I’ve posted a short video of the Question and Answer session following my recent talk at Rudolf Steiner House on YouTube . Here’s the link. I’m aiming to post more of the talk sometime soon, and to record future talks and make those available too. It’s a slow process and while I am not a technophobe, I know why I studied the Humanities.
I’ve also recently agreed a deal with Thirteen Ventures Limited, of Toronto, Canada, for them to produce an audio book version of Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Mark Jeftovic, the man in charge, has had success with his earlier audio ventures, but Lost Knowledge is, I think, a new departure. I look forward to hearing the finished product, and with any luck others will too.
And last week I submitted my 10,000 word essay on ‘Swedenborg’s Correspondences’, to the Swedenborg Society, who commissioned me to write it for a new series of short books they are launching, dealing with different aspects of Swedenborg’s huge body of work. The idea of correspondences is at the heart of Swedenborg’s vision, and it is an idea that has had an enormous influence on western culture over the last two centuries. I take a look at Swedenborg’s influence on Baudelaire and the Symbolist movement, his own correspondences with the western Hermetic tradition, and ask how his ideas may be of help to us today, in the early years of the post-truth world.
Gary Lachman 
That Steiner talk was most excellent - hopefully you are going to do another one soon.
As to the audio book version of “Lost Knowledge of the Imagination”- hopefully you are reading it ?
Kind Regards,
David
I’ll be doing another talk next month and will be videoing that as well. I would have liked to have narrated the audio book of Lost Knowledge, but sadly not this time around. There’s also an audio book of Dark Star Rising coming out. I offered my services for narration on that one too, but the stars weren’t right. But maybe the next one? All the best, Gary
What evening do I need to set aside for the next talk in Steiner house…
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I will let you and everyone else know as soon as I do.
Thanks for posting your talk at Watkins. It’s such a critical subject to explore. Research in the ’80s by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson showed metaphors are physical links from our sensory-motor experience to the brain’s motor cortex and to other parts of the brain, they are not just how we think, but a way in which we think.
Another important way to view poetry is as an antithesis to the outlawing of language - new ways of thinking that lead to the opening of belief systems instead of closing them. A way of reclaiming how we see the world.
When people understand that older cultures were overcome through the outlawing of their native tongues, and that language is how we define reality at its most commonplace level, it becomes apparent that new ways of speaking were a means of superimposing Western ideals by literally stuffing them down their throats. What remained afterwards in most cases were remnants, words so deep in meaning they could not be replaced, forcing establishments to vilify those words with ridicule until their meanings eventually became lost in triviality, leaving later generations with only the definitive shackles they’d been squeezed into. It’s almost hard to fathom that here we are, hundreds of years later, still labeling ideas dealing with spirituality, depth of feeling, and a holistic sensibility negatively, and doing so unconsciously! Disparaging with impunity the deeper understandings of life we’ve been taught to label as crass superstition.
These prejudices of our modern language have cost us our moral center. What is real and what isn’t if you don’t have a scale of values with which to weigh a fundamental truth? I hope we can find a new mythology to replace science as such. Scientific knowledge is more critical than ever, but not as a way of understanding our place in the universe and the language through which we communicate value.
What’s funny to me is that I get a thrill every time I open one of your books, but if you compare how many people respond to Gary Lachman on Twitter versus JK Rowling, it’s obvious that story touches the average person much more readily than knowledge for its own sake. I was writing essays for a while and fought an inner battle between writing a book about unearthing magic or concentrating on finishing an interactive storytelling paradigm, and just seeing the difference in responses on Twitter has been a cue. That telling an epic story and having people be part of the universe through satellite stories as they play out is a way of taking them on their own mythic journey through self and archetypes, etc. Unfortunately, one doesn’t find this anymore in modern forms of commercial storytelling and it’s very damaging to people’s psyches. If myth and metaphor are how we understand who/what we are, we sure as hell better find new ways to explore them ASAP.
Anyway, thanks for listening. An audience of one is better than nothing!
This is most interesting… https://m.youtube.com/watch?list=PL_IAws1Va9AhcnTkyPTUnLkWETSh6g-fB¶ms=OAFIAVgd&v=nNXr9hyrIQU&mode=NORMAL
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Great news about the audio book, I came here to ask about audio versions. I can’t find anything on Audible. I’ve been slowly working through your books in Kindle version but, as I drive for a living, audio books are more convenient. I just finished Secret Teachers of the Western World which blew my mind! The Amazon Kindle store is cluttered with garbage, it’s hard to comb through and find quality books about Esotericism, so discovering your work has been awesome and set me up with reading material for a long while.
I wish there were more audio versions of my books as well. But there is this, coming out in May. It’s a start. All the best, Gary. https://audiobookstore.com/audiobooks/dark-star-rising.aspx