Kushner in 2016
― Tony Kushner
Anthony Robert Kushner is an American author, playwright, and screenwriter. Among his stage work, he is most known for Angels in America, which earned a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, as well as its subsequent acclaimed HBO miniseries of the same name. Wikipedia
Born 1956 (age 69 years), Manhattan, New York, NY
The Gnostic Religion was the 1st decent introduction to gnosticism for the modern world & is still of value today. It includes both heresiological & original texts–Nag Hammadi only uncovered later. It holds useful material on Simon Magus, the Hermetic Poimandres (shown here to be equally a gnostic document), the Valentinians, Mandaeans, Manichaeans & the “Hymn of the Pearl”. The existentialist bent–Jonas a student of Martin Heidegger–makes an interesting contrast to Pagel’s more orthodox view of gnostic religion as theistic. This volume & the Nag Hammadi library will provide good coverage of the diverse teachings of gnostic & related movements.
Introduction: East & West in Hellenism
The Meaning of Gnosis & the Extent of the Gnostic Movement
Gnostic Imagery & Symbolic Language
Simon Magus
The “Hymn of the Pearl”
The Angels that Made the World. The Gospel of Marcion
The Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus
The Valentinian Speculation
Creation, World History & Salvation According to Mani
The Cosmos in Greek & Gnostic Evaluation
Virtue & the Soul in Greek & Gnostic Teaching
The Recent Discoveries in the Field of Gnosticism
Epilogue: Gnosticism, Nihilism & Existentialism
Hans Jonas was a German and American philosopher whose work bridged existentialism, theology, philosophy of biology, and ethics. Born in Mönchengladbach to a Jewish family, he studied philosophy and theology at Freiburg, Berlin, Heidelberg, and Marburg, earning his doctorate under Martin Heidegger with a thesis on Gnosticism, and counted Edmund Husserl and Rudolf Bultmann among his advisors. He maintained a lifelong friendship with Hannah Arendt. Jonas left Germany in 1933 due to the Nazi rise to power, moving to England, then Palestine, where he married Lore Weiner and served in the British Army’s Jewish Brigade during World War II. After briefly teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he moved to North America, teaching at Carleton University and then holding the Alvin Johnson Professorship at the New School for Social Research from 1955 to 1976, later serving as Eric Voegelin Visiting Professor at the University of Munich. His major works include The Gnostic Religion, The Phenomenon of Life, and The Imperative of Responsibility, the latter formulating a moral imperative to act in ways that preserve genuine human life. Influenced by Heidegger yet critical of him, Jonas shaped bioethics, environmental philosophy, and philosophical understandings of life, technology, and human responsibility, emphasizing that ethical reflection must guide human action in a technologically complex world.
(Goodreads.com)
The Perennial Philosophy is defined by its author as “The metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds.” With great wit and stunning intellect, Aldous Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains them in terms that are personally meaningful.
An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the “divine reality” common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley
“The Perennial Philosophy,” Aldous Huxley writes, “may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.”
With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with a degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine Oxford Poetry, before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addressing these subjects in his works such as The Perennial Philosophy (1945), which illustrates commonalities between Western and Eastern mysticism, and The Doors of Perception (1954), which interprets his own psychedelic experience with mescaline. In his most famous novel Brave New World (1932) and his final novel Island (1962), he presented his visions of dystopia and utopia, respectively.
(Goodreads.com)
Crane photographed by Walker Evans, c. 1929–1930
Harold Hart Crane was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. Wikipedia
Born July 21, 1899, Garrettsville, OH
Died April 27, 1932 (age 32 years), Gulf of Mexico
Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. Inspired by the Romantics and his fellow Modernists, Crane wrote highly stylized poetry, often noted for its complexity. His collection White Buildings (1926), featuring “Chaplinesque”, “At Melville’s Tomb”, “Repose of Rivers” and “Voyages”, helped to cement his place in the avant-garde literary scene of the time. The long poem The Bridge (1930) is an epic inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge.[1]
Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. He dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University. Crane took various jobs, including in copywriting and advertising. Throughout the early 1920s, various small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s poems, gaining him among the avant-garde a respect that White Buildings ratified and strengthened. His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge, intended to be an uplifting counter to T. S. Eliot‘s The Waste Land (1922). Initial critical reaction to it was mixed, with many praising the scope but criticizing the quality of the poems. On April 27, 1932, Crane, in an inebriated state, jumped off the steamship USS Orizaba and into the Atlantic Ocean while the ship was en route from Vera Cruz to New York via Havana, Cuba. He left no suicide note, but witnesses to his jump believed he was intentionally killing himself. Throughout his life, he had multiple homosexual relations, many of which were described in, or otherwise influenced, his poetry. He had one known female partner, Peggy Cowley, around a year before his death.
Contemporary opinion of Crane’s work was mixed, with poets including Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens criticizing his work, and others, including William Carlos Williams and E. E. Cummings, praising it. William Rose Benét wrote that, with The Bridge, Crane “failed in creating what might have been a truly great poem” but that it “reveals potencies in the author that may make his next work even more remarkable”.[1] His last work, “The Broken Tower” (1932), was unfinished and published posthumously. Crane has been praised by several playwrights, poets, and literary critics, including Robert Lowell, Derek Walcott, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Bloom; Bloom called him “a High Romantic in the era of High Modernism”.[2][3][4] Allen Tate called Crane “one of those men whom every age seems to select as the spokesman of its spiritual life; they give the age away.”[1]
Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899 to Clarence A. Crane and Grace Edna Hart. His father was a successful Ohio restaurateur[5] and businessman who invented the Life Savers candy and held the patent, but sold it for $2,900 before the brand became popular.[6] He made other candy and accumulated a fortune from the business with chocolate bars. Clarence Crane’s sister, Alice Crane Williams, was a composer and literary editor.[7] His aunt Zell Hart Deming gave funds to her nephew to support his early career.[8]
In 1894, the family moved to Warren, Ohio where his father opened a maple syrup company, which he sold in 1908 to Corn Products Refining Company. In April 1911, his father opened a chocolate manufacturing and retailing company, the Crane Chocolate Company. The family moved to Cleveland in 1911, into a house at 1709 East 115th Street. In 1913, Clarence Crane’s parents purchased the residence across the street.[9]: 61, 63
Hart Crane began attending East High School around 1913–1914.[5][9]: 63 [note 1]
He has woven rose-vines
About the empty heart of night,
And vented his long mellowed wines
Of dreaming on the desert white
With searing sophistry.
And he tented with far truths he would form
The transient bosoms from the thorny tree.
O Materna! to enrich thy gold head
And wavering shoulders with a new light shed
From penitence, must needs bring pain,
And with it song of minor, broken strain.
But you who hear the lamp whisper thru night
Can trace paths tear-wet, and forget all blight.
— Hart Crane’s “C33” as published in Bruno’s Weekly in 1917.[10]: 28
Crane’s first published work was the poem “C33”, which was published in the Greenwich journal Bruno’s Weekly in 1917[11]: 75 in a feature entitled “Oscar Wilde: Poems in His Praise”.[10]: 22 The poem is named after Oscar Wilde’s cell in The Ballad of Reading Gaol[5] and his name appeared misspelled in print as “Harold H Crone”.[10]: 27 The style he would use in his later books is apparent in poems written at the time.[12][13] Crane dropped out of East High School in Cleveland during his junior year[6] in December 1916[9] and left for New York City, promising his parents he would later attend Columbia University. His parents, in the middle of divorce proceedings, were upset. Crane took various copywriting jobs and moved between friends’ apartments in Manhattan.[6] For a period, he rented a room at 25 East 11th Street from a motion-picture scriptwriter named Mrs. Walton, who encouraged his writing.[14] Crane’s mother and father were constantly fighting, and they divorced on April 14, 1917.[15][note 2] The same year, he attempted to enlist in the military, but was rejected due to being a minor.[16]
He worked in a munitions plant until the end of World War I.[16] Between 1917 and 1924, he moved back and forth between New York and Cleveland,[5] working as an advertising copywriter[17] and a worker in his father’s factory.[18] In 1925, he briefly lived with Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate. The two had a dispute with Crane due to the mess his belongings made throughout the house. Additionally, Crane and Tate had a disagreement over the negative outlook of T. S. Eliot‘s work. This prompted them to leave two letters under his door requesting that he move out, which he did.[19] He wrote his mother and grandmother in the spring of 1924:
Just imagine looking out your window directly on the East River with nothing intervening between your view of the Statue of Liberty, way down the harbour, and the marvelous beauty of Brooklyn Bridge close above you on your right! All of the great new skyscrapers of lower Manhattan are marshaled directly across from you, and there is a constant stream of tugs, liners, sail boats, etc in procession before you on the river! It’s really a magnificent place to live. This section of Brooklyn is very old, but all the houses are in splendid condition and have not been invaded by foreigners…[6]
Based on Crane’s letters, New York was where he felt most at home. Additionally, much of his poetry takes place there.[20]
Main articles: White Buildings and Voyages
Throughout the early 1920s, many small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s poems, gaining him respect among the avant-garde which was later cemented by the 1926 publication of White Buildings.[citation needed] On May 1, 1926, he went to Isla de la Juventud to reside in his mother’s family residence there. He received a contract from Liveright Publishing to publish White Buildings in July.[5] White Buildings contains many of Crane’s most well-received and popular poems, including “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen”, and “Voyages”, a sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer,[21] a Danish merchant mariner,[22] whom “Voyages” is generally considered to be about.[5] “Faustus and Helen” was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was “so damned dead”,[23] an impasse,[24] and characterized by a refusal to see “certain spiritual events and possibilities”.[25] Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create “a mystical synthesis of America”.[26] Edmund Wilson said Crane had “a style that is strikingly original—almost something like a great style, if there could be such a thing as a great style which was … not … applied to any subject at all.”[1]
Crane returned to New York in 1928 following a hurricane which left the Cuban residence damaged,[5] and began living with friends and taking temporary jobs as a copywriter, or living off unemployment and the charity of friends and his father. For a time he lived in Brooklyn at 77 Willow Street[27] until his lover, Opffer, invited him to live in Opffer’s father’s home at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights. Crane was overjoyed at the views the location afforded him.
Main article: The Bridge
The first known mention of The Bridge was in a 1923 letter to Gorham Munson in which he wrote:
I am ruminating on a new longish poem under the title of The Bridge which carries on further the tendencies manifest in ‘F and H.’ It will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish it as I see it now, so much time will be wasted in thinking about it.[5]
Crane moved to Paterson, New Jersey, in 1927. In 1928, he worked as a secretary for a stockbroker visiting California.[11]: 77 Crane’s mother, following her second marriage breakup, was living in the Los Angeles area. He revealed his homosexuality to her, causing a confrontation. Crane sneaked out on May 15, 1928, never to see her again. He later found out about the death of his grandmother, Elizabeth Hart, but his mother refused to pay him his $5,000 inheritance until he would return to live with her. He managed to convince her to send him the money and left for Europe towards late November[5] intending to live in Mallorca, but instead went first to London then to Paris.[5] In Paris in February 1929, Harry Crosby, who with his wife Caresse Crosby owned the fine arts press Black Sun Press, offered Crane the use of their country retreat, Le Moulin du Soleil in Ermenonville. They hoped he could use the time to concentrate on completing The Bridge. Crane spent several weeks at their estate where he wrote a draft of the “Cape Hatteras” section, a key part of his panegyric poem.[28] In late June that year, Crane returned from the south of France to Paris. Crosby noted in his journal, “Hart C. back from Marseilles where he slept with his thirty sailors and he began again to drink Cutty Sark.” Crane got drunk at the Cafe Select and fought with waiters over his tab. When the Paris police were called, he fought with them and was beaten. They arrested and jailed him, fining him 800 francs.[6] After Hart had spent six days in prison at La Santé, Crosby paid Crane’s fine and advanced him money for the passage back to the United States,[28] where he finished The Bridge.[6] In January 1930, the work was published by Black Sun Press in Paris and subsequently by Boni & Liveright in the United States in April.[5] The work received poor reviews, and Crane struggled with a sense of failure.[16]
His ambition to synthesize America was expressed in The Bridge, intended to be an uplifting counter to Eliot’s The Waste Land. The Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.[16] Crane found a place to start his synthesis in Brooklyn. Arts patron Otto H. Kahn gifted him $2,000 to begin work on the panegyric poem,[6] though he had requested a loan of $1,000.[5] After parting with the Opffers, Crane left for Paris in early 1929, but continued to struggle with his mental health.[6] His drinking had become worse during the late 1920s, while he was finishing The Bridge.[29]
Emerson c. 1857
–Ralph waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a prominent American writer, poet, philosopher, and lecturer who led the Transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century. His ideas on literature, religion, and philosophy influenced many writers, including Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson studied at Harvard Divinity School and became a minister, but made his living as a lecturer and schoolmaster. He is known for his publications Essays and Nature. Wikipedia.org
Born May 25, 1803, Boston, MA
Died April 27, 1882 (age 78 years), Concord, MA
Who thinks AI is a good thing? Not that many people, it turns out.
Published Jun 21, 2026 (Futurism.com)
Not that anyone in power is going to care, but there’s even more evidence that Americans are coming to overwhelmingly loathe AI — despite, or perhaps because, they’re using chatbots more than ever.
In a sweeping new poll conducted by Pew Research, only 16 percent of respondents said they believed AI will have a positive impact on society — a number as dismal as the perception of the tech.
Meanwhile, 49 percent of adults say they use AI chatbots like ChatGPT, which remains the most popular by a considerable margin, with a quarter saying they use the tools daily. That proportion is considerably higher than the 33 percent of American adults who said they used AI chatbots in 2024.
In other words, the tech’s widespread adoption isn’t helping its perception. A full 40 percent of respondents said they anticipate AI will have a negative impact on society, and 31 percent said it will impact them personally in a negative way, too.
This varies quite a bit by age. Gen Z adults, ages 18 to 29, were the most wary of AI, with 48 percent believing it’ll be negative for society. Yet they’re also the group that reported using AI the most, at 66 percent.
Interestingly, the 30-49 year olds and the 50-and-up brackets are more closely aligned, at 39 percent and 37 percent respectively viewing it as negative. They’re using AI less, though the dropoff between their usage is significant: 61 percent of 30-49 year olds said they used AI chatbots, while only 42 percent of 50-64 year olds did. It was less than a quarter for 65 years and older.
What’s driving this gap between perception and usage is unclear. You could argue that some feel compelled to use it, even when recognizing the tech’s shortcomings and the ethical dubiousness of the industry that’s building it. In fact, many are literally forced to use it at work, with bosses often more enthusiastic about the tech than workers are.
In any case, it’s a real problem for AI’s long-term staying power. Right now the industry is being propelled by hype and the mountains of cash that’re being pumped into it, while profits remain elusive. If no one likes AI years or decades from now, will there be enough customers to keep the industry running?
More on AI: Cop Accused of Using AI to Fake Evidence
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
~ Hsin Hsin Ming
Xinxin Ming, meaning literally: “Faith-Mind Inscription,” is a poem attributed to the Third Chinese Chán Patriarch Jianzhi Sengcan and one of the earliest Chinese Chan expressions of the Buddhist mind training practice. It is located in section T2010 of the Taisho Tripitaka. Wikipedia
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jun 22, 2026 Serena Roney-Dougal, PhD, received a doctoral degree from the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom, for a parapsychological dissertation. She is author of Where Science and Magic Meet and The Faery Faith: An Integration of Science and Spirit. She resides in Glastonbury, England, where she served on the Town Council. In this video, rebooted from 2020, she describes her commitment to the Green Party and to achieving certain ecological objectives in her local community in the coming years. She explains her passion for a sustainable future in terms of the Buddhist ideal of compassion as well as the global, indigenous sense of wholeness and oneness with nature. She recounts her struggles in understanding the perspectives of her political opponents. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on December 5, 2020)
(Image from press.uchicago.edu)
I have been thinking about the sexuality of Jesus since I was thirteen.
A man from South Korea writes. When he was sixten, in 1984, to be exact, he spontaneously entered a state of cosmic consciousness while sitting in the back row of a high school classroom. He was looking out the window, mesmerized by some shimmering sunlight reflecting off the side of a bright white building. Caught by the sight, he found this beauty and joy strangely expanding and growing inside him. And then,
[s]uddenly something weird happened to my body. I felt like thousands of hot small worms came into existence inside of me. At first, they appeared near my foot and crawled up my body, making my pleasure bigger and bigger. As if the dead body of an animal was full of tens of thousands of small maggots without leaving any space, my body was being fully occupied by all these hot and small creeping things. They made me feel that my body was boiling like hot water. In that way, my body was getting hotter and more aroused by the upward creeping of innumerable “energy” worms, and my whole body and mind were filled with even greater pleasure! And when those creeping and crawling things inside reached my whole body. It happened! Or more exactly, I exploded into It.
[William James] remained troubled, however, by how to reconcile this state of cosmic consciousness with the mundane needs of the ego or social self. He now writes often of the “trauma” of these initiatory states.
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” he prayed, directly from the biblical text [Song of Songs 1:1]. “And He did. I was overcome with the erotic passion of my Beloved.”
Put simply, the men who could receive such a teaching, who “had ears to hear,” were those whom we would today call gay, and those who could not receive such a teaching were those whom we would today call straight. Sexual orientation, in other words, determined the hierarchy of Jesus’s kingdom of heaven, and it was the gay man, not the heterosexual married man, who was clearly privileged by Jesus. This is certainly an imperfect and anachronistic way to gloss such a saying, but it is hardly, I think an inaccurate way.
What makes biblical love “spiritual,” then, is not its lack of sex (there is plenty of that), but its sublimation of the erotics of the Beloved into a systematic denial of social hierarchy and a radical affirmation of the man or woman “on the bottom.”
[F]urther down the path, one would learn to see the phenomenal world as a “mansion of fun” in which to take delight in the omnipresence and essential bliss of the divine.
Indeed, the word personality is derived form the Latin for “mask”: a persona is quite literally a “mask” that one speaks (sona) through (per).
Mythically put, it is suffering and a psyche’s subsequent dissociation that often grant access to the super- or x-tra of the hero. Thus it is the early horrible event of a little boy witnessing the murder of his parents outside a theater that psychologically produces the figure of Batman, and it is the trauma of watching his father accidentally murder his mother that produces the rage that triggers the transformation of Bruce Banner into the Hulk in the Hollywood movie.
[S]exuality and death are indeed two sides of the same mortal coin. Organisms engage in procreative sexual activity because they die. If there were no death, there would be no need of sexual activity.
[T]he attentive reader may have noticed that my earlier discussions of consciousness in the history of religions were actually discussions of consciousness and energy. The two, I would suggest, cannot be separated, ever.
—The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, by Jeffrey J. Kripal
