Forest bathing and ecopsychology have done something important. They have helped restore our capacity to slow down, step out of the relentless cognitive machinery of modern life and become present in nature again. That sounds simple, but it is not. Much of the time we move through landscapes without really perceiving them. A forest becomes … Continue reading Beyond Forest Bathing: What Happens When the Landscape Begins to Answer Back?
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New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 12: Advanced Landscape Meditation: Peripheral Vision, the Witness and the USH
There is a point in landscape practice where simply walking attentively is no longer enough. Once we have become familiar with the basic phenomenology of a place, with its paths, boundaries, changes in atmosphere and the way the body responds to them, we can begin to alter the manner in which we perceive the landscape … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 12: Advanced Landscape Meditation: Peripheral Vision, the Witness and the USH
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 11: Psychogeography Before the Situationists: Debord, the Surrealist Root, and the Zones We Already Knew
Historical Foundation of the Psychogeography The word psychogeography has appeared in this series before, almost in passing, one frame among several offered in the Foundation post as a way of naming what we were doing at Monte Pocilgais. It deserves a fuller reckoning of its own, because the essay that coined it turns out to … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 11: Psychogeography Before the Situationists: Debord, the Surrealist Root, and the Zones We Already Knew
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
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 8: Phenomenology and Entering the Landscape: Memory, Imagination and the Participatory Field
A Phenomenological Approach to Natural Landscape Cognition A landscape is never encountered as a neutral arrangement of forms. The moment we step into a place, perception is already entangled with memory, expectation, bodily state and imagination, so that a forest which feels protective to one visitor can feel oppressive to another, a mountain can evoke … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 8: Phenomenology and Entering the Landscape: Memory, Imagination and the Participatory Field
New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 7: The Soul of the Tree: Breath, Reciprocity and the Living Landscape
A landscape begins to change when we stop experiencing it as scenery. Hereunder is a segment of our landscape at the Quinta Quixote, where the elemental of the tree can be seen with our imaginative eye... The stones, trees, paths, springs and contours of a place are ordinarily arranged by perception into a world of … Continue reading New Landscape Holistic Project, Part 7: The Soul of the Tree: Breath, Reciprocity and the Living Landscape
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
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 Magickal Rite of the Restored Waters
Concerning the Purpose of this Operation This operation is to be performed when the Soul Mirror has shown a deficiency of the Water Element in the character of the operator. It is intended to call forth, strengthen, and internalize those virtues belonging to Water: receptivity, connection, softness without weakness, adaptability without loss of form, feeling … Continue reading The Magickal Rite of the Restored Waters
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