“If you are beyond all grasping at an object and at a subject, that is the monarch of all views. If there is no distraction, it is the monarch of all meditations. If there is no effort, it is the monarch among all conducts. When there is no hope and no fear, that is the final result, and the fruition has been attained or revealed.”
- Tilopa
After a 30 minute meditation session, we decided to sit down and share our thoughts on what meditation is. Philosophy and history have the luxury of offering a lot of paths for topics to branch out into, whereas meditation itself seems so static an activity that it doesn't seem like you'd be able to talk a lot about. To talk about it would defeat the purpose, one would guess. But after a whole year of consistently meditating each day, we are more than confident to share with you some of the insights and the benefits we gained from doing this most inactive of inactivities. With it, we feel like we are tapping into something that is maybe more real than anything else conceivable.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
"How can we forget those ancient myths from the beginnings of all peoples, the myths of the dragons who turn into princesses at the last minute? Maybe every dragon in our life is a princess, just waiting to see us perform a beautiful, courageous act for once. Maybe every terror is, at absolute bottom, only something helpless, wanting our help." - Rainer Maria Rilke
This quote is a lot to deal with, overturning our image of the monster as the angel. The dragon as a terrifying creature is most definitely a western image that does not echo with other parts of the world. Rilke here already breaks through a century old bias and takes into consideration a more benevolent nature of this beast. In this episode we will not just be in agreement with Rilke here, but look at what the connection between dragons and princesses exactly is. We'll take a look at the origin of the word 'dragon', how the west and the east were originally in agreement on the dragon as not being a face of the devil and how that changed. The true symbolism of the dragon is bigger, much bigger, than most people assume and not to be reduced to either 'powerful' or even 'wise'.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
It's been a while and so the 仙島 Headless Thinking team decided to sit together and discuss a topic we've been studying the past few months: Kabbalah. While this tradition isn't a big secret anymore, it still has a mysterious aura to it. In this episode, we try and dispel some of the basic misunderstandings that exist about this discipline and school of thought in Jewish mysticism. Because while many people have an opinion on it, very few know what it is actually and fundamentally about. This episode is the beginning of a larger project of 仙島 Headless Thinking that will be exploring Kabbalah in ways you won't be able to Google your way into knowing. So follow the updates on social media and learn things that aren't available anywhere else.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Most likely everyone has heard George Berkeley's famous thought experiment, which has led to at least three centuries of metaphysical ponderings on the nature of perception and observation.
But we want to ask a different question for this episode and swing it to perhaps equally metaphysical levels, although the question might look like a joke at first: "If you haven't posted anything on social media, has it really happened?" A significant part of you will resist and point out that no matter how big a role social media plays in our lives, we will always give precedence to the events offline than whatever reproduction we'll post or see online. But is that really the case? Has almost ubiquitous Wi-Fi not altered everything to a point where we have become too intertwined to tell the difference? And what does that say about media as a whole? Join me and Ben on a thorough discussion on the film "Videodrome", which pointed to a time it wasn't even aware of yet, and on the new media invasion.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
We aren't living in the most prudish of time periods, but we certainly haven't been trail blazing as much as we think we have. A lot of ideas that were explored more than half a century ago are still realms left unmapped. In "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, we get, next to a dive into what Huxley would call a visit with the antipodes of our reality, also a manifesto that argues for a serious undertaking into the chemical wedding that takes place in our heads when we exhaust the body and leave room for the mind at large. But more than half a century later the field is still very much understudied and I think it would disappoint Huxley a bit, who assumed we would have, most likely, made a lot more progress by now.
In "Heaven and Hell", Huxley further explores what happens when we tamper with the psychic censor of the brain's chemistry. Messing with the brain puts us at risk, but the rewards are still there and of enormous value to our understanding of reality and subsequent feeling of belonging. In this episode, we will tamper with the ideas of both books and the connection there is between doors of perception being opened and the dangerous risks we take that learn us something about the gates of death.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
The digital world loves trailblazing, but it's only a few in number who really manage to upset the consensus. In this episode we'll look at a book I recently finished, "La Sorcière" (Satanism and witchcraft, a study in medieval superstition) by Jules Michelet, who definitely did his fair share of trailblazing when it concerns reimagining a loathed figure into a character worthy of our interest and empathy. I found it to be an exciting read and that's why I want to share some of the ideas found in this book. A number of questions were triggered as a result of finishing this work. The strict medieval-modern divide that Michelet makes and also acts as moral divide, is something that has been accepted and subsequently criticized by many scholars. But a few things he claimed are more worthy of note, in my opinion, to be studied up closely. I want to look at how early modern times ended up being a bit more of a mess than what Michelet thought the middle ages to have been. And I want to ask why and how that was. I also want to take a closer look at the figures present at the Witches' Sabbath and who they really were. Are we truly dealing here with a similar icon like the inverted cross of the satanists, or is something more arcane going on here? This is the first of many explorations on this particular topic.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
Without mentioning the events that occured around this time a year ago and the uncertainties around other things literally floating around since late 2019, let's just say that among people there's a general distrust in the main story. Conspiracies have been springing up like mushrooms, some causing the mind to bend more than others, as a way to cope for the lack of coherence many perceive when they see the events, or the dominant stories being told about these events, not line up with their own experiences.
Instead of making a list of conspiracy theories and prove or disprove certain (cooky) claims of each and every conspiracy, me and Ben discuss what secret societies really are. We go into the history of the phenomenon and the basic human needs these organizations meet. It's paradoxical that conspiracy theories try and be revelations of the truth, while that's exactly what these secret societies, that birth such suspicions, also claim to do for its members.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
The holidays are a time when people gather and share a nice meal and a bunch of stories to fill the night. Cultures, being made up of people, also like to share stories. In fact, stories might just be the DNA of a culture. One cannot imagine a culture without a set of core stories it tells itself and puts centre stage. We all know what happens when the conversation turns dull, but what happens if that occurs on a collective level? In this episode we explore what has happened to our stories the past few decades and why that happened. We also talk about the different types of narratives and what are the conditions that lead to some stories not being told any longer. A long Christmas special episode with my good friend Ben.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
We all need to chill out. Especially in a world that resembles a Bosch painting more than some inviting picknick scene in 19th century France. But we also need to do more than just chill out. We need to do absolutely nothing. If you're imagining a guru on top of a mountain saying this, you're not far off, but it's not as vague and mystical as it sounds. It's the first and crucial step in every and any development. If you don't halt what you're doing, how can you ever change paths? And not just pause, because we all know how bodies in motion want to keep moving and will continue showing signs of resistance against anything obstructing its path, but try and completely stop. Pull the brakes on everything. Our minds especially are the great culprits in not cooperating here. They need to be the target of the great inaction. If this still doesn't make sense, try and imagine how you're still thinking about things long after they happened. Why keep moving? Our involvement with the world sometimes needs to stop. During such moments, in what seems like nothing, something else can enter. And then we are back with the bearded man on the mountain and another friend of his. A familiar, but not in a way you were expecting. For more information, please visit our website:
For more information, please visit our website: https://headlessthinking.wordpress.com
Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
After some people-watching with the street dogs of Greece and having our craniums sweat insights with the help of the gymnasium of philosophy, we continue our city trip to the polis by having a closer look at the origins of this entire culture of rational reflection. "Know Thyself" is one of the three main maxims inscribed on a column in forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. A lot more was probably going on there than a bunch of fancy tarot card reading sessions that inspired Socrates to introspect and launch western philosophy. That'd be too simplistic a story and would ignore an entire context that seems to have been essential to the beginnings of philosophy. But sadly enough, that is indeed the case. Every course that introduces the student to western philosophy, will mention the anecdotes of philosophers and their involvement with what are obviously practitioners and cults of magic, but treat this undeniable connection as a mere anecdote or illustration of a certain idea or point. In this episode we'll look at the magical roots of philosophy, born from altered states of consciousness and, as contradictory as that might sound, the aid of other beings than just one's own mind.
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Intro track: Graal - Kroon VII
