(Nick) Religious Studies PhD candidate (Rice University), MA History of Religions (University of Chicago), MA Eastern Classics (St. John’s College)
Anchorage, AK
Joined August 2012
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Agent 888 retweeted
This is a reminder that Prof. of Religious and Buddhist Studies at Stanford University, expert in Tibetan Buddhist thought, Dr. James Gentry, shook the field this summer when he single-handedly demonstrated that medieval Tibetan Buddhists knew and experimented with psychedelics and even included them as part of their path to Enlightenment: "Tripping Toward the Real: Inducing Liminal Sensory Experiences through Psychoactive Substances in Buddhist Contemplative Practice," Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2026, 94, 548–576 doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfag0…
To put this in perspective: Dr. Gentry says this is "the first unambiguous account yet discovered among premodern Buddhist traditions that prescribes the cultivation and consumption of psychoactive substances with the express goal of awakening."
This has sparked a heated conversation on Reddit among some Buddhist practitioners, who can't accept the fact that humans in most cultures, including Buddhists, at some point or another have experimented with mind-altering substances since time immemorial, despite what their ethical codes may say (the Buddha famously prohibited taking intoxicants as part of the five vows or precepts for lay people), and within the right context, such substances can yield knowledge. The heated thread in question: "Textual evidence for traditional use of psychedelic/psychoactive fungi in Dzogchen" (though this title is a bit misleading because Dr. Gentry not only mentions fungi, but also datura and others): reddit.com/r/Buddhism/commen…
Agent 888 retweeted
This is Goethe on why reading alone is not enough:
“People think that by reading they become learned; but it is not so. Reading only supplies materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. Without reflection, what we take in remains external and does not truly belong to us.”
Agent 888 retweeted
The dismissal of the soul-crafting function of education is deadly to the humanities. And it's rooted in a thoughtless dismissal of the role of the imagination in human flourishing. /end
Agent 888 retweeted
I'm prepared to accept the end of literacy, but in exchange writers and editors have to stop imagining a reader who can't follow long sentences, misses irony, thinks of counterexamples to everything, and doesn't understand jokes. That's over. We're down to the good ones now.
Agent 888 retweeted
The “product” of a graduate program is not a string of text, it is a certain kind of person.
If strings of text are no longer reliable measures of the qualities of a person, graduate programs aren’t obsolete, they just have to be more thoughtfully designed—by and for people.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Agent 888 retweeted
"Young people are quickly becoming so dependent on A.I. that they are losing the ability to think for themselves. And rather than rallying resistance, academic administrators are aiding and abetting a hostile takeover of higher education." nytimes.com/2026/02/12/opini…
Agent 888 retweeted
Terre Haute-born Gilbert Brown Wilson painted this cosmic white whale as part of a suite of 200 paintings produced over 30 years to illustrate his vision of Moby Dick.
Agent 888 retweeted
Me: "copy and paste text from this pdf to a word document.”
Adobe Acrobat:
“Ab$Ol utely
N
O
PrO blem”
Agent 888 retweeted
On the near horizon of consciousness change is the normalization of the image of the entire solar system as moving through space.
No longer a contained and orderly structure but a cloud of related and mobile elements, always in flux.
Agent 888 retweeted
“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
- Oscar Wilde
Agent 888 retweeted
319. Carl Jung, Death, and Communion with the Dead with Luis Moris
Listen now: anchor.fm/hermitix
Youtube: youtu.be/siBPu61k2y8
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Patreon: patreon.com/hermitix
Agent 888 retweeted
“The environments set up by different media are not just containers for people; they are the processes which shape people.
Such influence is deterministic only if ignored.”
Marshall McLuhan
quoted by John Culkin
1967
Agent 888 retweeted
PhDs are awesome because they’re either “I will provide a slightly different interpretation of a slightly interesting book” or “I will revolutionise the theory of mind and disprove God”
Agent 888 retweeted
"You can just look everything up." Ha! 1) It is time-prohibitive to look everything up if you don't know all that much in the first place, and 2) you can't look something up if you don't even know what you're looking for.
