back into Our Awareness

If you want to understand how gnosticism flourishes in our modern world, you need to understand why it developed in the ancient world.Show notes here

Solon was a Man of the Tao

Solon opened Athens to true order: the transformative order found through the Tao.Show notes here

Why David Hume is Important

Within 100 years, the Cartesians used impeccable logic derived from Descartes' I think there I am to reach two conclusions: there is no earthly agent of movement and there is no matter. There is only God and mind. Hume yanked...

The First Amendment’s Separation of Church and State Goes Back to 500 BC

Something really bizarre happened around the year 500 BC, all across Eurasia. We started to realize that we live in the metaxy: an area comprised of transcendence and immanence. These ten thinkers, from Italy to China, led the way.Show notes...

An Introduction to Eric Voegelin

Out of this paradoxical mish-mash of empire, Fascism, Catholicism, tradition, and modernity stepped a big dose of genius. Men who became giants in their fields, ranging from music to economics to psychoanalysis, many of whom fled Fascism to settle in...

We're All Machiavellians Now

Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about...

Keep Sweet and Have Sex

A 50-year-old man had ritual sex with a 12-year-old girl while adult women assisted. And everyone was cool with it. That’s just part of the bizarre story told in Netflix’s Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey and the exploits of its prophet, Warren...

How Can You Cure Yourself of Modernitis?

You're soaked in modernity. You think like a modern. It's not good. Consider doing the opposite of whatever your rationality tells you to do.Show notes here

Seven Early Symptoms of the Mental Disease “Modernitis”

“Modernitis”: A mental disease, rarely diagnosed, marked by intuitive confidence in one’s ideas and the findings of science.Show notes here

When Western Civilization Submitted Itself to a Lobotomy

Descartes was a philosophical surgeon who lobotomized common sense from the modern mind without most people even noticing. It helped that western civilization was thoroughly prepped and anesthetized for the procedure.Show notes here.

Descartes Praised Lycurgus

Lycurgus put the “Spartan” into Sparta.Before Lycurgus, Sparta was like other Greek cities. Its citizens sang, celebrated love and good food, wrote poetry, and crafted fine pottery.After Lycurgus, Sparta became grim and tough, determined to keep its slave class under...

This Monk Understands David Foster Wallace

Issue 11 of The Lamp features a review-essay about David Foster Wallace that is written by a man who is obviously conversant, not only with Wallace’s postmodernist prose, but also with the Wallace scholarship surrounding him. The writer of the...

Jack Kerouac: The Tao on Steroids

He sat on his mother’s couch, smoking marijuana and watching the McCarthy hearings, cheering Tail Gunner Joe. He was 32 and it was 1954. In his 20s and the 1940s, he said he’d like to join his Russian comrades and...

New Course/Newsletter? How to Raise Intellectually-Sound Children?

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Montaigne: Godfather of 4Chan?

Montaigne was the godfather of modern skepticism. His was a “negative skepticism,” which disturbed Descartes enough to prompt him to come up with a positive response, which in turn gave us modernity, its fierce subjectivism, and the parade of “little...

71 Thoughts for Improving Your Thoughts

Show notes here1.            The wise know they start each morning as beginners. Robin Daniels2.            "In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention." Simone Weil3.            "My experience is what I agree...

Why Francis Bacon is a Founding Father of Modernity

Show notes hereBacon’s books proposed a new method of inquiry.In technical language, he proposed that we rely on induction instead of deduction.Put a little more simply: Instead of trying to deduce truth from a priori principles and making our observations...

Top Ten Mystics of the 14th Century

Show notes hereThe 1300s. Europe in the grips of economic depression, war, and natural catastrophes. Europe still experiencing the spiritual wake left by the lives of Saints Francis and Dominic. A deep concern with the interior life seized large numbers...

Introducing Blaise Pascal: The First Anti-Modern?

Rene Descartes was kind of a dick.His famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” is nothing less than a wholesale rejection of all authority—even objective truth—in favor of a defecated rationality and fierce subjectivism that belittles anything outside one’s own...

Four Quirky Post-WWI Utopians

World War I shook European society.The first 15 years of the 20th century were la belle epoque—the banquet years. Society was more optimistic about its prospects than Harvey Weinstein at a cocaine-fueled casting session.And then came the genocide against English,...

Mystical Erections, Violence, and Theft

No, that isn’t a passage above the front door of Jeffrey Epstein’s residence on Little Saint James.It’s a popular saying of a medieval sect known as the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” which has long been regarded, according to historian...

Renaissance: Follow the Magic to Modernity: Follow the Science

The Renaissance Believed in Magic Like Moderns Believe in ScienceIn 1598, a huge renegade friar organized a revolt to liberate Calabria from Spain.Tommaso Campanella started the revolt with astrology: he announced to his followers that the stars portended great changes...

The Black Arts Have No Nonsense About Them

“Torture enables the torturer to capture the soul of the victim”Mexican drug minion Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo conducted an odd mix of magical rituals, a mish-mash of ceremonies that combined his mother’s Cuban magic with ancient Mayan and Aztec practices....

150 Years that Shook Europe

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The Satoshi Nakamoto of Mysticism

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When Dr. Faust insulted the Tao, the devilemerged.

When Dr. Faust insulted the Tao, the devil emerged.

We Golf. Therefore, the Tao is.

We intuit the Tao. That’s why our active hobbies engage us.Show notes here.

Thomas Aquinas: Pinnacle to Obsolescence in 200 Years and Why ItMatters

Thomas Aquinas was an existentialist, in his own way. His existentialism was forgotten . . . to western civilization's detriment.Show notes here.

How to Kill the Tao

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Seven Great Quotes About Money

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How Do We Account for Thomas Merton?

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How to Survive the Atheistic Hurricane

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How to Kill that Feeling of Thankfulness

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How to Escape the Selfishness Paradox

Five Pieces of Furniture for Your Intellectual Living Room

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How to Start Detaching the Door of Reality from itsHinges

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How to Break on Through to the Other Side

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Lady, You Have One Ugly Kid

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Who Exactly is Trying to Take Down Joe Rogan?

Complete show notes. The new McCarthyism? Probably not, but still unsettling.

The Elf Lays Down His Harp to Kill an Orc

Synopsis: Owen Barfield wrote about the importance of pre-rational thought and language. It heavily influenced Tolkien’s work. Iain McGilchrist has written about the same thing in The Master and His Emissary and the importance of the brain’s right hemisphere.

Living in the Present Moment is Bad Advice

Why do the spiritual masters unanimously seem to insist on that lame piece of advice: “Live in the present moment"?

How to Break a Maniac

My daughter sent this Existential Comic to me. It shows three ancient philosophers competing in the Philosophy event at the Greek Olympics: Thales, who declares everything is water. Zeno, who declares motion is impossible. Socrates, who declares they’re full of...

Are You Engaged in the Act of Existence? Then You're a Man of the Tao

My daughter runs.She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs.People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She’s a runner.”But I know she’s more than that.My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning,...