Know Your Egregores

The image at the center of the thumbnail above is a scan of the Book of Enoch, PUBLIC USE, borrowed from Wikimedia Commons.

Strange links. Weird intersections. Patterns in world lines.

Alright, so when I was a teenager, I decided to read all the major holy books. I really wanted to know what life was about.

My effort was a scattered, slapshot affair, like all such blind ambitions. I didn’t read anything about the holy books. I just read them, bouncing around from part to part and coming to my own conclusions. This is NOT the way to read holy books. Anyone who tells you that it is the way to read holy books has probably not read any holy books. You need historical and philosophical context to make sense of the great works of spirituality and religion. They sound largely like meandering, chaotic gibberish otherwise.

Still, I must say that my haphazard reading did bear some interesting takeaways that I might not have otherwise gleaned if I’d gone into it properly prepared. One of those came from the New Testament of the Bible (Matthew 7:15–20):

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the…