Hello and welcome back to the Startup Geometry Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Windcastle Press, where a new pair of hardbacks of my translation of Giordano Bruno's On The Shadows Of Ideas will soon be available. We're back after a long break to talk to Greg Kaminsky, host of the Occult of Personality Podcast, and author of two new books: Pronaos, dealing with the ngondro or preliminary practices of Vajrayana Buddhism, and Celestial Intelligences, dealing with the esoteric writings of Renaissance philosopher and magus Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, best known for his manifesto Oration on the Dignity of Man. Download the episode here, or find us on your favorite podcatcher.
When I first started out working on Giordano Bruno's works on the Art of Memory, it was a bootstrap affair, and even then, the translations barely found their way into press. But On The Shadows Of Ideas has been a consistently popular title among Renaissance scholars, memory artists, those with an occult interest, and others who have come to visit with Bruno through their own doors. Because of this interest, I'm now able to release this title in a form that makes no compromises. The new hardback Scholar's Edition and deluxe King's Edition are both made with the finest of archival-quality materials by master printers and bookbinders. We live in a time of great small
I am, by temperament and experience, more sanguine about all of this than he is. I tend to think things will eventually work themselves out over time. My enlightenment experiences have been mild and pleasant; if mine had been as harrowing as his, I would probably feel as he does. As a technical note, there were some sound issues on our Transatlantic Skype call, which occasionally made it sound as though one of us was conducting the call while having a bath or as if we had ghost hunter-style EVPs from beyond the grave on the line. I apologize for these and hope they do not interfere with your listening enjoyment. Photo: Robin
Camelia Elias holds a PhD and DPhil and spent the last twenty years as a professor of literature, most recently at Roskilde University in Denmark. Recently, she escaped academia to start an online school, Aradia Academy, where she teaches cartomancy (card reading); that is, how to read—yourself, someone else, books, pictures, films, the situation, the problem, or anything else—without belief, emotion, preconceptions or other obscurations getting in the way. She recently said, "Why is reading cards fascinating? Because their visual language allows us to bypass everything we know or think we know." Boiling our conversation down to the keywords, we talk about: interesting—curiosity—dullness—belief—vastness—strategy—one cut—the present circumstances—"and yet"—concrete—psychomagic—Jodorowsky—Freud—Boom! (L to R)
Today, I talk with Gary Lachman about his latest book, The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. We discuss the need to balance the analytic "survival mode" consciousness of the external world with an older way of thinking that prioritizes the inner landscape and the imagination. We also discuss the necessity of creative outlets to regulate how much of the sensory world we take in and process, to open the valve all the way for peak experience and dial it down so we remember to do the dishes. I spend a good bit of the interview groping toward, but never reaching, the concept of a gestalt as a shorthand mental representation of external or internal objects. Some events do not pack down well to a gestalt representation, while others form
