Here are 100 books that An Outline of Esoteric Science fans have personally recommended if you like
An Outline of Esoteric Science.
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I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
An Italian aristocrat who led a magical order in the 1920s, Evola is a fascinating and controversial figure who has become influential in the New Right. Even though I am a Leftist, I find many of his ideas important and helpful—along with his fellow “traditionalists.” Rene Guenon and Fritjof Schuon. Evola believes we are in a period of accelerating decline known as the Kali Yuga, the age of iron and materialism, where the true spiritual knowledge has been almost entirely lost. He argues there is no way to stop the destruction of this civilization and it is best to focus on self-transformation through alchemical and magical practices. His books on Buddhism, eroticism, tantra, and alchemy are also fascinating!
No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress, which together with its corollary notion of the superiority of modern civilization, has created its own "positive" alibis by falsifying history, by insinuating harmful myths in people's minds, and by proclaiming itself sovereign at the crossroads of the plebeian ideology from which it originated. In order to understand both the spirit of Tradition and its antithesis, modern civilization, it is necessary to begin with the fundamental doctrine of the two natures. According to this doctrine there is a physical order of things and a metaphysical one; there is a mortal…
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
This is a book that can change your way of understanding your life and your world, profoundly and permanently! Gebser demonstrates that human consciousness has evolved through a series of stages, from the archaic or aboriginal, through the magic and mythical to the current mental-rational structure. Surveying areas ranging from science to art, Gebser proposes that our current meta-crisis is actually necessary to force a mutational break to the next structure of consciousness, the integral-aperspectival, where we will be able to shift between different realizations of time and space, as our world transforms around us.
Born in Posen in 1905, Jean Gebser came from an old Franconian family domiciled in Thuringia since 1236. A nephew of German chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg, he was a descendant on his mother's side of Luther's friend Melanchthon. He was educated in Breslau, Konigsberg, Rossleben, and at the University of Berlin. In 1929 Gebser emigrated to Italy and subsequently lived in Spain where he was attached to the Ministry of Education of the Spanish Republic. From 1937-1939 he lived in Paris in the circle which included Picasso, Andre Malraux, Paul Eluard, and Louis Aragon. In 1939 he made his permanent home…
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
Edinger was a student of Carl Jung’s and this book picks up from Jung’s essential essay, “God’s Answer to Job”. Jung realized that God was in a dialectical relationship with his “Chosen People,” and when Job maintained his faith despite being subject to unspeakable cruelties, this compelled God to incarnate as Christ. Following Jung, Edinger believes we are currently living through the archetype of the Apocalypse. The word means “revealing” or “uncovering.” Psychologically, the Apocalypse is the “Coming of the self” into conscious realization. It is a point of maturity where we have gained the self-knowledge needed to integrate, rather than project, the Shadow. This portends a collective incarnation of God into our human world.
The collective belief in the End of the World, as described in the Biblical Book of Revelation, can be seen in public reaction to terrorist outrages such as those of Sept. 11, in the preoccupation with disasters, in the obsession with UFO's and the possibility of encountering extra-terrestrial life, and in the breakdown of social structures. Edinger argues that this very real psychological force is vitally important for our times, and he offers an alternative to catastrophe through understanding the meaning of these radiant scriptures.
I started my career as a New York magazine editor and cynical journalist writing about art, celebrities, and show designers. Eventually I had an existential meltdown where I realized I was trapped in reductive materialism. I didn’t believe in a soul or a spirit or anything that wasn’t tangible. I decided to explore psychedelics and wrote my first book, Breaking Open the Head, after visiting indigenous cultures in Africa and South America where I took Iboga, ayahuasca, and mushrooms in initiation ceremonies. I learned we are facing an ecological and geo-political meta-crisis. I tried to find the roots of this, hoping to save humanity from extinction by unifying us around a mystical realization of oneness.
The Mayan Factor had a huge influence on me when I read it after reading Jose’s other amazing books, Earth Ascending and Time and the Technosphere. He makes the case that the classic Maya civilization of the Yucatan was related to a galactic civilization that travels across the universe as patterns of information transduced into DNA so they can incarnate at particular junctures to perform a cosmic ritual of “synchronization.” The Mayan calendar is an artifact of this “Galactic Maya” who wanted us to understand we were starting to enter a new dimensional portal with the end of the 5,125 year Long Count on December 21, 2012. While reading this book, I had a crazy experience of the Galactic Maya entering into me and looking out through my eyes at our turbulent reality. Jose argues that a new calendar could shift us from chaos to harmony. A fabulous visionary excursion!
This is the extraordinary book that initiated the Harmonic Convergence in August 1987 and awakened the world to the Mayan Calendar. In it, Jose Arguelles revealed three revolutionary ideas: that a great moment of human transformation awaited us as we approached 2012: that there are galactic "seasons" and that the Maya accurately recorded them; and that each person had the capability to connect directly with the energy of a beam emanating from the galactic center that contains the power to awaken the higher mind.
I would trace the genesis of Hitler’s Monsters to three distinct influences. The first was my childhood love of Golden, Silver, and Bronze Age comics––Batman, Superman, Captain America, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four––which, as illustrated by the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,are replete with themes of Nazi occultism and border science.The second was a conversation with my thesis advisor early in graduate school, when he noted that he was advising a dissertation on German occultism (Science for the Soul). The third influence was observing the mid-2000s resurgence in rightwing populism across Europe and North America, seemingly fueled by recourse to esoteric and supernatural thinking. The rest, as they say, is history.
An ideal complement to Goodrick-Clarke’s study of the links between Nazism and Ariosophy, Staudenmaier devotes his well-researched and comprehensive monograph to examining the relationship between fascism and Rudolf Steiner’s occult doctrine of Anthroposophy.
Like Goodrick-Clarke, Staudenmaier finds important points of ideological and sociological convergence between proponents of Anthroposophy and Nazism, including Waldorf Schools and biodynamic farming, but also highlights many instances of intellectual tension, political hostility, and persecution.
Just as importantly,Between Occultism and Nazismlooks at the role of Anthroposophy in fascist Italy, providing an explicit comparative framework that is missing from most studies of Nazism and the occult. A must read for anyone interested in the “occult roots of Nazism” or the history of Western esotericism.
The relationship between Nazism and occultism has been an object of fascination and speculation for decades. Peter Staudenmaier's Between Occultism and Nazism provides a detailed historical examination centered on the anthroposophist movement founded by Rudolf Steiner. Its surprising findings reveal a remarkable level of Nazi support for Waldorf schools, biodynamic farming, and other anthroposophist initiatives, even as Nazi officials attempted to suppress occult tendencies. The book also includes an analysis of anthroposophist involvement in the racial policies of Fascist Italy. Based on extensive archival research, this study offers rich material on controversial questions about the nature of esoteric spirituality and…
I have pursued escapism in all its forms for most of my life. From studying the otherworlds of ancient civilisations, especially in my native Britain, including Arthurian tales and those of the Welsh Mabinogion to the fictional worlds of Tolkien and Lewis’s Narnia. I am lucky enough to live in the Snowdonia Mountains with a wealth of legends and myth-making landscapes on my doorstep. This led to a practical interest in The Western Mystery Tradition and from there an academic curiosity toward occult societies and their founders. I believe there is a distinct link between our spiritual morality and physical mortality that is worth exploring through experience.
John and Caitin Mathews have a vast body of work on the subject of spirituality. This is one of their first and, in my opinion, one of their best.
I recommend this title to anyone who feels a deep connection to Celtic heritage and the old Gods and Goddesses of early British and Welsh ancestry. I was especially entranced by the pathworking techniques, a guided visualisation journey into the ‘otherworld’ of our native ancestors. Having undertaken several of these guided visualisation journeys, I had some deeply personal and life-enhancing experiences that I still vividly recall some thirty years later.
A great introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition.
Since 1979 the life of soil and plants, and how they link to our own lives and health, has fascinated me. In the 1980s I was a maverick because as an organic market gardener, my work was mostly seen as irrelevant to society, producing food that was expensive and for only a few people. That changed from 1988 when the BBC filmed my garden, and green consciousness developed. Since then I have gone from being zero to hero and especially with regard to soil because since 1982 I've been gardening with the no dig method. My experience allows me to direct you towards these gems, which I'm sure you will find useful and enjoyable.
I love how Maye thought deeply about nature and this had originally led her to the pioneers of biodynamic gardening in 1920s Austria. Then she became disillusioned with what she felt was too strict of adherence to every word of Rudolf Steiner’s writing. Like me, she wanted to try new approaches. After moving back to the UK in the 1930s, she developed her own methods of organic gardening which centred on making top quality compost, using herbal stimulants which she worked out herself.
She was a true scientist and helped me to understand not to trust “accepted views” which can become authoritarian. Plus I learnt about making great compost, in particular the roof she used to keep rain off her heaps.
Tom spent the first 30 years of his professional life at the cutting edge of the broadcast industry. He has always been fascinated by new technology and more specifically how it allows humans to evolve and work smarter and better. He is also a sci-fi fan and has a keen interest in both cosmology and metaphysics. He says that today's metaphysics is tomorrow’s physics. So his book choices mirror his fascinations which are in what lies in the future for humanity, bearing in mind that science fiction especially has a tendency to become science fact at some time or other. If we humans are capable of imagining something, then we seem to develop the ability to make it happen.
This might sound like a weird choice as it really is an alternate view of human history and evolution. At the very end of the book, Steiner gives some pointers about where we might be heading and how we could evolve. When I read this, I felt intuitively that it gave a truer picture of how we may have got here than one held as gospel by materialistic science. Again, Steiner was a visionary and a meta-scientist. If you do read it, be mindful not to take some of the language literally. When he writes about the Saturn Phase, think accretion disc for example.
In the best tradition of the literature of ancient wisdom, Cosmic Memory reconstructs, from the akashic record, events that span the time between the origin of the Earth and the beginning of recorded history. This spiritual research includes a profound investigation of the origins, achievements, and fate of the Atlanteans and Lemurians - the remarkable 'lost' root races that developed the first concepts of 'good' and 'evil,' manipulated natural forces, laid the foundation for human legal and ethical systems, and defined and nurtured the distinctive yet complementary powers of men and women that brought humankind, many centuries ago, to its…
I love businesses and have been lucky enough to work for and with some great ones in my career in senior leadership positions. For me, leadership is an extraordinary privilege, so we have a responsibility to do it well and keep learning and improving ourselves and the organisations we lead. My journey into more conscious leadership began over 30 years ago, well ahead of the current movement, and it has progressively become the passion driving my work to help leaders and organisations contribute to building a better world. This passion also drives my service with a number of spiritual communities, including Sundial House and the Community of Living Ethics.
You might think this book is a bit left field in the arena of leadership, given its title. I think it cuts to the heart of the big question all leaders, whether of organisations or nations, should be considering, that of economics and economy.
What really resonated with me is the exploration of the subject from holistic and spiritual, or consciousness, perspectives and how this encourages thinking more deeply about the confines and constraints our economic systems place on us, the compromises that ensue in decision-making and, most importantly, the choices we need to consider more carefully from an ethical and human values standpoint.
This is a topic central to human survival and well-being, a must-read for leaders.
14 lectures in Dornach, July 14-August 6, 1922 (CW 340) 6 seminars in Dornach, July 31-August 5, 1922 (CW 341)
“In this age of social, economic, and ecological disruption, many people are beginning to realize that perhaps the most important root causes for this crisis originate in an economic thinking that is increasingly out of touch with the social, ecological, and spiritual realities of our time. How, then, can we rethink and redefine the fundamental economic concepts that frame our discussions and shape our key institutions in society today? This is the big question on the table today. Rudolf Steiner’s…
I’m an author, tech philosopher, father, geek, pianist, and novelist; and I'm fascinated by what it means to think clearly and well. Our world is bristling with complexities and crises; with staggering technologies, opportunities, and threats. What does it mean to find some kind of clarity, focus, and community amid this maelstrom? How can we hope to grasp, together, the nature of our times? These are the questions that keep me up at night—and that have driven me to write books that, I hope, can help and support people in rigorously exploring such questions for themselves.
Mary Midgley was in her nineties when she wrote this book, yet it’s alive with ideas and energy – and the insistence that philosophy should be “for” something in the most urgent, practical sense; that it should help us explore such questions as to how to live and to do good. Midgley was both highly scientifically literate and fiercely opposed to the claim that science will ever answer every question. We humans, she believed, are brilliant animals who need to understand our biological heritage as richly as possible if we’re to grapple fruitfully with our planetary future. I can think of few more urgent themes for the present century.
Why should anybody take an interest in philosophy? Is it just another detailed study like metallurgy? Or is it similar to history, literature and even religion: a study meant to do some personal good and influence our lives?
In her last published work, Mary Midgley addresses provocative questions, interrogating the various forms of our current intellectual anxieties and confusions and how we might deal with them. In doing so, she provides a robust, yet not uncritical, defence of philosophy and the life of the mind.
This defence is expertly placed in the context of contemporary debates about science, religion, and…
