Personalism 102

In one of those rare books that allows us to see the world not as we've never seen it before, but as we see it daily without knowing, Victoria Nelson illuminates the deep but hidden attraction the supernatural still holds for a secular mainstream culture that forced the transcendental underground and firmly displaced wonder and awe with the forces of reason, materialism, and science.

Each page has at least one summary sentence, beautifully compact, that offers a way out of the scientism and displaced notions of transcendence that have chased the life out of modern experience. Drawing on a largely neglected tradition of Neoplatonic and magical thought, it opens up key themes of religion and literature that lie hidden in popular culture and high art.

According to Marlene Laruelle, Dugin's adherence to the Old Believers allows him to stand between Paganism and Orthodox Christianity without formally adopting either of them. His choice is not paradoxical, since, according to him—in the wake of René Guénon—Russian Orthodoxy and especially the Old Believers have preserved an esoteric and initiatory character which was utterly lost in Western Christianity. As such, the Russian Orthodox tradition may be merged with Neopaganism and may host "Neopaganism's nationalist force, which anchors it in the Russian soil, and separates it from the two other Christian confessions".

RP via GSB wrote:”Although sometimes acting in the capacity of the insane, Mr. Smith is very clever, capable, and well informed.

Dr. Kit Green wrote:If something really strange in the area of UFOs is true, then what do we do about conveying that information to the public? First we must consider what may be the basic facts (describes the core story which is distilled core of the information known about the subject that in 1986 that he Hal Puthoff, and Jacques Vallee had agreed on – “The ETs came here, maybe once , maybe a few times. Either through accident of by design, the US government acquired one of their craft. The only problem is that the physics that powered the craft were so advanced that for decades we humans have struggled to understand it or to duplicate it.”)…if you were to give them the core story right off the bat, they’d get sick, so you do it slowly over ten or twenty years. You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books, a bunch of stories, a bunch of Internet memes about reptilian aliens eating our children, about the crazy stuff we’ve see recently in Serpo. Then one day you say. “Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it’s not that bad, you don’t have to worry, the reality is this” and then you give them the real story.

Now that is a tried and tested desensitization model. And to the extent that there is a core story that is true, and to the extent that the people who want to get the core story out want to do it in a way that will not hurt the people, that’s what they would do – they come up with a bunch of nonsense, and then they get rid of it, gradually making the public more comfortable to that when they are finally presented with the truth, it’s not as frightening as they originally feared. “I can believe that,” they’ll say. “I didn’t believe the crazy reptile stuff, and I didn’t belief that they were abducting babies from wombs on beams of light. But I can believe the part about the spaceship and the back-engineered technology.

Grant Cameron wrote:Being that Novel is dead and can no longer speak, let me tell the small part of his story that I know. I will tell the story with the help of Dan Smith who was Pandolfi’s best man for his recent marriage, and who told me that over the years he has had at least 1,000 conversations with Pandolfi. He has been told by Pandolfi that he speaks for him. The only problem with using Smith as a source is that Pandolfi has stated that Smith “makes stuff up.” In the same vein Pandolfi is now on record as saying that I like Smith make stuff up.

Therefore buyers beware. Someone in this story, whether it be Smith, Pandolfi, Novel or myself, is making stuff up. For most readers that will create a state of confusion. That, after all is probably how the government tells the UFO story. You take the truth, fictionalize it to protect the classified key elements, create confusion, and then put it out to the public.

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Pandolfi: And speaking for me, tell Gary that [I] think he is a lunatic. Yet in a e-mail from Pandolfi to Bekkum two days later Pandolfi wrote, “The fact that you have verified some information that appeared on Dan’s blog does not make Dan’s information generally reliable nor does it substantiate his rather insane claim that he speaks for me. A deep background source should be a very reliable source. Dan is not. At a minimum, you should offer me an opportunity to clarify or comment on Dan’s claims before you publish.” Smith described this discrepancy in Pandolfi as “example of the fact that Ron has to wear two hats…… One hat when communicating privately(?) with me, and another when communicating publicly about me.”

but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.

I showed up.

I don’t know exactly what that means, but that’s what happened.

Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” “What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again…..