From Looking at Landscape to Being in Landscape There is a point in landscape experience at which looking is no longer enough. A place may first present itself through sight, through the slope of the land, the arrangement of stones, the form of a tree, the opening of a path or the quality of light, … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 9: Being-in-the-Landscape: Body, Place and the Art of Dwelling
philosophy
From Magical Will to the Operator
E. W. Dobberkau on Imagination, Suggestion and the Experimental Formation of Experience Among the contributions to the first volume of the Zentralblatt für Okkultismus that speak most directly to the concerns of The Inner Laboratory is E. W. Dobberkau’s Magische Experimente der Willenskraft als Einleitung in den Okkultismus. The article appeared in 1907 in the … Continue reading From Magical Will to the Operator
When the Occult Still Meant a Research Program
Reading the First Volume of the Zentralblatt für Okkultismus, 1907 Screenshot Opening the first volume of the Zentralblatt für Okkultismus from 1907 means entering an intellectual landscape that has almost entirely disappeared. The journal carried the subtitle Monatsschrift zur Erforschung der gesamten Geheimwissenschaften, a monthly review devoted to the investigation of the entire field of … Continue reading When the Occult Still Meant a Research Program
The Architecture of Higher-Knowledge Claims
Sri Aurobindo as a Case Study in Esoteric Textual Criticism Jan M. Keppel Hesselink, MD, MSc, PhD. Professor em. molecular pharmacology at University of Witten/Herdecke, Germany, Quinta Quixote international yoga and meditation center, Santa Catarina da Fonte do Bispo, Algarve, Portugal; magickjan7@gmail.com Abstract Esoteric texts can create an overwhelming impression of cognitive depth while yielding … Continue reading The Architecture of Higher-Knowledge Claims
Enactive Psychiatry: Old Wine, New Bottle—or a Better Vessel?
A historical and clinical test of novelty: Can Psychiatry Renovate Itself? Enactive psychiatry presents itself as a solution to psychiatry’s integration problem: how physiological, experiential, social, and existential processes can belong to one coherent account of mental disorder. This essay argues that much of its conceptual material has identifiable predecessors in systems theory, phenomenology, philosophical … Continue reading Enactive Psychiatry: Old Wine, New Bottle—or a Better Vessel?
Context Without Content: BodyMind Medicine and Magick
From Higher Occult Knowledge to the Traumatized Body For centuries, occult traditions have promised access to knowledge that remains unavailable to ordinary consciousness. It has been called gnosis, higher knowledge, secret wisdom, spiritual perception, clairvoyance, initiation, or the recovery of dormant human faculties. The terminology changes from one period to another, yet the basic structure … Continue reading Context Without Content: BodyMind Medicine and Magick
The Persistent Promise of Higher Knowledge
Occult Training, Human Development, and the Problem of Definition In the preface to his Geschichte der Magie of 1844, the physician and magnetic practitioner Joseph Ennemoser formulates what may be read as the central premise of his entire work: “Die wahre Magie liegt in den geheimsten innersten Kräften unseres Geistes.” True magic, he argues, lies … Continue reading The Persistent Promise of Higher Knowledge
How a Myth Is Born: The Comte de Saint-Germain and the Machinery of Belief
A case study in narrative inflation, retroactive heroization, and the making of a modern god: read through the lens of the Inner Laboratory. Somewhere in eighteenth-century Europe, a well-dressed, extravagantly gifted man moved through the courts of Paris, Vienna and St. Petersburg, speaking a dozen languages, composing music, dabbling in chemistry, and letting slip, with … Continue reading How a Myth Is Born: The Comte de Saint-Germain and the Machinery of Belief
The Grammar of the Transpersonal
From observing consciousness contents to awe: a working overview Notes, prepared alongside our book Het Innerlijke Laboratorium/The Inner Laboratory (in preparation) Jan M. Keppel Hesselink https://www.youtube.com/@HetInnerlijkeLaboratorium 1. Starting point: the book's own trajectory The book's method begins from a simple, almost clinical act: learning to observe the contents of consciousness (thoughts, emotions, body signals, imagery) … Continue reading The Grammar of the Transpersonal
Madame de Salzmann at One Hundred: Attention, Automatism and the Birth of Inner Freedom
Jeanne de Salzmann was born in 1889, met G. I. Gurdjieff in 1919 and remained his closest pupil until his death in 1949. She subsequently guided the international continuation of his work until her own death in 1990, at the age of 101. The recordings discussed here therefore show not merely an elderly teacher recalling … Continue reading Madame de Salzmann at One Hundred: Attention, Automatism and the Birth of Inner Freedom