Descriptions:
Video Description
“”Books can be quiet companions on the path, and in this warm tour Lyam Christopher shares twenty titles that shifted the course of his life. He begins with a gentle warning not to treat a book like a magic button. Change, he says, is often already ripening inside you, and the right book arrives as a catalyst rather than a cause. The list itself reads like a treasure map: practical manuals on astral projection, clear guides to Kabbalah, and the deeper works that reach all the way back to ancient theurgy in Alexandria.”
“The selection moves from magic into myth and mind. Joseph Campbell opens the vast world of story, while James Hillman turns psychology inside out and asks what the many gods of the imagination have to teach. The practice of presence appears through teachers like Eckhart Tolle and the Tibetan masters, and the plain joy of being is offered not as a goal but as a way of leaning into whatever is already unfolding. These are not books of distant theory; they are books meant to be lived with, marked up, and returned to again.”
“The most striking thread is the story of where magic really comes from. Long before priesthood and civilization, the shaman lived beside nature and learned its signals directly, from plants, water, cold, and the sun. He recounts how the growing city-state pushed those shamans to the edges and replaced them with priests of order and control. To recover some of that lost aliveness, he names the breathing practices and body-mind work woven through Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation. The closing note is beautifully simple: your imagination is not a small room inside your head, but a vast world that holds you within it.”
Full Video Transcript
Okay, we’re going to try this again. I did one recording of this already and the sound decided suddenly not to work. So the microphone wasn’t working. Hmm. All right. So this week, we’re going to talk about books, in particular, life changing reads. So I’m going to share with you some books that appeared to have a strong effect on my life, that changed my life.
um remember that when we talk magic uh we want to challenge the common notion of cause and effect as
a horizontal phenomenon of this causing this okay and think of things more vertically so really what
happened as i read these books that as i was reading them a certain change emerged so i was
reading the book over here and then a change happened over here somehow related to that
event not necessarily caused by it okay another way of looking at things like this is that when
you are ripe for things to start changing in your life there can be a sort of catalyst that comes
along that triggers that change or has something to do with it does not necessarily directly cause
it the reason I’m saying this is because as you as I present these books and as you look at them
try not to look at them oh I should buy that book that book will change my life
let’s not look at them that way okay we’ll look at them as possible triggers
for changes that are already in the works for you possibly okay so I make no
guarantees about any of these all right I’d like to say this was the first book
I ever bought on magic but the first book on magic I ever purchased was
actually uh alistair crowley’s magic and theory and practice and didn’t have a high opinion of
it then i don’t have a high opinion of that book now crowley is very interesting but also
challenging to read because he puts up a lot of smoke screens and self-aggrandizing
traps for the unwary all right so the the second book i ever bought on magic was the art and
practice of astral projection by Ophiel this was probably back in 1986 something
like that and this is a great book because well I began practicing the the
exercise in it right away and I got results in about a month and the the
interesting thing is that it was using the dream method and the interesting
thing is that in the last chapter of this book there is a an introduction to
some Golden Dawn techniques and a reference to the Golden Dawn. So I
quickly graduated from the practice of this book to various Golden Dawn
ceremonial magic disciplines. I highly recommend this book. I think if you get
it you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the style of the
author’s writing. A hugely impactful book, Dion Fortune’s Mystical Kabbalah.
simply because it’s probably the best book on Kabbalah I could recommend if
anyone knows of a better one put it in the comments down below let me know I’d
be interested in it okay I have some kosher Kabbalah books kosher Kabbalah is
the Jewish Kabbalah that are really really awesome which I could also
recommend but I’m not going to go into those books here this is a hermetic
Kabbalah book which is pretty much the type of Kabbalah that was practiced by
the Renaissance magicians and the Golden Dawn. And so this was required reading for me when I was
in the Golden Dawn in the neophyte grade. And I spent a great deal of time outlining this in
heavy detail. I got like a 90 page outline of this book. Also learned a lot about outlining
how to do that. Oops, I didn’t keep up with the slides. Okay, Mystical Kabbalah, that was the
second book another book the tree of life by israel rigardi this is a fantastic overview
of ceremonial magic pretty much describing what it is linking it back to hermetic magic of the
hellenistic age in alexandria alexandria where the library burned ancient alexandria and uh
He describes the magic of the golden dawn as the same magic as theurgy, the theurgy that the magicians of the Hellenistic age practiced, and he relates it back to the magician Iamblichus, which we’ll talk about in a bit.
Okay, so this is a great overview of ceremonial magic.
It doesn’t go back to the ultimate roots of magic,
just to the roots of magic in Alexandria and in the Hellenistic Age.
Okay, and sort of from ancient Greece and ancient Egypt.
Okay, we will talk about the roots of magic before that
and just a wee bit further down the road as we do some other books.
This is written by Israel Rigardi, the same author.
It is the One Year Manual, and he wrote this when he was quite a bit older, and the style here is much more modern.
In the book The Tree of Life, One Year Manual, in The Tree of Life, the style is very much heavily influenced by the Victorian authors that Vigardi himself had probably read.
And so it was a very flamboyant style of writing, which I happen to like.
I think it’s fantastic.
He’s pretty good with words.
here the the style is much more it’s like clean straightforward um uh modernized uh it’s still
good he’s still a good writer when he does that uh this book was very impactful for me because
it has an exercise in it it’s got numerous exercises it’s got these exercises are basically
designed to get you a spiritual experience within one year like he makes a promise right
and one of the exercises in this book i found particularly powerful and that was the practice
of the presence of god it’s a poor breathing exercise where you visualize your body as covered
in pores that are breathing along with your breathing exercise i’ve already gone over that
exercise in previous a couple of previous videos and i discuss it in depth in an article in forbidden
realms that article is called the insanity of geometry okay i go in depth into the sort of
poor breathing exercise very powerful some of you have told me it’s extremely powerful as well it’s
a great exercise for putting you further down the path on the road to enlightenment and another one
that was very impactful for me is the alchemical tarot this book came with a tarot deck and that
tarot deck is a is a collector’s item now uh it’s on sale at the local uh occult bookstore here in
south florida where i live i think it’s like 250 for the book and the and the tarot deck and you
can see his style is very very clean almost like stained glass but not stained glass it’s got a
very clean style of tarot that’s not nearly the best card right there it’s there are other cards
that are spectacular in the deck but the main impact of this deck for me was the
booklet that came with it it’s fairly substantial and it describes alchemy in
terms of the trumps of the Tarot okay this is a psychological interpretation
of alchemy and as I’ve said in a previous video I tend to view alchemy
psychologically I am well aware that many of the descriptions in alchemy do
describe what physically happened in a laboratory so that’s all very interesting but when carl jung
explored alchemy he he wasn’t trying to rebrand it as psychological work that we can undergo
spiritually let’s say um he was simply delving into the psychological dimensions of the work
that the alchemists were doing and what he uncovered was that this kind of work can be done
without a laboratory without working with sulfur or mercury or antimony or things like that
this book gave me the first clear understanding of what alchemy seems to be about in regards to
sulfur mercury and salts those those ideas alchemy can be very difficult to study because there are
different takes on it there are different symbols that refer to the same thing
alchemy is actually quite simple in its essence and can be extremely complicated in its literature
i do go quite a bit into alchemy in my forbidden realms articles particularly when i talk about
sexual tantra those articles have quite a bit of basic alchemy in them and some direct pointing
teachings too in regard to alchemy and sexual tantra okay there’s there’s quite a lot of reveals
in that article too about the nature of sexuality and uh what’s really required for tantric work
this book was really impactful to me mainly because uh any of his books were are pretty
good when it comes to understanding kabbalah okay zev ben shimon halevi also known as uh warren
kenton i think he’s a british guy uh he probably adopted these pseudo jewish name maybe to lend
more credit credibility to himself as an author about kabbalah maybe i don’t know um but uh this
describes a human being in terms of the four worlds okay more than that okay quite in depth
is it accurate when it describes anatomy and things like that not necessarily uh there’s some
things there’s some medical things in here that are outdated it doesn’t really matter because you
what you’re learning here is how to work with a system of correspondences in the kabbalah okay
i was required to also outline this book in depth so i studied it quite intensely
and if you want kabbalah to be something that you realize in your bones as opposed to just
intellectually uh working with books like this and studying them in depth can really be helpful
and this one was particularly helpful to me yeah and it is not um this this is what i i would still
consider this to be hermetic Kabbalah, not necessarily the kosher style Kabbalah. I do
have some Jewish texts in Kabbalah. If you’re interested in that kind of stuff, I would
recommend getting some commentaries on the Zohar or on Lurianic Kabbalah, if you’re interested
in that kind of stuff. Lurianic Kabbalah is truly mind-blowing. Another really valuable
text um theurgy and the soul uh so as regardi was talking about magic ceremonial magic and its very
formal style comes from its roots in cities like alexandra and in the hellenistic age
basically lots of greek deities and priests learning how to invoke them how to animate
statues with them supposedly um learning how to uh transform themselves to become more divine
more godlike okay theurgy literally means god working okay this is a fantastic book for that
but still it doesn’t get to the ultimate roots of magic where does magic really come from
uh it magic was already existing in the city of ancient alexandria and uh so it came into that
city and got refined by people who knew a lot about greek philosophy and the egyptian religion
it’s a bit of a misnomer to say the egyptians had a religion okay we’ll talk about that in a bit
what is religion and what is magic prometheus rising if you like having your mind blown
this book becomes highly recommended robert anton wilson is the author he was a friend of
timothy leary he was also a friend of my teacher who knew them both and you get a lot of timothy
leary’s psychology in this book as sort of a framework but you get a lot of um robert anton
wilson’s incredible wit as well and uh he takes a lot of your standard everyday assumptions about
the world and pretty much blasts them to bits turns them inside out turns them upside down
and you’re not sure what reality is anymore when Wilson is done with you.
So a really good read.
Not so shocking to me anymore.
After I saw this one, I thought, well, I’ve got it now.
I’ve got the nature of reality.
Well, there are further books that came along that kept challenging
some of my assumptions about reality, and I’ll share those with you too.
All right.
This is one of them.
Revisioning Psychology.
Sorry about the glare there.
Kind of hard to see.
James Hillman is the author. James Hillman is the father of archetypal psychology, depth psychology.
He’s essentially a Jungian analyst, scholar, neo-Jungian, you could say, and quite a giant in
his field. And this book heavily criticizes everything that had been done in psychology
up until his day. So in other words, it really tears apart a lot of the assumptions that have
been made by psychologists a lot of the errors that they make it’s quite a mind-blowing book
and as he does that he pretty much challenges a lot of the standard narratives that have been
screwing up psychology and those standard narratives are the essence of your worldview
so your worldview also will come tumbling down if you read this book okay probably it certainly did
with me. And I still value reading him very highly. You can always get something out of this
book, something you can keep around and come back to. This next book I should warn you about.
It’s part of what I call the success club. So there are many self-help authors,
self-transformation authors, business authors, biohacking authors who give you techniques for
for leveling up, improving your productivity, getting an edge over your competition,
getting some extra mojo, all these kinds of things. Biohack your brain to become smarter
than everybody else, okay? A lot of these things are geared towards making you stand out in relation
to others. It’s all well and good. That’s fine, okay? Just remember that you can sort of get
addicted to this um maximize your performance perspective uh so when it comes to looking at
your mind body try to try to be more respectful to it than some of these authors are okay
and don’t try to extract as much out of it as you possibly can as much don’t try to extract
as much profit out of your mind and body as you can okay your mind and body are not your slaves
okay there is no you really anyway that’s so who’s this master who’s risen above mind and body
trying to maximize the yield it gets from these things okay so be very careful with these types
of books that in that hack your performance okay that being said this is fantastic because
you know wisdom and charisma are sort of the same entity they’re just sort of different sides of the
same coin. And Olivia Fox Caban explores charisma as not necessarily something that you’re born with
because that’s the standard belief, but it’s something that you can learn as a skill that
you can learn. And the cool thing is as you learn these charisma tricks, you learn how to become
more charming, more magnetic, a more powerful leader. You also learn about a lot about human
nature and your own um fears and your own uh psychological blocks things like that so it’s
a fantastic book for that uh and it’s always nice to be more charming right okay so uh yeah it’s a
it’s a life-changing book uh the techniques presented in here some of them are not very
not hard at all they’re super easy to do and they get very quick results i talk about um the charisma
myth in the article called how to project power in the forbidden realms i also talk a little bit
about the alpha male alpha female phenomenon like uh what what’s a true alpha male or a true alpha
female really like what kind of behaviors do they exhibit okay um you might want to check that out
to learn magic it’s essential that you know mythology there are mythologies that are
governing you right now as we speak. They have you hypnotized and you’re probably not even aware
of them. Even if you weren’t raised Christian, there are many Christian philosophies embedded
in our Western culture that are pretty much lording over you right now and controlling
your behavior. There are values that are implanted, images that are implanted in you
by your upbringing, whether it’s religious or not, that you get these kinds of values
programmed into you and they just kind of run and you don’t you’re not even aware that
you have a choice that’s that’s the christian myth okay there are other myths as well that are
also percolating around the world and pretty much taking people over controlling their behavior
the more you become aware of these myths the less they are able to control you okay it’s kind of
like every myth has a particular framework or perspective associated with it,
or a number of perspectives, okay?
So to learn about myth, you should go to the granddaddy of all mythologists, Joseph Campbell.
The Power of Myth, I recommend because it’s an easy read.
It’s actually put together by Bill Moyers, who interviewed Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell himself is a difficult read, okay?
He’s got a very cumbersome way of writing.
sometimes um if uh if you’re feeling really clever then he’s okay um but if um if you haven’t had any
coffee then maybe um wait till later to to read joseph campbell if you like a challenging read
i recommend joseph campbell’s entire series the masks of god okay particularly primitive mythology
and creative mythology those two uh for magical purposes for magical learning stuff about magic
There’s also a book written by Campbell himself without Bill Moyers.
It’s called Transformations of Myth Through Time.
That’s pretty accessible, not too difficult to read.
That’s another one I recommend.
This is probably the easiest and nice introduction to Joseph Campbell and his life work.
He explored so, so many myths of the world’s major and minor cultures,
and he showed how there is a sort of biological psychological and underlying unity to them all
yeah um there’s another book i could recommend um there’s another book called wired for story
which i also might recommend um the reason why we like stories there’s some biological and
instinctive reasons why there’s neuroscience behind it so yeah that’s interesting this is
more of a psychological like Jungian
Freudian look at mythology
but you could also do another book
called
Wired for Story
I didn’t put that on here
but that just came
to mind. Alright, the Holy Grail
I make several references
to the Holy Grail in my articles
I think in the Kabbalah Magic
book too. I think
it’s a very important subject
this book
some of you book collectors
are going to cry when they see this because i don’t i tend not to keep the jackets of books
so um so there it is the holy grail by malcolm godwin this is a fantastic book there’s the cover
um it has every every couple of pages is a single article and so you can read one of these per day
pretty much yeah that’s like a but you can read like one of these every single day you can see
it’s beautifully illustrated. And this goes into all aspects of the Grail. It goes into the pagan
roots, pagan origins. It goes into the stone that fell from heaven, which I do talk about in my
Forbidden Realms article called The Philosopher’s Stone. And it goes into the Christianization of
the Grail myth and the Arthurian cycle of the Grail. It also tells you what the Grail is. I
also tell you that too in some of my articles on forbidden realms all right this book so um
the kind of teachings that i think all of us value the most in regard to spirituality are
direct pointing teachings there’s a famous saying by lao tzu that says those who know do not speak
and those who speak do not know and we tend to interpret that as well if you’re talking then
you’re all talking crap basically right because you don’t know anything those who know keep silent
about what they know no that’s not necessarily true um what that means is that uh primarily
if you are talking about something the thing that you know is not in those words okay so the language
you’re using cannot really capture what you’re what you’re talking about if you’re talking about
the true nature of reality, okay? However, your words can lead your listener into certain states
and certain images and things like that that point to the nature of reality, okay? It’s very
important. So those who speak aren’t really talking directly about what they know. They’re
indirectly talking about what they know. They’re pointing at it, okay? So when somebody talks about
the true nature of reality, don’t pick apart their words. Try to look where they’re pointing.
okay and so this guy is astonishingly good at direct pointing teachings lama
he died not too long ago he was a living buddha as far as i’m concerned you know there are others
that are still alive that are supposedly enlightened like he was um this is not a
particularly um appealing cover um i understand why there are so many books with um tibetan
masters uh on the cover like this photos of them um if you’ve ever met somebody who’s enlightened
uh their presence is uh life-changing they don’t even have to say anything and so somebody probably
you know met this guy and thought that putting his picture on the cover would have the same
impact that uh that the person has that this person has in person that lama yeshe has in
person but um so uh yeah it could have been a better cover um fantastic book i i really like
the mahamudra form of tibetan tantra it’s a form of buddhism that is considered supposedly supposedly
the most advanced um not really it’s simply the most most effective form of buddhism that
there is yes people do have to be ripe for it they have to be ready for it and often they’re
not ready, but there are intermediate or earlier forms of Mahamudra practice that you can work
through in order to get to essence Mahamudra. And this guy’s really good about talking about
how to meditate and what happens when meditation brings you to the brink of enlightenment.
He describes it very well. It’s a little difficult at points because the true nature of reality is
very subtle uh but he manages very well to to point out um sort of where it’s going this is a
great survey uh this is also a buddhist it’s a the secret of the vajra world by reginald ray
okay uh it’s a survey of the most advanced practices in buddhism he’s got two other books
before this that taught the first one talks about the um theravada school of buddhism that’s kind
buddhism as the buddha taught it in his time and then there’s the mahayana school of buddhism that
he talks about in the second book and in the third book he talks about the tantrayana or the
vajrayana school of buddhism which is the magical forms of buddhism that involve ritual
visualization powerful voice techniques very similar to golden dawn magic okay so fantastic
book if you gravitate towards buddhism especially the magical forms of buddhism buddhism not as a
religion necessarily but as a discipline spiritual discipline and so i don’t have i don’t have the
power of now i loaned it to somebody and i’m not sure who it was so there’s the cover a very
transformative book for many many people for me um it was not that big a deal many of the insights i
already had. But the biggest deal for me came in the first few pages when he describes his
enlightenment experience, when Eckhart Tolle describes the night that he achieved enlightenment.
He basically describes what I call a letting go attack. And in his case, he had a letting go
attack that completely allowed him to surrender. And so his ego died, and then he emerged from that
experience supposedly enlightened and if you see videos of him when he especially when he was
younger uh yeah radiant very radiant presence very uh very humorous very uh reassuring very
kind very got a twinkle in the eye you know interesting um presence uh he’s getting kind
of old now he’s still a very compelling teacher even now though and one spirit medicine another
book where the jacket has come off sorry guys uh one spirit medicine this one really made a big
impact on my life because it led me into biohacking and earlier i said well where where uh where did
where does religion where does magic originally come from okay um regardis was saying sort of
that ceremonial magic came out of alexandria out of theurgy and the practices of iamblichus
and but well no magic obviously came from much earlier than that it was pretty much practiced
by shamans by our um our hunter gatherer hunter gatherer ancestors by the animistic worldview
okay um and once i i read some of campbell i wrote some of joseph campbell and i i started
to get an inkling about what happened between religion and magic and i was and it’s like that
can’t be right and then once i read one spirit medicine i it confirmed for me it is correct
so apparently what happened when civilization developed um the shamans were really quite a
pain to deal with because they weren’t interested in maintaining civil order in a city state they
were interested in you know contact with the ancestral spirits or the gods or the spirits of
the land uh and uh that didn’t have much to do with a civil order which is basically hell-bent
on maintaining control and uh exploiting the citizenry to make wealth for the overlord okay
i’m not saying that’s all there is to civilization but that’s largely what was happening and of
course when the um when the king of a city-state became annoyed with the shamans because they
weren’t submitting to his rule of law he would have them you know banished or killed but the
people wanted their shamans they wanted their spirituality so not only did he banish and kill
the shamans which were causing trouble he replaced them with priests so rather than have a religious
figure that developed organically out of the nature sort of spontaneously naturally the uh
we just kill them or banish them and then we replace them with somebody who pretends to be
a priest of nature but they’re actually a priest of the city state and they’re then everything
becomes about morality and maintaining order and becoming a good servant to your king all right uh
Why am I bringing this up?
Well, because One Spirit Medicine talks about how to get healthy again.
When we started living in cities and being cut off from nature,
our bodies were not getting the right signals from the food, from the water, from the air,
from the sun exposure, from the cold exposure, from the heat exposure.
Our bodies were not getting the right conditioning anymore,
and our habits were also out of sync with nature.
That was making us sick.
What did people do when they were getting sick back in the city-state days?
the shaman if he was banished lived outside of town outside of the city you would go to the
shaman and the shaman would say well what have they done to you behind the walls of that city
stop eating that that’s you’re eating porridge that’s that’s really terrible food like um it
gives you some energy for a little while so you can do some work but then you’re totally
trashed by the end of the day right here have some real food it’ll give you some herbs give
you some some fat from from a fresh kill we’ll give you vegetables and roots and not only that
but you’re going to sleep outside in the cold you’re going to expose yourself to the cold you’re
going to take a bath in the river in the clean water of nature we’re going to walk in the rain
we’re going to get back in touch with the goddess and the various spirits of the land and lo and
behold your health will come back and well then you go back into the city you work for a while
and you work you’re working that oppressive environment get sick again and then you go out
and get cured by the shaman again hopefully so very interesting uh so here um alberto velaldo
presents ways that pretty much this kind of signals that we are missing from nature a lot of
it’s in the diet okay but also in regard to you know getting enough sunshine directly on the skin
yes sunlight is good for you um getting heat and cold exposure okay the all these things are good
triggers for the body to maintain its health okay uh lots of other things he talks a lot about diet
especially like a paleo diet and things like that all right the secret teachings of plants
uh this one i don’t have in a physical copy i have it in an e-copy there’s a picture of the
cover this is a astonishingly good book um where stephen harrod buehner does his best to try to
convey to us what it’s like to be a shaman who’s in direct communication with the plant world
and he would say that the really good herbalists way back when when we lived out in nature
could learn how to cure ailments by talking to plants, by listening to them, by sitting with them,
by learning from their examples. Plants are pretty amazing. There’s another good book called
The Secret Life of Plants, which is also mind-blowing. Apparently, plants have a whole
electromagnetic sensory system. And so if you take a plant and you break it in half in the
presence of another plant that’s like it, it appears to get stressed out. There’s a spike
in its energy, in its electric energy. So apparently it’s possible for humans to communicate
that way. And many of the cures that our shaman ancestors had that came from roots and plants and
things like that, even recipes, supposedly were taught directly by the plants. Does that sound
really far-fetched read the book it’s a great deal of science to it some of it a bit seems a
bit wishful thinking but of course you have to try some of the things he’s talking about
this book really changed my life in regard to breathing it actually has had me revise the
breathing techniques in the Kabbalah magic book yeah the revision to those breathing techniques
you could find in my article on breathing techniques to restore primal health I think
it’s called one of the articles in forbidden realms and this is a book on free diving essentially
about how to hold your breath and dive really deep it’s also a book about how to equalize your ears
so you can dive really deep and uh so there’s lots of stuff in here about how to do that like you
know running on a treadmill to get yourself used to and holding your breath while you’re running
to get yourself used to more carbon dioxide so you can hold your breath longer things like that
I discovered this book before I got over my fear of swimming underwater.
I had hydrophobia, and I was born with it, apparently.
And I picked up this book in the oceanography section of the bookstore,
and when I began reading it, I actually started to cry a little bit.
And it was so beautiful what he was describing about what happens to a freediver
when he dives without a tank of oxygen on his back.
and what the physiological changes that come over the body,
and what that does to your mind when you go deep into the water like that.
And apparently humans do have a diving reflex, which we share with other mammals.
And when that diving reflex is triggered, it’s very, I don’t know, zen-like.
You’re in the zone, you’re one with the ocean,
not really possible to describe what that’s like.
And it can happen even in relatively shallow water,
like um like uh i don’t know 15 feet deep or so um but maybe 30 feet and greater would be you know
even stronger effect on your dive reflex uh fantastic for learning how to breathe to reduce
anxiety and uh interesting thing is um the diet that’s proposed in the alberto villaldo book
one spirit medicine combined with the breathing techniques in this i think could cure you of
anxiety permanently once you learn these things and adopt them and we have one fiction book okay
um i’m a huge fan of first of all i’m a huge fan of jrr tolkien he is my favorite author don’t
want to go into that because if i could go on for an hour about jrr tolkien and the lord of the
rings and things like that um interview with the vampire uh funny thing is i have the book right
here but my webcam is attached to it so i can’t show it to you so there is the cover um this is
such an an intense book it’s truly a classic it’s so beautiful for its prose so you want to think
the way of a romantic evil seductive vampire would speak that’s that’s ann rice’s style and
this book is a really good example of that she lets she spreads it on really thick and uh not
only that but the two characters in it of the vampire lestat and the vampire louis uh are
amazing characters one of them is sort of a hedonist thinks he knows a lot about the world
because he seeks pleasure and he’s really involved in the underworld of partying and sex and things
like that and of course vampirism and um he becomes a sort of mentor to louis who’s a new
vampire and louis is very much um sentimental and moralistic sort of catholic in nature and can’t
seem to let go of his human sentiment and he can’t seem to bring himself to kill to survive and so
the very interesting dynamic forms as Lestat, the vampire Lestat, tries to teach Louis how to
kill, how to be a predator. And there are a lot of disturbing parallels between somebody who
thinks they know a lot about the world and they develop a, you know, cutthroat business attitude
or a hedonistic pleasure-seeking attitude. And they think that’s what life is all about.
and they try to teach that to somebody else and all of the there’s there’s some good stuff in that
and some bad stuff in that and of course all of the irony that comes out with that and and rice
explores that so brilliantly and the vampire metaphor makes it all the more potent and
finally there’s a book on poetry um this book was so impactful to me because it pretty much
introduce me to what Romanticism is. I already sort of knew it. I didn’t have a word for it.
And so this book takes us through a series of poems from pre-Enlightenment to the Enlightenment
period. By Enlightenment, I mean the rational Enlightenment of René Descartes, which overtook
Europe and which they thought science was going to cure everything and analyzing everything with
our heads was going to be enough for figuring out the entire universe that’s that’s the sort
of enlightenment that happened during the 1600s and um uh post-renaissance and then um after that
in response to that uh movement the enlightenment the romantics came about where they they criticized
that and railed against it and said no the older values of the soul and the heart are the most
important thing not the head and so he takes us through some poems that existed during the
intellectual enlightenment period and then some poems that existed uh during the romantic period
and we get to see the difference and of course um magic the practice of magic is very much
a romantic pursuit okay not romantic with a small r as in oh he’s so romantic um more like
romantic with a capital r like you know edgar allen poe writing william blake okay um mythological
appeals in art the romantic worldview essentially is this that your imagination is not inside your
brain okay your imagination is not inside you you are inside the imagination okay that’s essentially
the romantic worldview uh according to the empirical philosophy of the enlightenment
that’s preposterous and some of you listening to this might think that’s ridiculous how could
that’s not that’s impossible is it all right so that was 20 books uh that could possibly
have something to do with the uh changing your life uh remember just reading one of these books
isn’t necessarily going to change you that much uh but of course if you’re ripe for change yeah
that can huge things can happen okay yeah i’ve got uh i might do some more of these i’ve got
about a thousand books um i’ve got over a thousand books literally i really do uh so uh might be some
more videos like this if you guys like it in fact you can ask me you know if you want to see some
more of the biohacking stuff or you want to see more of the magic stuff just let me know
all right until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher