The Full Creation

A version of the story can be found here: http://www.authorama.com/english-fairy-tales-30.html The story involves a lazy guy called Jack who lives with his mother. Eventually, she is fed up with his laziness and gives him the ultimatum: work for your keep or get out. So Jack goes off to work. There follows a week of him being paid, but every day losing his pay, and it is always in a consistent manner. For instance, he brings home a cat, but it jumps out of his hands. His mother scolds him and tells him he should have walked it home on a string. The next day, he is paid with a leg of mutton and drags it home on a string, ruining it. Things flip around the next week, however, for the last instruction his mother gave was to carry home the mutton on his shoulders. He is paid with a donkey, which he carries home on his shoulders. On the way, there is a girl who cannot speak or hear, and the doctors have said this will be so until she laughs, and her father has promised that whoever makes he...

A version of the story can be found here (a version of the story is also in Grimms Fairy Tales): https://www.worldoftales.com/.../Russian_Folktale_22.html... The story starts out with the Tsar requesting a flying ship. This image puzzled me a great deal. However, I think it is something like the Tsar asking or looking for a kingdom, a vessel to hold his identity. A ship is generally feminine, and a flying ship is something like a very high version of the feminine. Only a fool can construct such a ship, as the story shows. The reason is that such a kingdom must be able to contain the lowest and the highest. The fool shows hospitality to the lowest person, and it seems that the old man was an angel, who in response revealed how to obtain a flying ship. The impossible task can only be accomplished with heavenly insight. Thus we have the fool, who is the lowest, reaching up to the highest. The ship appears while the Fool was asleep, and in this respect is like the Elves and the Shoemaker: ...

Gnosticism (very roughly) is the belief that the 'spiritual' is uncorrupted, while the material world is fallen. We extend our being through the use of technology. For instance, when you drive, the car becomes an extension of you: you 'feel' through the car. Technology allows us to do more and faster - but this means it also acts as a buffer between you and what you are doing. Your attention to the things on your journeys is more fleeting when you drive than when you walk. Your connection with the world around you becomes attenuated with the use of technology. This is most accentuated with digital technologies, where it is possible to inhabit a virtual reality for hours on end, extending your being to every corner of the globe, but in a severely limited way. It is in this sense that technopoly (ironically, given its intense materialism) favours the gnostic point of view, since it allows the mind to remove itself to a very large degree from the actual experience of physi...

If you come across something strange enough, it will transform your identity.  Emelian the fool was a fool and lazy. He was given the chance to better himself by working, but only after some haranguing did he consent to work. His task was to carry water, but when he drew up the water he also drew up a pike. In exchange for not being eaten, the pike said he would grant any wish. And it was so: Emelian wished the buckets to carry themselves home, and they did. In this, we see the ability of a marginal character, the fool, being able to harness chaotic feminine potential, as there is a closeness between the fool and chaos. It is harder for chaos to get the better of the fool because he is too simple, contains too little higher meaning and thus cannot be easily questioned. And so Emelian becomes the identity that directs the potential whereever he desires, and the carrying of water is a perfect representation of this.  The choice to eat the fish is analogous to naming it, integrat...

  There are various rumours on the internet about ways in which COVID vaccines could cause sterility. Generally, it turns out that these claims are not based on evidence, but the fact that so many people have this intuition makes it interesting to ask why this is so. I think this is due more generally to the breakdown of trust in our public institutions, and more specifically to the desire that is seen, though not necessarily actualised, to make the vaccine mandatory. During the response to COVID we have seen what might be termed an imposition of identity from above, in the form of lockdowns and extremely strict control of the population so that people conform to particular patterns of being, which are apparently intended to control the virus.  The tyrannical imposition of identity from above tends to obliterate the smaller identities below it. It is thus not possible for these smaller identities to reproduce authentically, as they are now, in some measure clones of the higher...

Numbers are immaterial. Numbers are essential for the measurement of physical reality. All scientific principles and discoveries are based on measurement of physical reality. If numbers are a human construct, then all scientific discoveries are also. If reality is only physical, the only means by which you can know this objectively is by immaterial numbers, which is contradictory.  Therefore reality is both material and immaterial.

Image by Jonathan Pageau Every year, when we celebrate one of the festivals of the Church, articles explaining how some tradition or feast day is really not Christian at all and is just pagan. In many cases, these claims turn out to be false or historically tenuous, put together by people who are just a little too happy to take a jab a Christianity. But in other cases, the festival or tradition does reflect and may have originated from a pagan practice. The problem with this is at least two-fold. In the first instance, Christians in the early centuries of the church were so careful to keep their faith pure that, for example, they would not even offer a pinch of incense to Caesar at risk of martyrdom. Thus, it seems highly unlikely that such people would appropriate 'pagan' traditions willy-nilly.  There is also a certain attitude which assumes that Christians had no traditions of their own, nothing to offer the world, and so behaved in a purely parasitic manner. This is manifes...