Transcription
Well, hello. How are you doing?
By the way, I get absolutely no kickbacks off of the sale of this book. I have a link below, but it's not any kind of affiliate link or anything like that. Okay.
I actually want to cover a few things in this video. And importantly, a lot of people have asked me this, and I've not made a video about it. I've told people there's a secret and it's really simple, but unless you know what to lock into, people won't see it. Some people read a whole book and then at the end of the book they'll go, "That book wasn't any good. Life is short. Time is valuable."
Um, I work seven days a week and I try to keep things piffy. And I said, and it sounds impossible to some people. It's like, you know, what's the secret to uh, you know, determining in 30 seconds usually takes me 30 seconds. Sometimes it takes just a minute or slightly a hair over a minute. And uh, that's all it does. Like, is this book any good or not? I'll go to the university library and I've been there quite a few years because I have all the good books and uh you know I could go through oh usually I'll do like 150 books at a time and that's I don't know two, two and a half hours and I'll take home like one or two or three books. The rest of them are trash. Other people like check out a book. I'm like, "Well, this is the topic I'm interested in." And they read the whole book and they ah book's no good. Well, I can do it in 30 seconds or a minute. I'm actually going to talk about that um in this video.
This is the dust jacket. I actually have two copies of this book. I've got this one earmarked in a few places over here. Um this is a Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition. And I have the link below uh for it. Um, did I mention it's printed on Italian-made glossy paper? I love this glossy paper a lot. Yeah, I'm a big uh book nerd, I guess. This is it uh without this dust jacket. Like to talk about it here in a second, but I'm going to talk about uh also two top books. And let me give you some examples of how you could determine if a book's any good or not in 30 seconds to a minute. Once you lock in on it and uh you know you put that uh filter in your brain you can actually determine really quickly. I got a couple books I'll use as an example just read a couple passages from and talk about the nature of why it's like yeah this is the book to get so you don't have to read a chapter or two of the whole book to if it's any good or not. Uh talk about Giordano Bruno and this book is out now and available and know once again I don't get any kickbacks from it. It's from Gallowglass uh books. I'm going to talk about top 13 books after this and I have a link for that also too in the description. Uh I got a list of top 13 books and remaining recommended books like to talk about that. The book that I wrote an introduction to called the Monad. There's 50 copies left. They told me I don't get any kickbacks from either that either. I was paid to write the introduction to that book, but no sales of that book in any way, shape, or form come to me. So, I have to say that again.
Um, the Giordano book is printed on a slick paper. Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition. He died. Well, he didn't die. You know, they took care of him, shall we say, in 1600 by Francis A. Yates. They're limiting this one to 2,500 copies. It has a sewn binding, is printed on 100-pound Italian-made glossy paper. It's acid-free and it's printed in Canada. There's tons and tons and tons, not just some colored uh pictures. I love glossy acid-free colored pictures and charts in it. And the cover design by Max Ller and the interior book design by Faran Zarazzak. 9.6 x 6 in, 536 pages. Giordano Bruno was born in 1548. I'll make this really simple, you know, interested in discussing the simple facts. And he lived until 1600. Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines including eternal uh um you know uh Hades uh the Trinity and the divinity of Christ and uh you know the skepticism over the uh of the purity of uh Mary and transubstantiation. I'm going to get into transubstantiation. It's a philosophical point I'm not going to get into here. Bruno's pantheism wasn't taken lightly by the church, nor was his teachings on metempsychosis regarding reincarnation of the soul or polygonis and uh Greek. The Inquisition found him guilty and they they how do I say this lightly? They toasted him like a marshmallow at Campo De' Fiori in 1600, which was what 200, 400, excuse me, 425 years ago. um after he perished of course at the hands of the Catholic Church. He gained considerable fame being particularly celebrated in the 19th and early 20th century uh by commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science which he was. Historians, and accurately so this time, historians are usually wrong, or the opinion uh that uh his uh trial for heresy was not a response to his cosmological views but rather a response uh to his views on the church. And of course that's the case and his a views on afterlife and uh transmigration. Uh Bruno was deeply influenced obviously so by presocratic impoticles, neoplatonism, renaissance hermeticism and the book of Genesis, likely to Origen's commentary on Genesis um uh religiosity and uh the metaphysics thereof surrounding the hellenistic concept of her strengtos especially. This is uh uh some of the seminal extracts of like uh expulsion of the triumphant beast which is the one that the church really went after him over. I don't know if you're familiar with uh with that one but Bruno's infinite universe was filled with a substance, not literally a substance of course, quote unquote pure air, but not literally air, the ether or spiritus that offered no resistance to heavenly bodies. Um that's actually not true. Gravity is an anti-patial vector. But I know what he's actually saying. He's correct, but the minutiae of which he's incorrect about. But that's okay. That's a matter of uh abstruse fine point of field theory. One of the most fascinating figures of the Renaissance and they toasted him like a marshmallow for heresy by the Inquisition um in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600. The primary evidence against him was uh yeah a book, the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, a daring indictment of the church that abandoned the references to classical Greek mythology, Egyptian religion, especially Isis worship, hermeticism and genuine magic. There's a lot of books on magic and they're just garbage, they're not actually about true magic, but Giordano Bruno's writings are about genuine magic and that's a very important point that I don't think anybody makes about Bruno, not that I'm aware of.
Giordano Bruno and the hermetic tradition by Francis Yates says, "The definitive book on Renaissance occult studies, hermeticism, and Renaissance philosophy serves as a great introduction to the intellectual milieu of the Renaissance, but also too bridges the gap between late Renaissance magical thinking, literal magic, not figurative magic, and the dawn of enlightenment, rationality. Specifically, this is neoplatonic ministic Sophia Perennis. I don't know if you know what Sophia Perennis is, but this is the perennialism of the dialectic engagement as to the nature of reality. AB extra to all the religious mumbo jumbo and hoo-ha that's out there. And that of course since he was interested in understanding these things from the perspective of true metaphysics and philosophy is one of really the primary reasons why the church roasted him. Um book profiles fascinating outsider Giordano Bruno lectured on cosmology, philosophy, memory among other topics. A great one is uh his article uh book, excuse me, it's called the memory, the shadow of uh uh the shadows of thought. I think it's called the Shadows of Thought. It was a great one. Um he was held captive and interrogated for seven years by the Roman Catholic Inquisition. Uh refused to recant any of his ideas on theology and the universe, cosmology and said uh was substantially of course roasted, remains a martyr to this day for syncretism, mysticism, free speech, genuine magic and genuine science alike. Francis Yates puts uh forth the notion that Giordano Bruno was operating within the hermetic tradition which of course he was. Um this really actually is an important work to have. I suggest also to uh Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast by Giordano Bruno. Um it's always important also too to look at the great works of people that the church considered to be not heretics, which would be like a simple-minded heretic, but ultimate uh heresy against doctrine. Um kind of like Martin Luther. But Martin Luther was only quoting the Bible and he knew more about the Bible than the people that were put as experts and judges over him and which really really infuriated him. Everybody should actually watch uh the movie Luther. It's quite a quite a brilliant exposition.
Uh like to show you like one of the beautiful and you could actually look at this for hours. And this is the only drawing that I know of. I got it bookmarked here with a little towel. Huh. that I know of that actually shows you um the two lights and the two darknesses. Um I forget when this one was done uh from B Rome like here's some of the I can't flip through and show you all the pictures, but there's a lot of actual uh color illustrations. Uh I love that slick glossy acid-free paper. Basically lasted for durable internity. And as a genuine book expert, as so far as the binding and how well this is made and uh the gilding on the edge, made in Canada, acid-free archival. Slick. I love slick acid archival. I don't even have to have my eyes open to know what kind of paper it is. Made in Italy and printed in Canada. This is a wonderful book. It sounds like I'm actually trying to sell this book, but I'm not. Trust me, I don't get whatever number I people buy or don't buy off of this video. I don't get a dime, which is important. I'm not praising a book because, you know, I'm going to get something on the back end of it. I'm not like that. There's tons and tons of illustrations like this. Anybody would actually get a lot um out of reading it. Here's more just randomly flipping through. It's uh this is a fine printing. You don't see books like this uh printed uh um like this anyway. You do, but they cost a fortune. You have to go to like a used bookstore and find something printed like from the 1970s or 80s from Oxford uh University Press or Princeton University publications where they it's not about just the book. It's about how it's printed, how it's bound, the dust cover, what type of paper it's put on. I got a lot of really important Oh, here's a great one. I was trying to look for it. There we go. This is great. The detail on it and the printing and the pitch point of this illustration is really good. This, of course, is from Robert Fludd. And we go. Anyway, you'd really love this book. I mean that genuinely.
I like to go on to the secrets of a book evaluation. And I'm going to grab a couple books over here to show you that. But once again, here's the cover art. It's from Gallowglass Books. And I have the link below in the description and also to as a pinned comment in this video. So here's the secret. I'm going to give you a couple examples. I'm going to grab this one. And this is some really heavy stuff. And I'm going to talk about some books of recommendation. And I have that link below also too in the description. It's right below uh the PayPal link. You see a top recommended books and there's a link there. And this is actually from Dr. Osei D. Jeff Aminko, he had two PhDs. His brilliance calls causality, electromagnetic induction, and gravitation. There's a lot of really, really heavy equations in this. He's quite a genius. But he actually questioned, he secretly in his academic way questioned relativism because it's absolute garbage of course, but this type of pathiness, if you actually listen and see the way it's written, it's uh very analytical, but super super concise. But as we've seen, neither Maxwell's equations nor their solutions indicate the existence of causal link between electric and magnetic fields. Therefore, we must conclude electromagnetic fields a dual entity always having an electric and magnetic component simultaneously created by their common sources time variable electric uh charges and currents. Coordinate these equations. These are Maxwell's equations and time variable systems. Electromagnetic fields are always created simultaneously. They actually extract the piffy points of what you want to know. Some books you got to read like 50 pages like, "Oh, there's one point. There's the needle in the haystack." People like this and I can spot it. And if you know what to look for, you'll be able to spot it very quickly. You can literally evaluate a book in 30 seconds. This garbage book. Put it down. Grab another book. Okay. I need another 30 seconds to evaluate it. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yep. A minute. Sometimes it takes me two minutes. I'm going to be honest. The average time is less than a minute for you to evaluate it. I've actually got a list of little fine points here. But let me go on to um this is a great book called Metaphysics, a collection of articles by Dr. Anandi Kit Kumar Swami. I was friends with his son Rama Pikuraswami, gave me the rights to all of his father's works as long as I gave them away for free. uh liberation mukti is distinguished from salvation as something other than a perpetual and ideal being oneself as it were part of the world picture. Liberation in the fullest sense of the word liberation is not merely from phenomenal becoming but from any numinal determination whatsoever. And of course there's a footnote and basically every page, look at this a lot. And this guy knew 27 languages. He wrote like 54 books, hundreds of articles. This stuff is really nearly half of uh the pages of the article stuff he's write. You notice that the notes uh here take up three-quarters of the page. Right? The page is here, but the notes for the page are way down here. I got a mosquito flying through here. It's mosquito season. Hello, Mr. Mosquito. I'm going to edit that out of this video. I'm sure I can edit out that flying mosquito. But, uh, nearly every page is like that. Just copious notes. You got Greek and Sanskrit below and prayer. Like I said, he knew 27 languages. And his son, who I knew, unfortunately dead, said that of all the books and articles that he wrote, this is how he typed. He was not really a typist, but he used a a uh old-fashioned, you know, paper and the typewriter, two fingers. He did all his typing, not like, you know, I went to um class for learning typing. Hello, Mr. Mosquito. And at least he didn't bite me. Uh, you know, I got up to like 60 some words a minute. I was the only guy in my class at the time. the the rest of the class was full of ladies. And now I see that mosquito. I'm like starting to itch as if it bit me. It's just one of those psycho-reactive things. You see a mosquito, you like start to itch as if it bit you. But he did all of his writing with two fingers. Very, very precise. A lot of deep thought. Here's some of the secrets of book evaluation you could do in a half a minute to two minutes max. The number of notes, copious copious notes, which I just showed you. Multiple language notes. People that can speak at minimum four languages. That doesn't mean they're not writing something intelligent. But if it's on the analytical stuff, metaphysics, philosophy, science, they have to have an enormous amount of notes. The good stuff to read is not some goofball, you know, spewing what it is he thinks about something. Uh the person you want to read and you you can determine it in just a few seconds. I mean, this guy, you know, half of his stuff, look at this. Look at this. This is mostly notes here. There's mostly notes over here. The page is here and this page over here is that big. The good people and this is the same way I write. They have looked at every book essentially on that topic. They've drawn in all the points. They make uh really precise analytical super condensed like soup. Remember the old soup you used to get and you used to shake the can and it would come out like sludge, like everything is condensed. You had to add water to it. Well, you're looking for the condensed books. Life is too short. This guy and people like him. They can put more in two pages than the average uh uh uh uh goof will put in the whole book. Like I got more out of five pages than this guy got out of 400 pages in his book. Look at this. This is really important. The notes are just like a gold mine. Look at the pages up here, but all the notes for the page are three-quarters of the page. And it's small pitch fl. It's like an eight-point font. I've got Greek, Latin, poly, and Sanskrit reference to the g the GA coin Greek. These are the people that have poured their heart and soul into the topic and they pull out only the condensed stuff. You'll be able to spot that quickly when you know what you're looking for.
Number three, like extensive notes, research, and sourcing. It's written really, really piffy, dense matter, just like Plotinus. Um, uh, dialectic writing, not so much, but concise, logical, rational disassembly of complex subjects because somebody has looked at every major book ever written on the topic. You'll examine it, dissect it, either support it, or deconstruct it, and trash it. And you only have to read four or five pages of their stuff on any particular subject to really get to the heart of the matter. Retroductive logical analysis on a subject, which is what Kumar Swami does. Look at this. The reason why this book is so crinkled is I think I fell asleep once when I was in the tub reading it and it got wet like this. You know, some of these highlightings that I have and oh, his notes are just absolutely brilliant. I mean, it's a gold mine. When there's more of a gold mine in two pages of notes than there is in most people's entire book, then you've really got something. You get my point? Um, academic garbage books never reach a point. That's actually how they maintain neutrality. Well, we can look at it from this perspective and we can look at it from that perspective. They never draw a point or a conclusion because it's an academic trick that they use. If they draw a point or conclusion, then somebody could come after them. You drew a conclusion. Boom. If they take both sides and they're like jello or, you know, a gummy worm. Well, you know, we can look at it like this, but we can also look at it like this. There's never a conclusion. That's how academicians write. Uh they don't draw conclusions. They don't present a string of evidences, and they certainly don't. Uh, you know, most pages on this book have at least two or three languages in the footnotes. Extensively sourced and you could use that as a springboard for all the other good stuff because good stuff is emanation from other good stuff. In other words, this person knows where all the good stuff is and they mention it in their notes. You can find this in book so and so blah blah blah. Wow, that's great. I got a gold mine in just the notes. Not the book. No, just the notes. um Thomas Taylor's books uh like the Parmenides, I think there's 150 pages of notes. If you never read the Parmenides translated by Thomas Taylor you could just like rip out just the notes on the back end of it, rip it out and you could just you get a hundred times more by reading the notes of Thomas Taylor on the Parmenides for example than you would by trying to slowly read the Parmenides. You get my point? These are the secrets of uh book analysis where I could determine in 30 seconds to 2 minutes max. You know, take it home with me, i.e. read it and pour through it or just go like, "Yeah, there we go." Not that book, but you know what I mean.
Top 13 most books. There's countless thousands of people taking my recommendation on this. Number one is The Periphyseon on the Division of Nature by John the Scot. I can't tell you how important it is to read the Periphyseon. You can get a better education and build a better toolbox in your brain by reading the Periphyseon than you can from countless years of school. The Enneads of Plotinus, every Christian mystic, including Giordano Bruno, by the way, were all openly or secretively deep, deep readers of Plotinus. And that's not my opinion, girlfriend. That is a fact. Fact, fact, fact. Um the Upanishads of four volumes with the notes and commentary by Swami Nikhilananda. The Principal Upanishads written and translated by, not written by but translated by with copious notes by the way. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan who also used to be president of uh India. The Universal One by Walter Russell. There's a book everybody should have. The Universal One, The Unknown God written by my friend, the only living author that I respect, a wonderful older lady who's Irish with a thick Irish accent that retired to Uganda. It's called The Unknown God by Didiri Caribbean. You can find that on Amazon. She has many other really good books. She's written quite extensively about Giordano Bruno also. Um two primary works of Adi Shankara from Shish Karachia, the Thousand Teachings, sort of the Upadesha Sahasra and the other book that's genuinely attributed to him which is the Vivarana Muni. Once again, this is in the description on top recommended books. Philosophy is a Rite of Rebirth on Genuine Original Theology written by Algirdas Julien Udavinis. Uh also two by the same author, Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism. That one book which I was just showing you, the Metaphysics, a collection of articles by Dr. Anandi Kit Kumar Swami. Other top recommended books, any and all translations from the Greek by Thomas Taylor. The works of Iamblichus, Proclus, the Dascalikos which is a very tiny book you could read in a day. Everybody should read the Dascalikos of Albinus um translated by Thomas Taylor. Um the sign, these are all in a series. The Significance of Neoplatonism which is a collection of articles by different people. Neoplatonism and Nature, Neoplatonism in Indian Thought. Neoplatonism in Indian Philosophy, the three-volume set of Meister Eckhart. Yeah. Um the books of Porphyry such as Launching Points of the Realm of the Mind. He was the disciple and assistant to Plotinus uh himself. Presocratic Philosophers compiled by J.S. Kirk and Raven. It's a collection. It's really really good book to have. It's called the Presocratic Philosophers. Countless thousands of uh of passages in their translation from the ancient Greek by many different uh ancient true philosophers. All translated writings from the Neoplatonists to Iamblichus, Theology of Arithmetic. Everybody would love that one. That's a really ancient work by Iamblichus. Translated by Robin Waterfield. You could read that in a day. Everybody should have that book by the way. Ride the Tiger by Julius Evola. Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola. Um the other books by Kumar Swami. Time and Eternity, Traditional Art and Symbolism which is a collection of articles. What is Civilization by Kumar Swami which is also too a collection of articles that are completely different from one another. Guardians of the Sunor. Same thing, different articles, same author. Anandi Kit Kumar Swami. Very, very brilliant person. I do recommend this book highly. I don't get any kickbacks from it. The link is below to Gallowglass Books. Apparently, they have 2,500 printed copies. I have two copies. I'm going to give one to my friend. The other one, obviously, I'm keeping. But that's the actual secrets uh to uh determining. And once you know what to spot, you'll zero in on it like a hawk. You're like, "Oh, now I see what he's talking about." The rejection ratio were um you know, 2 minute or less evaluation uh ultimately ends up being a dead end. you know, if I put like another four or five minutes in it, it's like less than one in 500 once you actually lock in to that six or seven point step on the pathiness, the notes, multiple uh uh the retro logic, uh you know, this wishy-washy academic way of speaking. Uh where there's more in the notes than most people's books. It's like forget about the book. I'm just going to rip out the notes. like Thomas Taylor for example or even Kumar Swami, the Metaphysics book, I can just cut out the notes and I get a hundred times more from just the notes than I would from most people's books, you'll know what to spot when you see it, like oh
I see it now, and you get faster and faster and faster, and it just takes me 30 seconds to a minute usually, and that's the secret of super fast book evaluation. I guarantee it works.
It's not going to happen overnight for you to zero in and lock in like that like I do. It's going to take a little bit of practice, as does anything.
I hope you like these videos. Any donation is warmly welcome. Check out the Gordono book below. I'm not connected to the sales of that book. I got like 50 copies of the Monad left, which I wrote the introduction for, on that link.
And I hope you have a lovely week. Contact me if you got any questions. Lux veras.