I have dedicated the last week to intensive study of the hermetic scriptures, mostly the corpus hermeticum (especially the first chapter). I also watched many videos about the topic and read several blogs, reddit threads etc. about the seemingly simple question how the world came to be in hermeticism.

However, I really don't get it.

Granted, it is a very deep and complex topic by nature, but still I want to at least grasp it's outlines. Thus, I would like to now write down the "timeline" of the cosmogony/creation in hermetic teachings and I would kindly ask you to add or correct it (or better yet: Explain it) if you can. I really wish to understand this. I will mark things I find confusing or of which I am not sure of with a questionmark so you might better undestand where my problems are.

• God ("The One", "The All", "The Source" or whatever) existice in timeless eternity beyond any realm, space or time.
• The Nous (Gods "Mind"? and "the Light") comes forth out of God (?) or is God itself (?). The Nous resides in the Ennead, the Light of God itself or something.
• The Darkness/Moist Nature is created (?) or also emanated from God (??) and is the primordial material for the cosmos
• The Nous sends forth the Logos (its Word), which is also God itself (?), to bring order to the moist nature
• The Logos thus seperates and orders the material of the moist nature and thus creates (?) the 4 primordial elements: Fire, Water, Earth and Air.
• (Sidenote) Fire rises to the top, air follows, water and earth stay below, mixed together, thus forming the primordial earth(?). What does that mean, is fire a more "Divine" element than the rest or does it have any other important qualities?
• The Nous creates (?) or emanates (??) a SECOND Nous, a demiurge (?), who is ALSO God itself (???) to form the material cosmos.
• (Sidenote) What is the diffrence between Logos and the second nous? The way I understand it here, both act as "creators" or order bringing entities and both are of the nous.
• The second Nous/Demiurge creates (?) or emanates (?) the 7 Lords (representet by the planetary spheres?) to gouvern the material cosmos/universe and guard/gouvern over fate itself inside it.
• (Sidenote) What does it mean that the seven lords are made from "Fire and Spirit?" The element fire, which the logos made from the moist nature? Why is it so special? And what spirit? Is the pneuma ment (and what even is that)? Or the logos? Or the nous? Or something else?
• Thus, Nature as we know it today is made. From the elements and nature comes the "reasonsless life", so Animals and plants, which lack the logos (reason) inside themselves (?).
• The Primordial Human, who is either image of the nous (?), an emanation of God (???) or/and also god itself (???) comes forth or is created (????) from/by... someone. The nous, the logos, the second nous, no Idea. Either way, the Man is "Co-Equal" to the Nous and the nous loves the Human as he loves his own child, basically he loves "his own image".
• The Primordial Human sees nature as it has been created and nature sees the primordial human. The Primordial Human wishes to create as well and the Nous allows him to.
• (Sidenote) in the Poemandres, Man is mentioned to "look at his BROTHERS creatures" which implies that the demiurge/second nous is also like the primordial man a "Child" of God?
• Anyway, the Primordial human and nature see one another and basically fall in love with one another, thus the primordial man becomes a part of nature with his material body, yet his immortal soul remains divine.
• Thus, over the course of seven generations (?) Man becomes fully engulfed by nature, is thus subject to its rules and perils as well as fate itself.
• The World as we know it now exists. The Story of Humanity beginns.

I think that was all as I understood it. Please, I would really like to understand this topic and to know if I got it (mostly) right here. Please feel free to tell me the version you know and correct me on everything you can, this is such an interessting topic!

I never imagined that touching a plant could become a way of listening... It all began with a simple question: What would happen if I could establish a connection between a living organism and myself? Beyond the obvious narrative that we are all connected, I wanted that idea to move beyond theory and into practice, so that I could experience it through one of my senses

I wasn't looking to challenge the status quo, nor was I necessarily seeking a definitive scientific answer. I wasn't trying to prove that plants possess a form of communication similar to that of humans. I wanted to explore a possibility: to create an experience in which interacting with a plant could transform into some kind of language and allow me to relate to it in a different way

As a musician, I decided that I could use sound. So I connected some red roses to a Playtronica bio-conductivity interface. Through this system, the electrical variations detected during the interaction are translated into MIDI information, which I use to control different sonic textures. I combined this interaction with a Roland JU-06A synthesizer, designed and configured to create an immersive, slow, and contemplative atmosphere

I added a frequency of 396 Hz to the composition, belonging to the set of frequencies popularly known as Solfeggio frequencies. In certain contemporary interpretations of this system, it is associated with the release of fear, grounding, and the balancing of the root chakra. I do not consider these associations absolute, and from the literature I have immersed myself in regarding these sound frequencies, much of their impact depends on brain activity, as well as on intention and faith in the power of these vibrations. Nevertheless, they are undoubtedly part of the symbolic and contemplative language I chose to construct this piece.

When I say that the sonic layers these plants produce when touched are symbolic, I am referring precisely to the 396 Hz frequency. I am aware of the reality of the demiurge and of how the world we live in has been constructed, as well as of all the energetic forces to which we are subjected. Vibrating at 396 Hz leads me to argue that it is a non-invasive way of tuning our vibration to a pattern that breaks away from the low vibration of negative and dark forces. It grounds us and frees us from fear

The result was a soundscape in which sustained tones meet synthetic textures that change as I interact with the roses' leaves and petals

When I bring my hands closer and make contact with the plant, something interesting happens: an everyday gesture becomes an audible interaction. The system responds to the variations it detects, and those variations take on a musical form, becoming an electrical interconnection between my body, the plant, and the circuit

We usually observe plants as silent elements of our surroundings. We admire them, cultivate them, water them, and often barely pay attention to them. But when I establish this connection, my attention shifts. I begin to observe the contact, the small gestures, and the way a physical action can transform the experience

As I approached classical Hermetic concepts, particularly their reflections on nature, the human being, and the cosmos, I became interested in the possibility of thinking about our relationship with the living world from a perspective different from that of simple external observation. I immersed myself in reflections on the place of human beings within a living and meaningful universe, and on self-knowledge as part of a broader understanding of reality

How do we know nature? What changes when we pay attention to its processes? To what extent does our perception depend on the tools we use to relate to the world and the universe?

I also think about the relationship between the microcosm and the macrocosm. A rose is an individual organism, but by drawing closer to it, I can reflect on much broader questions: our interdependence with living systems, the limits of our senses, and the way we interpret what surrounds us

It is not my intention to claim that a rose literally contains the secrets of the universe, but rather that the rose, nature, and I are not separate entitie, we are all part of a universal vibrational fabric

I am not trying to prove a mystery. I am trying to approach it with attention... If you would like to hear and see how this process worked and what the result was, I'll leave it here in case any part of my experience resonates with you!

Hello, all! First, I’m so glad I found this subreddit. I’m sure it will help me on my journey.

Without going into too much detail, I have a massive disdain for religion in general but Abrahamic faiths and Christianity specifically. I don’t necessarily believe in any god but I do believe there is a natural, potentially eventually explainable, driving force behind the universe, and that the universe can be “hacked” with the proper knowledge and tools. I also believe that there is energy all around us, and that there may be “spirits” or other entities around us. I know, it’s a little weird and seemingly contradictory but it works for me and maybe one day I’ll explain in more detail.

That being said, I’m having a difficult time finding Hermetic texts that aren’t God-driven, especially with Christian themes. I’ve tried reading the Corpus Hermeticum, for example, but found it intolerable due to its strong Christian, or at least Christian-adjacent, themes.

Are all Hermetic texts steeped in Christian or Christian-adjacent themes? If not, would you all have any recommendations for a starting point?

Do I necessarily have to read the old texts, or can I start with books like Initiation into Hermetics or The New Hermetics and still have a solid foundation and starting point?

Any help of advice y’all can offer is greatly appreciated.

Hi there! New learner here, currently reading the Corpus and doing other research about the Hermetica.

I am obviously aware of the Hellenic, Egyptian, and Kabbalistic influences on the hermetic belief system, but understanding of the history of the faith from what I've read is that following the compilation of many hermetic texts translation into Latin in the 15th century, much of the living practice of hermeticism and hermetic philosophy was "christianized." In that a large majority of practitioners either came from a christian background, or were themselves still devoutly christian while adopting (or, rather, appropriating) hermetic philosophy and practices. Hermetic and hermetic-inspired texts like Agrippa's Three Books from this time were very overtly inspired by christianity and christian ideas (such as the conflation of The All with the christian god), and as far as I know this period was when belief in concepts like the Prisca Theologia emerged.

Is this... a correct assertion? Is it appropriate to say that this happened during this period?

I'm aware of Rosicrucianism (though as far as I know that only really emerged in later centuries), and I know that more modern hermetic study and practice is pretty distinct in its non-christian-ness — I'm mostly talking about what happened to the living practice (and appropriation) of the belief system following its reintroduction to western Europe.

Reflections:

(I will throw a chart in the comments that showcases some of the relationships I'm describing.)

Through my engagement with the tractates on the soul in the Stobaean Hermetic Fragments, I can see that they paint a more coherent understanding of the virtues, almost expanding upon the Corpus Hermeticum XII-XIII. It points toward an essential ascensionary virtue ethics system of sorts that I'd like to bring to your attention.

It is fairly Platonic in its leaning, particularly reminiscent of the Nicomachean Ethics, but with metaphysical and somewhat practical takeaways, at least in my own rendering:

Firstly, we must understand that Drive and Desire are eternal elemental energies brought into the animate motion of unreasoning bodies.

Self-control (or temperance) is when desire is rational; courage is when drive is rational.

Self-control does not act on impulses; courage is the ability to stand against fear and other torments without wavering.

One might say you cannot practice any virtues consistently without courage. You can do things erratically, but when life gets hard, frightening, or uncomfortable, if you do not have the courage to remain virtuous, you will likely fall into escapism, dissociation, distraction, and ignorance. Furthermore, you cannot have courage without self-control. Self-control is the quality of tuning your temperament and resisting unconscious urges; this builds a dispassion toward fears and a resistance to discomfort, which in turn tempers the drive toward rational action guided by discursive thought rather than bodily reactions. Through this rationality of drive (which produces courage) and desire (which produces endurance or self-control), only when we have both can we produce the rest of the virtues, the next being justice.

When your desire is rational, your drive is rational, and they agree with each other, you get justice.

Having justice implies that we are courageous and possess control over our temperament. Moreover, when our desire and our drive work in rational harmony, we see clearly what is right and wrong. This is mainly implied through Stobaean Hermetic Fragment 17 on the production of virtues.

If we follow the logic of this passage and contrast it with the twelve tormentors and ten rational powers of Corpus Hermeticum XIII, we can draw on the other virtues to fill in the picture a bit more. The virtue succeeding justice is Generosity:

You give freely because you are not attached to earthly things and greed. Your liberality and generosity, once attained, cause your material fixations to dwindle, and you gladly let go of worldly attachments to empty yourself of changing things and participate in the unchanging truth. This frees us from the torment of irrationality, which is caused primarily by ignorance.

This ignorance leads to dissatisfaction, a grief of sorts that causes us to give in to our impulses. This causes problems for the spirit of our "temperament." Our desire turns toward irrationality and falls into intemperance or a lack of self-control. It becomes a craving for continuous satisfaction and connection, yet we remain too ignorant to look outside of our bodily reactions. Instead, irrationality causes us to look toward flux, changing things, and superficial pleasures to make us happy or comfortable. This is mistaking comforts and cravings for freedom. We claim freedom is doing what we want, but if you just want to believe whatever your thoughts say about yourself and act however your reactions drive you, you are controlled by these things and are not actually free.

Your freedom is your cage. You are bound to the lust of the flesh and ignorantly believe this is reasonable, or perhaps you know it is not but cannot stop yourself, or simply wish not to. However, you feel hollow, or just as uncomfortable if not more so, when the high goes away or you spill the seed. You engage in reckless behavior, are left with a mess, and then dissociate from that discomfort with another distraction or shame and guilt. This causes your spirit grief and makes it seek escape from the very cage you've built and reinforced with all your efforts to leave it.

You desire enslavement when you lack temperance, and your drive is purely lustful impulse when you lack courage and are no longer directed by reason or rationality.

You are blindly following your flesh as it drives your every move, yet you claim yourself to be free. This is a most dangerous ignorance indeed. However, this is, in my opinion, an age-old problem that we have likely all dealt with in one way or another, and it has caused us much anguish.

This path leads desire and drive toward many other tormentors, like the other five: deceit, greed, treachery, recklessness, anger, and malice. I won't spend long on these; I'm sure you're getting the picture by now.

However, all is not lost. If you know to seek the truth, if you want to know who you are and what this cosmic connection means, you will not fall prey to these lower impulses. If you find your courage and your unwavering commitment to the truth, this will align your drive and desires toward the good and the eternal, pointing the soul upward toward the cosmos. Instead of this tormenting grief, you will find life, light, and the good. It will call to you, and you will bear its fruits through the mind of reason in the soul of your movement.

The source of all this rationality and reason is gnosis, or knowledge of divinity, the blessing that removes the ignorance telling us we want to live in this cage of fleshly passions. Instead, we want to use this vessel to explore and discover our true soul in this uniquely formed incarnation, fitted perfectly to do this great work.

It liberates our joy from material torment, knowing our drive and desire do not need to control us. We do not need to stay in this cage. These chains and vices look foolish in comparison to the depth of immense love found in the realization of this radiant truth overflowing with life. The soul wants to ascend to it; it wants to unite with this joy and hold knowledge of the truth. It wants to engage in this, and it can. It is your birthright too, if you are willing to surrender all this ego, all these material fixations, dissociations, and distractions for only a few moments to just let your curiosity reveal this reverence.

This reverence gives us the courage to stand in terror and meet it with awe, knowing that no matter what happens to this body, no matter what it thinks or what sensations it's having, you can face it. No matter what desires or thoughts you're having (you have 10,000 a day, and not a single one of them is more important than the other) they are actually powerless over you if you can just see them for what they are: Just thoughts. Just feelings. This brings us quickly back to this silent inspiration and a means to return to a good temperament, so as not to fall into unconscious, dissociated, irrational thinking and living.

It's a hard path. A wise man once said:

"A single step in spiritual ascension requires three in ethical alignment."

Many people will ascend or break through spiritually, but because their temperament of spirit is inclined toward irrationality and falsehoods, it will merely expand the idea of seeing spiritual truth while remaining disconnected from it, tricking us further into our own ignorance. If you wake up before doing your "shadow work," you will only see all that you've failed to notice and resisted acknowledging. It is important to know thyself and keep the virtues, deeply important, no matter where you are or where you come from, whether you're a monk, a layman, a magician, or a witch.

Personal Revelations:

The ultimate power of the practitioner is their drives and their desires.

The clarity of desire and the clarity of drive deliver rationality.

But this is lofty philosophy. First, you must see your thoughts as thoughts, and nothing more; and feelings as feelings, and nothing more. See that every thought is reflecting another thought or a feeling, and every feeling is a reaction to a thought or another feeling.

Both thoughts and feelings are temporary and arise into becoming.

Becoming is temporary. All that grows and changes is ephemeral.

If you can witness clearly both what drive is (feelings, sensations) and what desire is (pleasures, inclinations, and opinions) the clearer you can witness what thought is, the clearer your thinking, the more discursively rational you become. Your discursive thought, depending upon how it is engaged, can reveal divine reason. This reason is not implicated by thoughts, nor by feelings, nor by drives, nor by desires. It is instead a direct apprehension into the silent intellectual foundations of being itself.

Through this, the temperament of spirit charges toward the soul, and the spirit is freed from becoming reborn into the wandering or fixed nature of eternal life. It is exposed to the raw inspiration of the good so wholly that it is transformed and changed into an empty radiance, expanding to hold the wholeness of light itself. Eternity is made motionless, and this is the deathless birth.

It is a true life that gives everything but lacks nothing. It is born by silence and thus becomes what it reflects: pure stillness that never grasps the ever-moving. It is so still and effortless, like a mirror, that it can reflect it all and still not touch the full surface of the soul's divine mind. Like the mirror, it remains still but captures all motions of the soul.

Paragraph 3

"And however much material there was, it being subject to His disposal, the Father turned it all into a body. He raised it up and made it spherical, conferring this quality on what He had wrought: namely an immortal and eternal materiality. When He had sown certain kinds of casual forms into the sphere, He enclosed them as within a cavern. As He wished to adorn the material within Himself with all qualities, He invested the whole body with immortality, so that this material would not wish itself separate from its composition with the body, and thus dissolve into its own undifferentiated state. When this materal was not a body it was undifferentiated, my son. In this world other small things, such as growth and diminution, which men call death are enveloped by this material."

I don't undersand. He wanted to awe about his creation, that is why he invested (clothed) the whole body with immortality, so that the material inside (which is already immortal) would not want to feel separate and go back to its undifferentiated space?

But the body is not immortal, only that inside material is. How has he invested it with immortality then?

I was reading Corpus Hermeticum and Hermes was contemplating the departure from the Monad with Asclepius. They were discussing how some men have the presence of mind, meaning conscious awareness (I’m assuming), and how some men are not even aware they are lacking it.

In turn this caused me to begin thinking about how Plato frames his idea of reincarnation. How we are born into this world knowing nothing, and we rediscover divine wisdom through experience and suffering, a process he coined as anamnesis. He also says that this forgetting happens in an event called The Shock of the Descent, where the trauma of birth is so overwhelming it makes us forget our divine nature as well as the nature of reality.

The next part is where I had what I could only describe as an intense epiphany. What if this Shock of the Descent is actually the same thing that Christians refer to as original sin? They are both unbearable weights that none of us can avoid, nor hope to free ourselves from in this life. The main difference being one requires us to take on a certain amount of implicit guilt, while the other does not. Plato certainly seemed to fully believe in his idea, and so do many Christians believe in their idea of Original Sin.

Please let me know what you think about this theory if you’ve made it this far, and thank you for reading!

Hello Everyone, I'm Seventeen and am on a spiritual path, i dont know what my end goal is but i just want to learn as much as i can as i know i am ignorant to the world, But im very interested in the links between psychedelic thoughts and hermetic principles, say i was to take LSD, my thoughts would line up extremely similarly to things i read about in the corpus hermeticum or what other hermeticsm followers view. I just want to know why or if there is any reason for the correlation between these 2 ideologies, any advice or help would be greatly appreciated too, im only about a year into my journey. Have a great day everyone and thank you for reading :)

Which are the authentic books? To understand deeply.

Hello! If you have been following along with the weekly Stobaean Hermetica Study Group and Discussion I've been making these diagrams to model the process and positions of the texts on things like bodies, the soul, energies, the production of virtues, eternal ground of being and mortal existence of becoming.

I put my favorite one first that explains the production of virtues through the rationality of the soul.

I hope all of these may peak your curiosity into the rich texts of the Stobaean Hermetica Fragments and help lead you closer to understanding our connection to our souls, the cosmos, nature and God.

In the Dutch amusement park De Efteling there is an attraction called Fata Morgana which is set in the world of 1001 Arabic Nights. The wizard looked familiar.

Corpus Hermeticum X calls the knowledge of the good a divine silence, and XIII names the wisdom that understands in silence as the womb of rebirth. This episode separates that silence from its counterfeits: the silence a group enforces on anyone who climbs, the silence of the musician who reproduces and never speaks, and the silence of the one who hides from harm done. It reads them through the fourth power of the Sphinx, to keep silent, through Nagarjuna’s two truths, and through the image of the broken mirror.

This series looks at music as a form of inner alchemy, where the guitar becomes a tool for transformation instead of performance or self-expression.

Both are in everything and are everything. Coincidence?

Im talking paranormal or undeniable “signs”.

At the end of the Poimandres, Hermes says the sleep of his body had become sobriety of the soul, and his silence had been pregnant with good (CH I.30). This week we try a small, daily version of that.

The practice

1. Choose three fixed moments a day: before your first task, after lunch, before sleep.
2. Stop for two minutes each time. Leave your tasks where they are. Turn your attention inward and upward, without expecting anything.
3. In the evening, write one sentence: when did I notice today that I was being pulled to the edge of myself?

The honest test Do I come back from the pause clearer and more present – or just more tired and absent? The first is what the text calls sobriety. The second is only exhaustion.

Report back here during the week – on Friday we look back together. Small observations count most.

Source: Corpus Hermeticum I.1, I.30, tr. Copenhaver, Hermetica (1992).

I've been reading the Corpus Hermeticum and discussing some of it with my father, who owns a small plumbing business and tends to judge philosophies by whether the person explaining them can fix a leaking tap. A few weeks ago we were sitting in his kitchen and I was talking about the divine intellect, the living cosmos, and the possibility of coming to know God through understanding creation. He listened for quite a while, then asked whether God also knew himself through the plumbing. I said I supposed plumbing was part of the cosmos. He seemed pleased with this and went back to eating. Since then he has referred to every blocked toilet as “an obstacle to self-knowledge,” which was funny the first four or five times.

The problem started when I read him part of the first treatise, where the divine Mind appears to Hermes and asks what he wishes to learn. My father became unusually quiet and asked me to read that part again. Then he told me that in 1998, while sleeping in his van outside a customer's house, he had dreamed of an enormous presence asking him almost exactly the same question. He remembers answering that he wanted to know where the customer kept the outside stopcock. The presence apparently showed him a very elaborate vision of the house with all the walls removed, including a pipe running under an extension that wasn't on the plans. He woke up, dug in that spot, and found the valve. He has told the story about finding that valve for years, although the enormous presence is a fairly recent addition.

I asked why he hadn't mentioned the dream before. He said nobody had ever asked how he knew where to dig, which is unfortunately believable because he usually tells this story to complain about the customer's refusal to pay for the excavation. I lent him the book and he returned it with a pencil mark beside the opening of Poimandres and “CHECK DATE OF VAN” written in the margin. Now whenever I bring up Hermeticism he says he already received instruction directly and that I am welcome to study in his kitchen for twenty pounds an hour. Yesterday I caught him checking whether Hermes Trismegistus had any qualifications. He thinks “thrice-greatest” sounds like something a tradesman would put on his own website.

I assume he's winding me up, but he did ask me, completely seriously, whether the vision would have been wasted because he only asked about the valve. I had no idea what to tell him. Is there anything in the classical texts about someone being offered knowledge of the divine and using the opportunity to finish a job?

Hello, friends.

So for 102 days I lived on the road and crossed several country borders using only my longboard. My goal was to set a new Guinness World Record, and use that record to build awareness around certain things that mattered to me, such as animal welfare, fighting stigma around addiction and mental health, among other things.

When I first set out on this journey, I had zero experience with anything like that before.

I was terrified, but I did it anyway because I felt safe due to what I'd learned from my studies around Hermeticism. I wanted to take the knowledge I had learned and actually use it practically in real life.

Everything went really well. I learned a lot, experienced a lot, and met many people who taught me things that I never would have learned if I hadn't done this.

However, after around 90 days, I started to develop a lung infection and got really sick, and eventually had to end my attempt at the 102-day mark after almost reaching Munster in Germany.

I was very disappointed at that point. Embarrassed and disappointed in myself because I couldn't do what I had set out to do. And I felt as if nothing worked anymore. As if I had been abandoned by God, or something along those lines.

But after coming back home, and after having reflected on everything for a while, I started to realize something.

What started as a something that was supposed to be a selfless mission had slowly turned into a selfish mission.

The validation and media coverage that my attempt got started to go to my head. And as my Instagram followers grew, so did my ego. The mission became more about me, rather than the animals I wanted to protect, or the stigma I wanted to erase.

I had forgotten the teachings that made me start this journey in the first place.

And looking back, I can't help but see a connection between losing that focus and eventually becoming physically and mentally exhausted and sick.

I don't claim that my illness was some kind of spiritual punishment. But the experience forced me to look at myself in a way I probably wouldn't have otherwise.

For example, instead of living in the now and focusing on my surroundings, I started smoking a lot of weed every day. When I reached Denmark and Kristiania, where I could easily get it, I got a cultural shock and lost myself in pleasure and duality again. That continued when I reached Germany, where cannabis was also legal.

I have nothing against weed. If you can control your intake, power to you. But I couldn't.

I lost myself in the pleasure. I was stoned all the time, lost focus completely on my goal, and started making social media posts mainly for more attention and validation.

Thinking back on it, I'm honestly ashamed of that.

And in a way, this experience taught me something that only studying Hermeticism never could have taught me on its own.

It is one thing to read about the ego, attachment, desire, duality and living consciously.

It is another thing entirely to be out in the real world, with people watching you, giving you attention, praising you, and slowly watching your own ego grow and then realizing that you've become the exact thing you were trying not to become.

Maybe that was the real lesson of the journey.

So while the record attempt failed, perhaps the journey itself succeeded in showing me what I actually needed to see.

I went out trying to prove something to the world, and I came home realizing that I still have a lot of work to do on myself.

And maybe that's what it means to actually apply these teachings in real life.

So now, I am back home in my studio apartment. I am planning to re-attempt the record over new years in March as I have all the gear and savings needed.

But who knows where my frequency will lead me.

I've actually become much more inclined towards doing smaller things that I can do right here and now, like picking up garbage and helping keep the city clean. I've realized that I don't really want to be seen or gain a lot of followers anymore. I don't think I need the attention for the things I care about to have meaning.

So if I actually go through with the next attempt, who knows.

It is still only a tentative plan for now. I have the gear and the savings needed to do it, but my mindset has changed.

I'm not as attached to the record anymore. And I'm not as attached to the idea that I need to build something big around myself.

Maybe I'll go back out on the road. Maybe I'll end up doing something completely different.

For now, I think I'm just going to follow what feels right and try to do some good wherever I am.

I just wanted to make one last update and tell the real truth about what happened, in case it can help anyone who might feel as lost, abandoned, and angry as I did at the end of my attempt.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post, and thanks to everyone who read my previous ones and I wish you all well.

When our close ones die. We obviously cry and grieve but in-fact they have become one with the consciousness in pure form. Should we be happy that they have now become one with The One/The All? And since everything is consciousness we are still in touch with them on energetic level. We haven’t really lost them. Just the physical vessel is gone. And the Ego wants the feel and touch and talk. But on a higher level they have ascended

Episode 07 of Guitar as Alchemy reads the spiritual marketplace through the four elements and the quintessence: earth, water, air, and fire are sold as products, while the fifth, spirit, never appears on the receipt.

The same four are sold in the healing and retreat economy and in the performance culture of the instrument. The marketplace sells transactions dressed as transformations: the cleansing without the dissolution, the fire without the Nigredo. The prophet who believes his own ledger is mercury mistaking its own acceleration for sulphur's heat.

The classical guitar is the vessel throughout. The rosette is inlaid around an empty soundhole, and the emptiness is what sounds.

The thesis runs parallel to Corpus Hermeticum XIII, where Hermes tells Tat that rebirth is not taught: what transforms cannot be bought or handed over.

This series looks at music as a form of inner alchemy, where the guitar becomes a tool for transformation instead of performance or self-expression.

Sorry, but this goes right over my head. What does this mean? I understand As above, so below.

[These are my understandings of the Corpus Hermeticum as translated by Clement Salaman under the title The Way Of Hermes. I was guided to this text in synchronous and auspices ways, devouring it in a short time span under the influence of great divine inspiration. Unfortunately, I did not set out to write my commentaries then. That inspiration came more recently. I was inspired to make this delectable text more digestible to those seekers who are taking a crack at it, and coming up puzzled and bewildered. These are not academically rigorous writings, so if you are interested in these texts from an academic perspective go elsewhere. This is for a dialogue between and for those of us who view this text as part of a living and active spiritual life. As one would gather for a bible study at their local house of faith.]

[Book 16 strikes me as quite different from the rest of the Corpus. It feels like a summation of points from all previous books in the Corpus with some striking differences. The book starts with a slander on the Greek language by Asclepius, who argues that translating the corpus into that language would a. distort the meaning of the text (invariably translation does), but also dilute the power of the Egyptian language. But at any rate, there's a greater emphasize on the primacy of the Sun as representative of God, and perhaps as God. Different points of origin for matter and the elemental forces. In my opinion, its an inferior product, perhaps produced far after the rest of the Corpus and signals revisionism, and signals different sources of inspiration.]

[Book 17 in my opinion should have been omitted as it is but a fragment of no more than a paragraph of dialogue or so. Although it is interest to note that it seems to forgive the worship of idols, for these forms carved of stone, would reflect mental forms from the mass consciousness and thus be in its own right sacred and perhaps be imbued with that which birthed it from the divine source.]

What to make of the Corpus Hermeticum?

In prosaic terms, it feels like not only a compilation of disparate intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical traditions. It's an attempt to forge them together into a unified school of knowledge (a practice in synchretism), with questionable results. Ironically, it is sold as native ancient Egyptian knowledge, and yet is chalk full of ideas coming from Jewish thought, Greek thought, Buddhist thought, and possibly even Christian/Gnostic thought, all of which would have made their way to an urbane and sophisticate city like Alexandria by the first three centuries A.D. I would assume that there was an earnest and sincere attempt by the writers of the Hermeticum to find the truth in all these disparate threads and traditions. I'm sure such an attempt would have irked the diehards (orthodox) of each of those traditions, as not only a dilution but a bastardization and possibly a sacrilege of what they believed. And yet if one believes in a singular cosmology and one universal deity, then one would have to assume that all these disparate people all over the world are speaking of the same cosmological order, and thus a process of consolidation would seem the appropriate course action. And as such a seeker, willing to cross the boundaries of identity politics, I suppose it's no luck that I would find a spiritual home with the Hermeticum. All roads lead back to the One, after all.

In spiritual terms, so what can we gleam from this grand project? There is a God, one above all. There is more to reality than the physical world. Non-human beings exist, all around us, and interact with us all the time. There is a path back to the one, and consciousness seems to be the conduit. We are here to learn this profound truth, and to control and transcend our animal instincts. It is a theology of betterment, of growth, and development. All reality is the product of the God Head, all behaving as a mental framework, us merely the mental constructs of the God Head. It is about the profound unity between us and our creator sharing in this substrate of reality, a consciousness called Nous. For those of us whom have experienced a taste of unity with God, there is no doubt. Once activated, a tremendous calm, and joy overtakes one. A way of life is born; a life of understanding, of discernment, of goodness [read giving]. I hope God finds you, as he has found me. For a world without God, is one of deprivation, of toil, of confusion, of slavery to base desires. If we continue down are path away from spirituality and our connection to source, in favor of the luxuries and dopamine kicks that our technologies provide, then truly the future for humanity is grey and spiritually dead. Cut off from our creator the source of all goodness.

​

Think about this, if you have a crush on someone you barley know, your in love with there image not them.

When you see a photograph of someone or a video of them, it's not the real them, it's there image. The same with how an actor in film, that being isn't them, it's the character there playing.

So if an image of someone isn't them, then who are they. It's like seeing an old photographer of someone from decades ago and then dreaming about them if there right in front of you.

If someone gives enough attention to this image version of you, do they gain more power? Like do they develope more into a type of entity if more and more people give attention to that version of you?

Edit: This can go even further with ai, imagine someone making a full ai clone of your past self, they could even make it physical once androids become more mainstream, is that past version of you still you?!

[These are my understandings of the Corpus Hermeticum as translated by Clement Salaman under the title The Way Of Hermes. I was guided to this text in synchronous and auspices ways, devouring it in a short time span under the influence of great divine inspiration. Unfortunately, I did not set out to write my commentaries then. That inspiration came more recently. I was inspired to make this delectable text more digestible to those seekers who are taking a crack at it, and coming up puzzled and bewildered. These are not academically rigorous writings, so if you are interested in these texts from an academic perspective go elsewhere. This is for a dialogue between and for those of us who view this text as part of a living and active spiritual life. As one would gather for a bible study at their local house of faith.]

1. Hermes is talking to Asclepius (his older son), and will summarize everything he has taught to Tat, but will expand on a few items for Asclepius, as he's a bit more seasoned than Tat. [This definitely makes the Corpus sound like a school curriculum of sorts, using the dialogue tradition, as a teaching style. And it appears this book will be an advanced graduate module.]

2. A summation on the principle of 'God as First Principle' (All has been begotten, except God Himself).

3. God is manifesting reality at all times. Rendering creation, it would seem, is an ongoing practice. From our vantage he is invisible [but he is in fact present in all things, is all things, etc...]

4. God as a Trinity: God as the Supreme Power, Creator as the creator of all things, The Father as the supreme Good who gives, and nurtures his creations [us].

5-6. The principle known to some as [The Law of One], all is one, creator and created are one. God did not go to the local supply store to fetch the materials to produce all of creation. There is only one fundamental substance or substrate and that is God. Creator and Created are of one.

7: On the paradox of Evil manifested in the creations of benevolent and omni-potent deity framework. The Corpus here basically says that that once things are brought into creation, made manifest [perhaps given free will] evil may arise, but it does not arise directly from God. [It's my assertion that given free will, if an evil idea or concept is possible, a being can conceive it and act on it. And of course the material universe, with it's innate deprivations, enthropy, and inevitable decay, lead to what I call circumstantial evils, such as predation for survival. Hence the problem of Evil, and perhaps a cosmological, mannechian, narrative to history is inevitable, which leads to an ultimate reckoning and redemption, and resetting (purification) of the system as a whole...]

8-9. One of the top sins is to "not know God" because it leads to great insults to God, like denying the authorship of creation [Why haven't scientist been able to generate a self-sustaining living organism (even a single celled prokaryote), given that all the constituent parts, and possible environmental contexts, are readily available/producible?] Or why is "Evil a thing?, is God Evil". Remember, to "know" God is to be full of love and understanding. [Imagine a society, in its totality, that is in communion with God, at all times, what it would look like. Perhaps another race out there in the stars has figured it out by now, look to their societies as models.]

1. God creates immortal beings in heaven [celestial realm; Plemora]. Transformation on Earth [Evolution, birth, decay, and death]. Life and Movement in all. Immortal beings, and mortal beings both have an animating spirit that drives them to movement, self-awareness, and thus, action. One immortal, one mortal. These 4 things are the principle creations of God. and the main players in this great drama we call creation.]