Back to: The Hermetic Laws & Quantum Physics
Bridge to Module 2
We have spent Module 1 looking at the people. We have watched how the founders of quantum physics engaged with wisdom traditions both Eastern and Western, how their own scientific tradition had a Hermetic underground that runs from the Renaissance through Newton and Leibniz and surfaces again in the twentieth century, and how the concept of a perennial philosophy offers one way (though not the only way) to hold the observed convergence. We have also applied the three-level framework to specific historical claims, seeing how it helps us sort genuine correspondence from surface vocabulary.
Module 2 takes us from people to principles. We begin our systematic examination of the seven Hermetic principles themselves, starting with the first and in many ways the most challenging: the Principle of Mentalism. “The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.” That is what the Kybalion says. It is also, in a different vocabulary, something close to what Eddington said, what Wheeler implied with it-from-bit, and what Schrödinger meant by the singularity of consciousness. Is the claim the same across these vocabularies, or only similar? That is the question Module 2 will force us to take on.
Here is what I want you to carry into Module 2. If consciousness is in some sense fundamental, not derivative, not an emergent property of sufficiently complex arrangements of particles but something built into the ground of reality, what follows? What changes about your view of yourself, your view of other people, and your view of the work of being alive? Sit with that question. Let it be a real question, not a rhetorical one. We will earn any answer slowly. That is the whole discipline of the course.
See you in Module 2.
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Your inner work is the most powerful thing you can do for the world.
– James Sageman
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