Pulled out Joas & Bellah’s The Axial Age and Its Consequences to prep for a recent meet-up of our Axial Age reading group. I had finished it back in the fall but wanted to get back up to speed for our discussion.
Just finished Jean Gebser’s Ever-present Origin, Part II for the nth time.
And am working through Bernardo Kastrup’s The Idea of the World which is being group read here on the platform.
In a follow-up to a clip @johnnydavis54 posted in another thread, I read Mario Betti’s Twelve Ways of Seeing the World, which is a highly insightful review of twelve “paradigms” that are all legitimate ways of encountering reality. These are, in turn, based on four lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1914 which were collected in Human and Cosmic Thought. In the meantime, I found an elaboration on Steiner’s lectures from 1947/1989 by Sigismund von Gleich, Die Wahrheit als Gesamtumfang aller Weltansichten [Truth as the Total Extent of all Worldviews], all of which are now on the read again/to-read list. (This has turned into a kind of “mini-project”.)
Since Betti mentions him in every single chapter of his book, I’m about halfway through Rüdiger Safranski’s biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Goethe: Kunstwerk des Lebens [Goethe: Life as a Work of Art] which relies more on Goethe’s works than facts about his life to bring him back to life … an enthralling read, and I hate biographies generally.
All of the above being spin-offs from interactions here on the platform.
And I just started Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (recommended by a current email correspondent), which is a fascinating account of the author’s near-deathlike experience while in a coma after suffering a rare brain disease.
So, that’s what’s on my desk at the moment.