hermetic philosophy

Thank you so much for the answer. Can you explain more!

yes, here is an extract from my work in progress on a  book called dogma and complexity which should help

Chapter One

Hermetic Philosophy

The paradox of description itself is the first philosophical adventure out of shamanism that we have not yet fully explored.

Hermetic philosophy is a description I use to “home in on” describing alchemy, which contemporary dictionaries will describe to the reader as “an early study of chemistry”, but which I prefer to use as the basis of our understanding the desire to turn dross into gold. This is to say that I take the universe as evolution itself. This suggests, does it not, that rather than understand some fixed world that changes, we must understand the universe as “being” change. Rather than being, spacetime changes, evolution simply “is”. What we experience can be referred to as flow. Whether or not we call this consciousness would seem to depend upon the supposition that we refer to waking or non waking, or indeed to unconscious and yet alive states of living. Lived experience, so far as I know, include sleeping and being knocked unconscious! In a book called “the wandering mind”, Michael Corballis “draws from the latest research in cognitive science and evolutionary biology” to describe how mind wandering strengthens our position in the flow as to logical outcomes out of complex lived experience. Or at least that is what I take from it.

The premise upon which hermetic philosophy must rest as a platform for understanding upon which others may metaphorically stand, is that there is only the here and now and we are able to construct logical systems more or less according to our education and privilege in lived experience. We are born, not into chaos but into complexity, and are shown ways in which we can make sense of complexity. My assumption at present is that we use knowledge of our bodies, our social lives, our sense of belonging in terms of habitus and environment, and our emotional judgements, to keep hold of reality if we can. My argument is that if we are less educated and less privileged than other human beings we cannot grasp as much as those who are better educated and more privileged than us, given that educated means open to learning and privilege means sharing social situations with empathetic others. In many cases readers, of this text, will already be disagreeing with these versions of education and privilege! Thus the problem of paradox is shown as being commensurate with description. In order to describe the terms education and privilege enough to link them to my intended use of them as required by hermetic philosophy, I must move away from the descriptions that many readers would wish to read. This is my point about description as was the point of the philosopher Zeno more than two millennia previously.

What we humans seem capable of is to extend the here and now into an understanding of a systemic relationship between objects that appear real to us. The term real in hermetic philosophy can only be used within the hermetic boundary of the habitus. The habitus is not a place nor a time on a calendar but a relationship between individual and all objects, including the body, that can be logically deduced by the body of that individual. We seem able to process our immersion in flow so as to produce objects marked with values of both afferent and emotive links, this is to say touched by both sense and meaning. I believe we are better served using the term phenomena to describe objects. This is because ghosts for example are reported by some authentic individuals I have known in my life, as real, whereas I cannot be authentic in believing in ghostly apparitions. I am happy to call them phenomena, as appearances in lived experience, but to me they are reported by others, I have not seen any myself, although I have had what I refer to as hallucinations. Here again in this example we have paradoxical beliefs about human understanding. I can empathise with my real ghost acquaintances by granting them human status but believing them to be wrong. Thus the reader should get the idea of how empathy for others allows cohabitation of the planet but perhaps not cohabitation of my flat, except for visits and argumentative discussions. Is this not a lot like many issues around which we disagree? In effect the extended or existential world of each individual is soon likely as not to jar, to disagree, with the existential world of another one of us.