John Michael Greer's Blog

The two interludes just past strayed some distance from the writings of the Situationists, the little clique of avant-garde Marxists in mid-20th century France whose reflections offer certain highly useful insights into the problems and predicaments of life in the twilight of the industrial age. Neither of those divagations, however, was irrelevant to the theme I’ve been developing here. Both the no-ego ego trip and the collapse of genuine humor on the American left—shown most clearly, perhaps, ...

The system of metaphors at the heart of Yeats’s system of occult philosophy is not easy to grasp. Those readers who have been following this discussion as best they can will have realized this already, but the part of the text we’re about to contend with might as well be designed to rub the noses of students in that fact. It would be possible to write an introduction to the teachings of A Vision that proceeds gently, one concept at a time, so that the reader can grasp the whole system step by st...

The exploration of the no-ego ego trip and its relevance to contemporary culture a few weeks back has implications that reach far. The discussion that followed, lively as it was, barely scratched the surface of the subject. This week, before we return to the Situationist movement that set this sequence of posts in motion, we’re going to go a little deeper. In the process, I hope to cast some light on one of the most pressing questions of our time: why can’t the left meme?

Those of my readers who...

It’s a longstanding custom on this blog that whenever there are five Wednesdays in a month, the commentariat gets to nominate and vote on the subject I’ll discuss in the fifth Wednesday post. This month, by a large plurality, readers asked for an essay on psychic self-defense: the art of protecting yourself against hostile or harmful influences in the realms of thought and emotions.

It came as no surprise, at least to me, that this topic won as handily as it did. You don’t have to believe in mag...

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Every year or two I field an earnest message from someone who’s just discovered that the human ego is the cause of all the world’s problems. The sender’s invariably a relatively young man, and he’s usually sure that he’s discovered something that no one has ever thought of before. His preparation for his great discovery might be anything from 750 micrograms of LSD to a decade spent wallowing in abstruse philosophical writings of east and west, and the discovery itself may be embodied in anything...

Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, it’s time for us to plunge into the depths of Yeats’s Vision. That’s easy, in a certain sense, because Yeats starts out the main body of our text by tossing the reader straightway into the deep end of the pool, launching at once into the core images that undergird his magical philosophy. In another sense, of course, that’s exactly the difficulty, because it’s all too easy to land with a splash in th...

Tolerably often, when I’m reading any of the documents that came out of the original Situationist International, I end up feeling as though the author is caught up in a desperate struggle between his own Marxist presuppositions and the world as it actually exists. That’s common enough in 20th century Marxist literature from outside the Communist bloc—those from inside that bloc rarely even attempt that struggle—and the Situationist documents aren’t even extreme cases of the type.

This week’s Ecosophian offering is the monthly open post to field questions and encourage discussion among my readers. All the standard rules apply (no profanity, no sales pitches, no trolling, no rudeness, no paid propagandizing, no long screeds proclaiming the infallible truth of fill in the blank, no endless rehashes of questions I’ve already answered) but since there’s no topic, nothing is off topic — with two exceptions.

First, there’s a dedicated (more or less) open post on my Dreamwidth j...

Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of just how easily the mindset of leftist extremism motivates, excuses, and celebrates brutal savagery and mindless hate. Nonetheless I plan on continuing the discussion of Situati...