Full Of Self

A Mithraeum where rituals of Mithraic worship and magic were enacted.

"...Some of you may know the song by the Grateful Dead in which the refrain is "I need a miracle every day." I think any reasonable person can conclude that the redemption of the world, if it's to be achieved, can only be achieved through magic. It's too late for science. It's too late for hortatory politics."

"We also are living in the twilight of a great empire, and I don't particularly mean the American empire, I mean the empire of European thinking created in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern industrialism, the empire, in short of science. Science has exhausted itself and become mere techni. It's still able to perform its magical tricks, but it has no claim on a metaphysic with any meaning because the program of rational understanding that was pursued by science has pushed so deeply into the phenomenon of nature that the internal contradictions of the method are now exposed for all to see." quotes by David Ulansey

Ulansey writes: "I am Visiting Professor of Religious Studies at U.C. Berkeley, and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I am a scholar of the history of religions, comparative religion, and cultural history (Ph.D., Princeton Univ.), and before teaching at CIIS I was on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, Boston University, Barnard College (Columbia University), the University of Vermont, Princeton University, and Pacifica Graduate Institute.

"My specialty is the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially the ancient Mystery religions, Gnosticism, ancient cosmology, and early Christianity. I have also taught courses in a variety of more speculative areas such as the evolution of consciousness, archetypal psychology, alchemical symbolism, the metaphysics of cyberspace, and applied deep ecology, and I have been a frequent lecturer at the San Francisco C.G. Jung Institute."

For David Ulansey *click here*

Full Of Self

Some have happy hearts
without effort, fitting in
as if born to it.
I saw you take wing
last week and you haven't come
back to earth, not yet.

As for me, alas,
things take a darker lurking
hue more like that storm
that approaches from
the greater northern cyclone,
like that pelican
with a fat full beak
holding smelly rotten chum
just about to dump
right on me, on me!

July 17, 2012 4:21 PM