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 specialty presses, and I wanted to make the most beautiful and well-made version of the book that it is possible to imagine.

From now until October 14th, 2021, the book will be available as part of a Kickstarter campaign.

You can help bring this book into being today. Thank you.

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 Hood Co-op

Photo: Robin Grane-McCalla

Show Notes and Links

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:

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 new gestalts on close examination. This process of gestalt analysis and synthesis runs behind the conversation we have here.

Gary Lachman is the author of twenty-one books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to literary suicides, popular culture and the history of the occult. He has written a rock and roll memoir of the 1970s, biographies of Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, C. G. Jung, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson, histories of Hermeticism and the Western Inner Tradition, studies in existentialism and the philosophy of consciousness, and about the influence of esotericism on politics and society. He writes for several journals in the UK, US, and Europe, including Fortean Times, Quest, Strange Attractor, Fenris Wolf, and his work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Times Educational Supplement, Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times, Mojo, Gnosis and other publications. He lectures regularly in the UK, US, and Europe, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. He has appeared in several film and television documentaries and on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and is on the adjunct faculty in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Before becoming a full-time writer Lachman studied philosophy, managed a new age bookshop, taught English Literature, and was a Science Writer for UCLA. He was a founding member of the pop group Blondie and in 2006 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Lachman was born in New Jersey, but since 1996 has lived in London, UK.

I apologize for the occasional gaps in sound quality. These newfangled trans-Atlantic fiber-optic cables are sometimes troublesome. Or perhaps Mercury is in retrograde.

Elizabeth Smith Friedman, the subject of Jason Fagone’s new biography, The Woman Who Smashed Codes, is one of those rare people, though her story begins with a search for the true author of Shakespeare, runs through two world wars, includes a stint fighting gangsters and rumrunners (and the jealousy of J. Edgar Hoover) and the foundation of the NSA, and ends with more Shakespeare. It sounds like a whole series of detective novels rolled into one, yet Elizabeth was a real person with an amazing story.

On today’s podcast, we talk about the different ways to assess that claim, what states and insights may occur on the way to enlightenment, and what to do if you get yourself into a spiritual crisis of one sort or another. We also talk about some of my meditative experiences and how to use a candle flame as a focus for meditative practice.

She has conducted a series of experiments to replicate memory techniques from the classical memory palace to handheld memory devices such as the Lukasa to rituals and storytelling. Today, we talk about how several early and modern cultures have used these memory techniques, why Stonehenge and Chaco Canyon may have been used as memory palaces, and why they were almost certainly centers for an oral culture’s knowledge economy.

As with our other conversations with anthropologists, it’s helpful to remember the following guidelines:

1. Do not confuse industrial technological advancement with intelligence. “Primitive” people, whether distant from you in space or time, were and are at least as smart as you. The less technology they had at hand, the more this is true. Fools die when times are hard, or as Lynne Kelly’s colleague Nungarrayi said to her, ”The elders are pragmatic old buggers. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have survived.”
2. Most often, they are observationally correct even when they are theoretically wrong. We can identify the exact species of animals in cave paintings despite the fact that the artist didn’t have a grip on modern biology. Just as any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic, so does any technology sufficiently different from our own.
3. People of almost all cultures have been given to humor, hoaxes, tall tales, and flimflammery. Sometimes, when they tell you (or each other) something, they’re just having a laugh. Sometimes, they’re both having a laugh and expressing something serious.

Show notes and links may be found at: http://bottlerocketscience.blogspot.com/2017/09/ep-038-lynne-kelly-on-memory-code.html

Today on Startup Geometry, we’re talking with Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, authors of the new book Coming Alive. Since we last talked to them, they’ve been keeping busy with their highly successful psychotherapy practices, where much of their clientele consists of Hollywood creative professionals; running multiday retreats and seminars; and writing their second book, which deals with Part X, the self-sabotaging part of ourselves, the devil inside. When we’re able to overcome Part X, we become more engaged with life, more creative, and happier.

As one might expect with a discussion about inner sabotage, we experienced technical difficulties with the audio version of this interview. We were able to recover almost all of the contents of the interview in the print version below.

Special thanks go out to the members of The Tools Facebook Group, who asked some amazing questions about how the Tools can be used in very particular and challenging situations.

Continue reading.

On this episode, we talk about how indy and small press publishing works, the importance of having your own taste, and the art of branching out (Two Dollar Radio now makes films, and they’re opening their new Headquarters store to be a hub for literature in the city and a cool place to hang out.