Greetings!
Sharing with you, ladies and gents, my attempt at a common denominator underlying different creeds. I could attach a .pdf, but a webpage appears to be more handy in some ways:
Coming to Terms with the 21st Century: A Guide
Just for you to get a snippet of the write, like if it's worthy of your attention, here's the foreword:
The world is teetering on the edge. On the one hand, it is the cutting-edge knowledge in the field of ideology and psychology in their broadest senses; on the other, it is the entirety of ideological and psychological predicaments, both individual and collective, which are about to reach a tipping point, provided that a great weight of other woes are nothing but their emanation.
Certain philosophers, spiritual visionaries and leaders, some of them are still alive and well, some breathed the earthly air as recently as 'yesterday', have given themselves the trouble to summarize a rather... entangled state of matters on the earth and offered their roadmaps to the bedeviled mankind. Having probed a number of these, I have favored Daniel Andreev's The Rose of the World, Jacob Needleman's Why Can't We Be Good?, select works of Carl Jung, and Metamodern Era and lectures by Nirmala Shrivastava, better known as Shri Mataji. Many thoughts, as well as spiritual experiences, of C.S. Lewis, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Grigory Pomerantz, Viktor Frankl, Shri Ramana Maharshi and a few others, have proved to be of great value, too. My acquaintance with major sacred texts is a given. All this has passed through my, I dare say, robust perception and synthesized into a kind of guide for navigating in the modern world, at least for understanding oneself and his place in it. This work is largely based on my A Book of Concern, a self-sufficient write in itself, which has been expanded to include more thoughts and topics. For this reason, it has become pertinent to give it a new, more appropriate and, at the same time, more pretentious title – Coming to Terms with the 21st Century: A Guide.
About the structure of Guide. Unlike a guide in its conventional sense, where clarity, brevity and clear logical sequence are kind of axiomatic, the line of narration in Guide is rather sprawled-out and windy, dipping into the 'pockets' with quotations now and then (for convenience’s sake, a separate font will be used for these), including very extensive ones, turning one way or another. There exists a certain logic in all this meandering though, attesting to which is a tentative divide into the following chapters: "Cosmology", "Religious Studies", "Gnoseology", "Methodology", and "Teleology". At the very end, a surprise awaits the reader, although "surprise" is too paperweight a word for what shines through the grid of its letters.
Carl Jung in his time was hesitant when choosing a style for his works, first leaning towards a prophetic one. Over time though, he embraced a more neutral, scientific register. I, on the one hand, shun academic language, including the rules of citation and referencing. I also relapse into an old-fashioned language where "he" used to connote "she" without any belittlement of the latter. On the other hand, I avoid going too far into pontification. The downside of this being, some extraordinary, at times formidable matters may be articulated too matter-of-factly or jauntily.
With regards to Why Can't We Be Good? by Jacob Needleman, although Guide has absorbed its 'creamiest' parts, the reader should feel free to read the entire book. Since I personally do not agree with all of Needleman's contentions, I have cherrypicked only those parts of his remarkable work which I resonate with most. Do I violate any copyrights by publicizing them? This is the least of my concerns, to be honest, considering the paramount humanitarian significance of what is going to be presented.
I hope to have intrigued the reader enough for him to venture beyond this foreword. From my end, I have only one, yet crucial requirement of him: thoughtfulness. Bearing in mind Jung's disappointment in people's ability to think, unlike merely judge, and having amassed plenty of personal experience that way, I am not harboring particular illusions here. C.S. Lewis comes from a different angle: "The worse you are, the more you need it [repentance, metanoia, the transformation of mind], and the less you can do it." And yet...
November, 2023
Enjoy the read!
Sharing with you, ladies and gents, my attempt at a common denominator underlying different creeds. I could attach a .pdf, but a webpage appears to be more handy in some ways:
Coming to Terms with the 21st Century: A Guide
Just for you to get a snippet of the write, like if it's worthy of your attention, here's the foreword:
The world is teetering on the edge. On the one hand, it is the cutting-edge knowledge in the field of ideology and psychology in their broadest senses; on the other, it is the entirety of ideological and psychological predicaments, both individual and collective, which are about to reach a tipping point, provided that a great weight of other woes are nothing but their emanation.
Certain philosophers, spiritual visionaries and leaders, some of them are still alive and well, some breathed the earthly air as recently as 'yesterday', have given themselves the trouble to summarize a rather... entangled state of matters on the earth and offered their roadmaps to the bedeviled mankind. Having probed a number of these, I have favored Daniel Andreev's The Rose of the World, Jacob Needleman's Why Can't We Be Good?, select works of Carl Jung, and Metamodern Era and lectures by Nirmala Shrivastava, better known as Shri Mataji. Many thoughts, as well as spiritual experiences, of C.S. Lewis, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Grigory Pomerantz, Viktor Frankl, Shri Ramana Maharshi and a few others, have proved to be of great value, too. My acquaintance with major sacred texts is a given. All this has passed through my, I dare say, robust perception and synthesized into a kind of guide for navigating in the modern world, at least for understanding oneself and his place in it. This work is largely based on my A Book of Concern, a self-sufficient write in itself, which has been expanded to include more thoughts and topics. For this reason, it has become pertinent to give it a new, more appropriate and, at the same time, more pretentious title – Coming to Terms with the 21st Century: A Guide.
About the structure of Guide. Unlike a guide in its conventional sense, where clarity, brevity and clear logical sequence are kind of axiomatic, the line of narration in Guide is rather sprawled-out and windy, dipping into the 'pockets' with quotations now and then (for convenience’s sake, a separate font will be used for these), including very extensive ones, turning one way or another. There exists a certain logic in all this meandering though, attesting to which is a tentative divide into the following chapters: "Cosmology", "Religious Studies", "Gnoseology", "Methodology", and "Teleology". At the very end, a surprise awaits the reader, although "surprise" is too paperweight a word for what shines through the grid of its letters.
Carl Jung in his time was hesitant when choosing a style for his works, first leaning towards a prophetic one. Over time though, he embraced a more neutral, scientific register. I, on the one hand, shun academic language, including the rules of citation and referencing. I also relapse into an old-fashioned language where "he" used to connote "she" without any belittlement of the latter. On the other hand, I avoid going too far into pontification. The downside of this being, some extraordinary, at times formidable matters may be articulated too matter-of-factly or jauntily.
With regards to Why Can't We Be Good? by Jacob Needleman, although Guide has absorbed its 'creamiest' parts, the reader should feel free to read the entire book. Since I personally do not agree with all of Needleman's contentions, I have cherrypicked only those parts of his remarkable work which I resonate with most. Do I violate any copyrights by publicizing them? This is the least of my concerns, to be honest, considering the paramount humanitarian significance of what is going to be presented.
I hope to have intrigued the reader enough for him to venture beyond this foreword. From my end, I have only one, yet crucial requirement of him: thoughtfulness. Bearing in mind Jung's disappointment in people's ability to think, unlike merely judge, and having amassed plenty of personal experience that way, I am not harboring particular illusions here. C.S. Lewis comes from a different angle: "The worse you are, the more you need it [repentance, metanoia, the transformation of mind], and the less you can do it." And yet...
November, 2023
Enjoy the read!
