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Reverse Manifestation
To start with, is anyone already familiar with alchemy? What metaphysics is to physics, alchemy is to chemistry, and as much as they might deny it, there are metaphysical assumptions running just as rampant now as there always have been. They just have a different flavour now. They call it “empirical.” An example of such…
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First Matter
There is a lot of religious symbolism that came to be admixed with alchemical lore as was perhaps inevitable. Much of Christian Gnosticism is heavy with alchemical symbolism, and with that connection, we move on to the philosopher’s stone itself. It could be created in two forms, a white stone and a red. The white…
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All is One
Alchemy was dual sided. On the flip side of alchemy with all its concern over material structure and physical evolution and behaviour, you have the concern for a mystery element, one that actually came to the fore more in eastern alchemy than western. Manu. Mind. Prakriti. There are many complex references to the physical behaviour…
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Gold Standard
Shall we talk about the significance of gold in alchemy? Sidebar first: In Egypt, where alchemy as we know it had its origin, gold was valued less than glass. It’s pretty significant in modern science too. Indeed, it is. The alchemical interest in gold really had nothing to do with making themselves wealthy. For alchemists,…
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Naturalistic vs Heuristic
Could you explain what you mean by naturalistic and heuristic? A heuristic is a cognitive bias. It’s simply the rule set our brains form without even trying. Each of these “rules” was intuited to be an elemental component of the human soul, and in their default state they were considered to be the reason that…
Category: Philosophers Stone
Alchemists saw everything behaving according to the spirit in it, or pneuma, the spark of the first matter. The first matter when condensed down to a locus is what gives you the philosopher’s stone. The scientific version of the philosophers stone would be the unified field theory. They wanted either to create the philosophers stone or at least to understand it as a way of getting a handle on the ultimate nature of reality to understand why we live in such an unstable world.
“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the Philosophers-Stone” Benjamin Franklin (American Statesman, Scientist, Philosopher, Printer, Writer and Inventor. 1706-1790)
“Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher’s stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold.” William Osler (Canadian Physician, 1849-1919)