The Post-Partisan Emporium

The Sun is Alive, and Why that Matters Charles Eisenstein When the modern mind attempts to grapple with animistic concepts like “the sun is alive,” the first impulse is to dismiss them as a superstitious fancy. Thankfully, many of us recognize the culturally imperialistic tone of that dismissal. We may also be in touch with our own fundamental indigenous knowledge, however deeply buried it may be under layers of scientific education, that the sun is indeed alive. We want somehow to accept that without denying what science has taught us: that the sun is a burning ball of gas, a nuclear furnace, and couldn’t possibly be alive. One way to accommodate both is to make aliveness into an extra-material property, a spirit that infuses all things. The sun is alive because everything is alive. But to do so is to subtly capitulate to the worldview that holds everything dead, by making aliveness an added property, independent of anything material. It is a version of Cartesian dualism. Here I will ...

Tlaloc’s Revenge The ruthless application of metaphysical priors John Carter Aztec Warrior, by infesth6 Several hundred years ago, a small force of Spaniards landed on the shore of a land heretofore wholly unknown to European man. What followed has been characterized as the mass enslavement of an entire people, the systematic extermination of a culture, and as a genocide. It was all of those things. But try to see it from their perspective. These were not sophisticated men. They were second and third sons, with no inheritance to secure their futures, who had struck out on their own to chance their fortunes in the New World as soldiers and adventurers. They hailed from a military culture, which had within living memory concluded a reconquest of their ancestral peninsula that had taken seven centuries to complete. They were hard men from a hard people. In the world they came from, the divisions were between the three branches of the Abrahamic faiths. Whether Christian, Jewish, or Mohamme...