Charles Cameron
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By request — the ouroboros game
Responding to a reader’s request, the author gives examples of the ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, from Egypt, alchemy and Vedic and Upanishadic texts to film and art,…
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Contemplating the weave of the world
A new contributor introduces himself as a British outsider living in the United States, fascinated by the weave of the world, and uses the Kathasaritsagara and Salman Rushdie’s streams of…
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One or other, both or neither?
Reposted from Zenpundit, compares Trump’s claim to be the Chosen One with Modi supporters’ ‘Special One’, then turns to the Buddhist catuskoti, or tetralemma, and Nagarjuna’s statements on suchness.
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Climate change: impact on the Hajj
Citing an MIT study that projects Hajj heat stress exceeding ‘extreme danger’ levels, the author asks how climate scientists and Islamic scholars will reconcile a divine command with a warming…
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JustKnecht’s Loom of Form & Meaning
Charles Cameron shares JustKnecht’s Loom of Form and Meaning, a nine-category table for classifying how forms and meanings change, and links it to his own HipBone Games and to Hesse’s…
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Invisibility, Jeff Sharlet’s The Family, and the goddess Kubjikaa
The author traces one principle of influence across Doug Coe’s account of The Family, a Defense One article on surveillance and Mark Dyczkowski’s work on the goddess Kubjika, as an…
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The Ideal and the Practical — the Practice
Posting a quote that did not fit a comment thread, the author reads Chuang Tzu’s cook story as showing that Lao Tzu’s ideal of emptiness leaves room for practical play,…
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Moves in the Glass Bead Game
Explains how Hesse’s Glass Bead Game works by linking two shattered Catholic images, a statue of the Virgin Mary after the Sri Lanka church bombings and a chalice standing for…
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Saint Greta, Virgin and Guevara
Charles Cameron’s ‘DoubleQuote’ posts pair memes of Greta Thunberg with Guevara and with Malala Yousafzai, then ask readers whether the memes are valid, in conflict or irrelevant, and whether either…
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An observation for David Ronfeldt
Cross-posted from Zenpundit, the author suggests that predicting when a radicalised thinker turns violent is a koan, because the leap from thought to act mirrors the mind-brain ‘hard problem’ of…
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Chuang-tzu or Zhuangzi, it’s a laughing matter [review]
Reviewing Brian Bruya’s translation of Zhuangzi: The Way of Nature, illustrated by CC Tsai, the author says the comic-book illustrations, more than the translation, capture the playful Taoist philosophy of…
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Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism, a book review:
A review of Sex and Violence in Tibetan Buddhism by Mary Finnigan and Rob Hogendoorn, on the rise and fall of Sogyal Rinpoche. It covers the sexual abuse claims since…
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I’m fond of saying “two is the first number”
A former think-tank analyst explains his HipBone Games, an attempt to make Hesse’s Glass Bead Game playable, arguing that patterns need two linked concepts, so that the basic move is…
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DoubleQuoting Trees, 2001 – 2019, Greta 2019 – 1898
Guest writer Charles Cameron pairs images and quotations, from Sebastião Salgado’s twenty million planted trees and mother-tree science to Tolkien’s Ents and a 1898 Yukon photograph said to resemble Greta…
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Metaphors for full, empty, void, overflowing — Indian trains
Two contrasting images of Indian trains, one packed and one empty with women walking the tracks, offered as a binary and a metaphor for non-duality, with a link to an…
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Magic and advertising
Announces a series on another blog about Ioan Couliano’s argument that Renaissance magic was the art of conjuring desire through images, and that commercial advertising has revived it, illustrated with…
