Hearted Youtube comments on ESOTERICA (@TheEsotericaChannel) channel.
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Dr. Sledge--as a student of philosophy and the "history of ideas," I particularly enjoyed this episode. Not many channels are willing to get into the weeds with Scholasticism, despite how influential some of these ideas and thinkers have been. Thanks for digging into this one, it is a fantastic introduction to the topic.
As an off-topic aside, one of these days it would be awesome to see an episode on the history of esoteric herbalism, sacred plants, incense, entheogens, etc. Psychoactive or otherwise, the history of these plants and the associations they came to have is a fascinating topic. The other tools, equipment, etc., used in ceremonial magic probably all have an interesting history as well. I'm not sure how much scholarly research there is into this subject, I know everyone has a theory as to what exactly "soma" was, or what was given to initiates in the Mystery Shools in Greece and the like. Even so, some speculative hypotheses would be interesting to discuss. This is also a rather broad topic, it may need to be broken down into multiple episodes. Something like you did with absinthe would be awesome to see with historically significant plants used in witchcraft and magic, or at least I think so. Keep up the good work, and I'll keep watching!
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So I've been working really hard lately on my programming skills, and I've begun noticing some striking similarities between the community of back-end software developers and the Kabbalistic milieu. For one thing, nested layers of complexity, like what you described in your comment about the nested sephiroth, are par for the course in both disciplines. A simple statement can be understood to reference hundreds of lines of code just like a certain key word in a Kabbalistic text is understood, by Kabbalists in the know, as a massive complex of layered meanings. Believe it or not, I've been pretty able to effectively adapt the thinking style I developed during my amateur study of Kabbalah into a basic understanding of how code works. From this perspective, a lot of the arcane text-specific references you mention as barriers to entry-level studies would be looked at by the dev community as cardinal compatibility sins. One of the stupidest things you can catch yourself doing as a programmer is designing software that only you, the developer, will ever understand. It makes it pretty much impossible for anyone else to do anything with your code, so other developers will usually ignore it and find an alternative rather than try to understand your personal vernacular. It would seem that such standards did not exist in the Kabbalistic community, but that likely has to do with the fact that, while devs are frequently seeking more devs to expand their projects, Kabbalists tend to be pretty proprietary and tight-lipped about their discoveries. While I'm still struggling to understand the reasons for that (though the Sabbatai Tzvi business does shed some light on it), I think it's important to recognize that Kabbalah was not made for amateurs to pick up easily. There are layers of obfuscation which, from what I've seen, seem to be viewed as necessary deterrents to seekers who are not earnest in their desire to learn and grow.
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