“Many feminists have a serious blind spot. We’re ready to criticize patriarchy, and men’s misuse of power in a flash, but we ignore our own abuses of power. We see matriarchal control as gentle and kind, but the role of wife and mother can be just as authoritarian as a marine drill sergeant. We seldom acknowledge the power that women have over children and we almost never speak about wives who dominate their husbands. In many homes, the authoritarian mother is a force to be reckoned with. Her rigid standards of sexual morality and her righteous indignation when her rules are broken make her a formidable adversary who is unbending, unyielding, and sometimes even violent.”
― Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving
― Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving
“More fortunes in money and in the material things of life have been lost by those who hesitated out of fear than by those who ventured too quickly and without caution.”
― Master of the Rose Cross
― Master of the Rose Cross
“Yielding to an urge or an inspiration, or submitting to an impulse or temptation, or taking advantage of an opportunity with no other warrant or reason than the judgment based upon analytical reasoning, is equivalent in most cases to choosing between right and wrong by the toss of a coin. Man’s reasoning cannot rise higher than the premises upon which it is based, and the premises of knowledge forming the foundation of man’s analytical reasoning may be faulty because they may not include a knowledge of the external influences and the natural laws governing his life and his affairs. As”
― Self Mastery and Fate with the Cycles of Life
― Self Mastery and Fate with the Cycles of Life
“sense of pride that I write these few lines introducing this book dedicated to the exceptional individual that was Harvey Spencer Lewis. With an extraordinary personality, he was a great figure of Rosicrucianism. He was an avant-garde pioneer and was resolutely modern. Harvey Spencer Lewis directed his gaze toward the future and toward that which he liked to call “the Cosmic.”
― Master of the Rose Cross
― Master of the Rose Cross
“Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom.
Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.”
― The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.”
― The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
John’s 2025 Year in Books
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