Among humans, there are five levels of consciousness, and these mental states correlate to brainwave activity. Of course, correlation does not equal causation. This is important to understand, particularly when it comes to physiological versus psychological phenomena.

Regardless, the point is that brainwaves, or neural oscillations, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system. …

As an avid philosopher and historian, I’m often frustrated by what’s known as the Socratic problem. The whole thing really centers on the fact that one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy never wrote anything down. However, in Ancient Greece people such as Xenophon and Aristippus did mention Socrates in their writings. The thing is that this could reveal more about their feelings toward him than who he actually was or any number of other things. There’s really no way to know for sure. To further complicate the problem, Plato not only wrote about the life of Socrates, he…

In the year 1916, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung coined the term “collective unconscious”. He used it to refer to a hypothetical set of shared mental concepts that are thought to exist below the level of the conscious mind, somewhere deep within us, in a reservoir of qualia that connects us all. Simply put, according to Jung, there is a part of everyone’s mind that contains memories and impulses of which they are not aware. Moreover, the strange thing is that, according to Jung’s theory, we all somehow seem to share that same part of the mind. …

In 1832, after a dispute over that season’s Phi Beta Kappa awards among three Yale debating societies (namely Brothers in Unity, the Calliopean Society, and Linonia), a new kind of fraternity emerged. It started out as the Eulogian Club, named after its invented patron Eulogia — the goddess of eloquence. From what I gather, the order was initially co-founded by the valedictorian of the Class of 1833, William Huntington Russell, and his friend Alphonso Taft, along with thirteen other outstanding undergraduates. That same year they took the Jolly Roger flag as their symbol, thereby becoming Skull and Bones (otherwise known…

Introduction

In Classical Antiquity, amid the birth of the Western occult tradition, during the 1st century, in an age of radical religious revolutions in Roman-occupied Egypt, both Hermeticism and Gnosticism emerged alongside what was becoming Catholicism. Since then, the two spiritual movements have often been thought of as being the same thing, although they have very different approaches to life. Nonetheless, both Hermetic Christians and Gnostic Christians were seen as heretics by Catholic Christians. …

At some point, in the 6th or 5th century BCE, Pythagoras started a semisecret society of sacred geometers in what is now southern Italy, creating a very sophisticated erudite discipline in the process. That is to say, he became the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. As part of that, ever since he brought sacred geometry and numerology from the Middle East (Babylonia and Ancient Egypt) to the Mediterranean (Ancient Greece), the Western occult mystery schools have attributed mystical significance to certain proportions — such as phi (ϕ), the “Golden Proportion”, which is the ratio of a line segment cut into two…

In 1904, a rather infamous occultist named Aleister Crowley founded the religion of Thelema, and it has been propagated by his followers ever since. As part of that, the central text of their faith is The Book of the Law, more properly known as Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX as delivered by XCIII = 418 to DCLXVI. It is, without a doubt, one of the most unusual books that I’ve ever read. There’s even an amazing comment at the end of it, better than in any magical grimoire or rare esoteric tome in any library on Earth.

Although there are some really big differences between stoicism with a lowercase “s” and Stoicism with a capital “S”, there are also a number of similarities between the two. This is particularly true of the term when stoicism is defined as the endurance of pain or hardship without flinching or complaining. Somewhat similarly, Stoicism is defined as a philosophy of personal ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world: including the idea that virtue is based on knowledge and that the wise live in harmony with the divinity that governs nature — being indifferent…