Author: Via Perennis
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Verbs for Contemplative Practice: Three Elemental Orientations
There is an old idea, older than philosophy, that the elements are not merely substances but teachers. Air, water, fire — before they were chemistry they were ways of understanding what it means to be alive in a world that moves, shifts, and burns. The pre-Socratic thinkers of ancient Greece built entire cosmologies on them.…
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Prosousia: The Isness That Faces Toward Us
There are moments in contemplative life when language itself seems to lean forward, offering a new word for an old and living truth. Such a word, for me, is prosousia. I offer it here not as a scholarly coinage but as a quiet, practical name for the relational God who attends to us—who turns toward…
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Praseodymium: A Curious Homeopathic Case History of Structural Reorientation
This post arises out of an ongoing homeopathic quest for better health and vitality. Homeopathy, for readers unfamiliar with it, is a therapeutic system developed in the late 18th century based on the principle of similia similibus curentur (“like cures like”). Remedies are prepared through serial dilution and succussion, a process believed to imprint an…
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The Inner Sovereign: Lanthanide Remedies and the Evolution of the King Archetype
In homeopathy, remedies are often matched not just to symptoms, but to constitutional types—deep-seated patterns of personality, perception, and soul expression that shape a person’s experience across their lifetime. These types reflect a kind of energetic signature: a blend of temperament, coping style, and existential orientation that may manifest healthily or in distorted form depending…
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Benesentia: the Felt-Presence of Blessing
A new word arrived recently—though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it emerged. In the midst of quiet contemplation, I was attending to the subtle textures of the heart, listening for resonant syllables that seemed to rise from stillness while in contemplative dialogue. Then, serendipitously, I noticed the word had emerged in…
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Some Thoughts on Sadhana
Prior to my opening in 2001, I had no spiritual practice whatsoever, no routines or rituals to channel and direct my efforts, only a naked aspiration and desire honed from months in the deserts of western North America 15 years earlier. In the months and first years after the opening experience, the force and extent…
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Musical Key Characteristics
The more I dive into thought on the nature of Reality, the more I am persuaded that frequency and vibration are crucial. They act as fundamental “keys” to understanding how consciousness manifests. This applies whether it is subjective or objective. This, in turn, led me to speculate on whether people resonate to different fundamental tones.…
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The effects of becoming civilized: attentional biases
Very few people escape the attention rigidifying impact of our immediate familial and broadly social education. This educational process is heavily weighted toward specific attention biases. A preponderance of our educational resource is spent on intellectual development. This entails, with gradually greater subtlety and specificity, the singling out, or in my language, narrow focusing upon…
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Rasa: The Essence of Delight in Existence and Art | Aurobindo
Some considerations when musing on joy….attachment versus detachment. For who could live or breathe if there were not this delight of existence as the ether in which we dwell?From Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return. Taittiriya Upanishad, II. 7; III. 6. For the universal soul…