HAVE YOU HAD IT YET? PHOTO — ANCIENT TREE, PHIMAI — BY PAUL DUNBAR REVISED MAY 2024 Carbon is the element of life, the chemical basis of all known life-forms. It is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and the second in the human body, after oxygen. It is the unique and, indeed, […]
“It’s the end of the world, my friend,” said Muhammed Zafrul Yilmaz. The road was fast and empty, long bends snaking between dark, forested hills. The half-moon, floating on its back, scudded through cloud in a halo of petroleum colours; seeing the moon at this angle always reminded me that I was half a world […]
A hamadryad (Greek: Ἁμαδρυάδες, Hamadryádes) is a Greek mythological being that lives in trees. They are a particular type of dryad, which are a particular type of nymph. Hamadryads are born bonded to a certain tree. Some believe that hamadryads are the actual tree, while normal dryads are simply the entities, or spirits, of the trees. If the […]
PARIJAH DIARIES 13 “Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” (The Philosophical Tree,1945) It wasn’t fun, exactly, but I wouldn’t have missed it. […]
Fifth generation warfare (5GW) is conducted primarily through non-kinetic military action, such as social engineering, disinformation, cyberattacks, and the use of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and fully autonomous systems. It is ideological, psychological, biological warfare; at some point it may feature ‘hot’ or even nuclear war. It is all these things; but is it meaningful to characterise it as ‘spiritual’ warfare?
PARIJAH DIARIES 12 There was something else I was looking forward to when I came back to Jamrock — to put myself under the mushroom again. I’d been thinking about it for a while, up there on my parched plain in the North-East. I’d been in Isan more than a year already, working with Red […]
‘Never resist a sentence you like,’ wrote Baudrillard in Cool Memories (1990), and his incandescent style overflows with irresistible sentences. If you interrogate them, however — which is perhaps to ‘misread’ Baudrillard — you find that his beautiful paradoxes mask assumptions and transitions which must be explicit in a valid argument. Take, for example, the […]
“It is through the death of God that religions emerge.” — Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) “What comes after God? What follows in the wake of our letting go of God? What emerges out of that night of not-knowing, that moment of abandoning and abandonment?” — Richard Kerney (Anatheism, 2010) Whence, whence this creation […]