How to understand neoplatonism without your brain turning into a mush?

Don't tell me that Hinduism is even more complicated or something, I can't even get how the triad works!

Be forewarned, if you're having trouble getting your head around the Trinity, neoplatonism is gonna take some serious work to get your brain around. But! We encourage intellectual endeavors here! So let's start with the basics.

To vastly oversummarize: Plato and Aristotle had conflicting ideas on how divinity worked. Neoplatonism is what happens when you try to combine them.

If you're gonna give neoplatonism a stab, you need to familiarize yourself with Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy. Once you've done that, you can dip in.

Neoplatonism is basically three guys: Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, but you wanna focus on two works in particular.

The Enneads, by Plotinus

De Mystiis (On The Mysteries), by Iamblichus

As for how do this, understand that there is no shame in starting where you are. When I approach a topic I'm unfamiliar with, I have a process:

1 - Give the primary text a skim. This gives me an idea of how tough the ideas are gonna be for me.

2 - Dig around for YouTube videos and recorded lectures. This is a good way to prepare yourself for a serious read.

3 - Give the primary text a proper shot. Highlight areas where you don't really understand. Keep track of where the text loses you, and where it finds you again.

4 - Seek expert assistance. Armed with that list of questions from step 3, find someone smarter than you, and ask them questions. Im lucky enough to be friends with a cast of academics, but you can literally just shoot most professors an email. 9/10 times they're happy to discuss things things with an interested party!

5 - Repeat steps 3 and 4 forever, as there is always more to learn.

I remember you once giving an EXCELLENT explanation of how magic “Doesn’t Exist but is Real” and how that kind of contradiction and reconciling it is so powerful?

Whenever you feel like answering this could you restate those concepts? I am working on actually thinking about my Practice and it’s Methods more lately and I feel that I highly agree with that sentiment you gave, but Tumblr’s search sucks.

I think I’m just now understanding a lot of that much more than when it was first said so I’d like to compare when you’re able to restate it

Religion isn't unscientific at its core. I think that's how I might phrase the contradiction these days: the idea that religion is fundamentally not unscientific at its core. Whatever else you can say about it.

Religion is fundamentally magical thinking, though, or at least often incorporates magical thinking. Religion is a sort of magic, also, after all--organized or unorganized, it is belief in something else. Something unexplainable. The idea that there is something you cannot see or cannot understand, but that this something matters to you, to your world.

And looking back, we see religion form again and again, in vacuums and when cultures meet and share and intermingle or oppose. Studying history at the end of the day will always require at least a little bit of studying religion with it. It is omnipresent--for better and for worse--in the way that it affects us, changes how we think, influences how we behave, structures the societies we live in.

Humans are illogical creatures, made of emotions and subjective dread. Magical thinking is fundamentally illogical. It is an attempt to find and understand reason in darkness, to comprehend the things we only see in the peripheries of our visions--but not always. Only often.

Because just as much as religion is magical and illogical, it was often borne out of our craving for understanding, for logic or explanation. We see a rainbow in the sky and we do not know where it comes from, or why we can never seem to reach it, so we try and find a logical explanation for this apparent impossible thing. The answer is magic--fairies, gods, witches. Or perhaps we look at the catastrophe of a storm, look at the all-encompassing wreckage of our homes, and we need to find a reason why this could happen to us. This couldn't be an accident, it has to be by design, because if it happened for a reason, we can understand it; we can give ourselves, if only slightly, the illusion of control. We propitiate an angry god, or we find someone who we have decided isn't like us and blame them for it.

Because the thing is, as much as we are creatures of illogic, we are terrified of it. It becomes existential rather quickly--the idea that all of this is for nothing, for random accidents, that you or your community isn't special or noteworthy or safe? The idea that your pain is shapeless and your terror is aimed at nothing at all? That's hard to imagine, let alone to find comfort in. Gods give a shape to the suffering. The invention of them is one which lets us take the illogical thinking and turn it against illogical thinking. Yes, it is unreasonable. No, it doesn't make sense. It is emphatically unempirical and there will likely never be any concrete proof of any religion's magical thinking being definitively confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt as True.

But it isn't unscientific. It was borne out of the same reason as science, the desire to understand and comprehend. It went only in a different direction than scientific thought did.

The space between science and religion is the difference between what exists and what is real. We walk along paths of trying to understand the world around or within us, and the paths in between those two points is where magic can be found. Neither existing nor unreal.

i lowkey ship tumblr ♠ twitter now

Chen Chen

The fact that Microsoft Word has to be a subscription is upsetting. I already paid for it why do I have to pay again

Me: In an ideal world I would want to be a monk. But like, for Nisaba. In an extremely ideal world I would run a pagan library/resource center with an attached chapel of some sort.

My mental illness: You have several plants in varying stages of decay and the floor is covered in puzzles you plan to "finish later". You have not actually read a book in weeks.

While I'm talking about writing I do want to rec two INCREDIBLE writing apps that have helped me immensely as a writer with ADHD

Stimuwrite is a little program that you can customize with all sorts of really rewarding instant tactile feedback, for example sound effects every time you hit a key, emoji notifications and balloons when you hit your custom goal (which can be as low as you want for low energy days), and neat animated backgrounds.

4thewords turns writing into an RPG and you can kill monsters via word count in order to complete quests and progress through what I personally find to be an interesting and fun storyline. It comes with all the RPG trappings like loot, gear, even custom housing (win more stuff for your house by writing).

I cannot stress ENOUGH how amazing both of these have been in terms of my writing productivity as someone with pretty severe executive dysfunction issues. Usually I use Stimuwrite for the instant feedback and then copy and paste those over into 4thewords for the gamification.

Both are small indie projects, Stimuwrite is pay-what-you-can-afford and 4thewords is $4/month but they are very good about helping people who genuinely can't afford it.

and AS THE CHERRY ON TOP, Stimuwrite's programmer is a trans woman, and while I'm not sure about the 4thewords team in specific, the game is FILLED with really great rep, they are literally having a lesbian wedding global event going on right now as I type this. So like. I like giving money to them more than giving money to a lot of other projects lol.

Anyway no neither of these projects have told me to write about them or anything I just want to spread the love. Go check them out!!

Stimuwrite

4thwords

Unfortunately, Gilgamesh was too cool. He oppressed the people of Uruk, taking their lunch money and getting real friendly with all their moms. And so the people cried out to the gods for deliverance. "Save us," they said. "Gilgamesh is much bigger and hotter than us and we cannot stop him."

The gods heard their pleas and sent Bigfoot to kick Gilgamesh's ass. However, the gods overlooked one very important fact, which is that they were both bisexual.

The idea of english as a mother tongue is so strange to me, in my head english is how ppl communicate when there's no way in common to communicate, so english as a mother tongue sounds a bit like idk email as a mother tongue ykwim? Like english to me feels like the stuff that's used to fill the empty spaces between languages

Today's when I'm celebrating the new year, AND it's a solar eclipse, AND I absolutely did not plan any fun pagan shenanigans other than obsessive cleaning. The true tragedy of doing your own pagan thing is having no social reminders and then forgetting a holiday is upon you until it Arrives.

On the bright side my job is gardening today, so I'll be outside, and doing things with trees feels vaguely appropriate.

found goat milk and wheat ale at the store. theres no way im NOT making a white gilgamesh tonite

There is so much amazing about this. It's an archeological museum in 530 BCE or so. Also, the exhibits are labeled in three languages. Also they apparently had replicas on display for some things, much like modern museums do.

Humanity has not really changed that much, and some of the ways in which we haven't changed are really good.

Since Tumblr is for being an unhinged nerd, I'm going to throw ideas at the wall for my own pagan practice and let y'all listen.

Since there is only a certain level of historical accuracy achievable, at the mercy of the Changing Times (living alone in an apartment with no city temple available) and also Information Scarcity (I do not have access to academic journals about cultus relating to my gods), I am in a constant state of both Learning and Grafting Ideas On that I think are suitable and a bit fun.

I'm mostly interested in Nisaba, mother of scribes, generally wonderful and awesome and partially represented by the literal written word itself.

I am also an extreme Elder Scrolls nerd and the dragon language/Way of the Voice has my attention for obvious reasons. It's obviously rooted in some other concepts (Buddhism maybe? not my area) but worship of language through language is exactly my idea of a good time. Meditating on the importance of words and where they come from, what they mean, why they mean that- that mostly comes down to etymology, but part of me is doing that 24/7 anyway. Silence as a form of worship also interests me. Like fasting from words, emphasizing the importance of them by experiencing their lack. Or, in the case of the Greybeards, only speaking when there is no other choice.

It's part of why I'm motivated to learn ASL, though that's a whole other rant. Suffice it to say that ASL doesn't work to enable someone who's selectively mute if nobody around understands it anyway.

I'm not entirely sure how practical a vow of silence is though, even if I'd just do it for a week or something. Everything everywhere requires speech, from dealing with managers and customers to apologizing for bumping someone in the hall. From what little I know, fasting rules say that you can eat/drink for health and emergency reasons, but what about words? Part of it, I think, is I'm afraid of being so weird that I get fired or excluded from things on sight. Which is hilarious considering how weird I already am.

I want to try some sort of Way Of The Voice mindfulness/silence thing for Nisaba, but the silence part in particular is driving me crazy. It's not supposed to be easy, but there are reasonable limits to "not easy" too, I think. Problem is the only time I actually speak with my mouth is in a drive-through or at work anyway. Maybe social media restriction???

Eh. Have a ramble. Anyone else tried using silence in worship?

inspired by boop day, reblog this post if its ok for people to send you random asks and interact on your posts with no judgement. i want to talk to people.