Anyone using words such as consciousness work, inner transformation, visualisation or breathwork today is entering a territory much older than modern psychology. For more than two thousand years, Western culture has contained a continuous undercurrent of philosophers, mystics, alchemists, physicians and magicians trying to understand how human beings can change themselves. Their language differed enormously. … Continue reading From Plato to Jung: The Long Search for the Inner Landscape
philosophy
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 10: Reading the Landscape with the Body
Movement, Thresholds and the Phenomenological Topography of Place Over the course of the New Landscape Holistic Project, a different understanding of landscape has gradually begun to take shape. What first presented itself as a study of unusual places has become something more precise: an inquiry into the way landscape is lived through the body, memory, … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 10: Reading the Landscape with the Body
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 9: Being-in-the-Landscape: Body, Place and the Art of Dwelling
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
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
