Ethereal Insights

Persian depiction of the Divan ( دیوان ) By Jean-Étienne Liotard Traditional Forms | Saturday – May 9, 2026 F orms in their essential and traditional way have a certain and often subtle charm to them that only qualified people can sense, but even less qualified people tend to be able to pick up on this, even if they can only sense something in the abstract, here " abstract " refers to the noise that moderns would be able to conceive of in this connection. Take the traditional couch, the Divan: would the Divan be complete without Opium, read " Are Imagination Enhancers Good? ", or indeed the man or woman sitting on it in the traditional way? Of course not, and these small details matter, because nothing exists within a vacuum, in some kind of compartmentalized isolation, away from the right context, read " Hierarchies " and " The Problem of Borders ". The Divan would also not fit, even close to its traditional form, outside the right context, b...

Photograph of the Atlas globe Disease Control! Friday – May 8, 2026 B lack tar... Like a black and tar-like substance... It clings onto you... It clings onto every surface... And it's impossible to remove.      Indeed, that is disease for you, unless of course you decide that you do not want to be infected or affected by them, but you see the contemporary and actually rather blasé attitude is of course that disease is something unpreventable, really that you should expect disease and that it may even be a good thing. How absurd, but more to the point – how evil. Yes, these people are truly evil and they are evil not only because they want you and other people to get sick; they are evil in particular because they are truly nihilistic and truly would not care if they themselves got affected by some disease. Yes, because are you not supposed to be so tolerant and so open minded? Of course, it will not hurt you if you are affected by some virus, some bacteria, because "this...

Saugandhikāpariṇaya ( सौगन्धिकापरिणय ) By Mummadi Krishnaraja ( मुम्मादी कृष्णराज वोडेयार ) Romance? Thursday – May 7, 2026 R omance, what is it? Well, first of all if you intend to understand "romance" you need to know that it as a concept is rather new, like most of the things that continue to bedevil the world. Apart from being something fairly new, romance is also an expression individualism: in this case the idea that a couple, read " Relationships ", can somehow consist of people who have "found" each other, either because they have some kind of almost mystical "chemistry" or because they just "click", etc. All of this is, of course, absolute nonsense and the people who claim that finding a "partner", another vocabulary monster, depends on all of these different aspects of what is fundamentally individual and personal " preference " are not only wrong, but actually quite evil and manipulative, because after all...