Quotes from John Michael Greer

There's no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.

Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.

We cannot experience the world, even for an instant, without experiencing it through some myth, some narrative structure that sorts out our experiences and gives them meaning to us.

There's no such thing as technology in the singular, only technologies in the plural.

There's a rich irony, in other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.

Questions about what counts as knowledge are at the heart of most dissensions about religion.

T]he ideals and desires of the majority define the structure of society as it is; a would-be mass movement that pursues a different path will reliably find itself failing to attract members, while a mass movement that reshapes its message to attract a large audience will inevitably turn into a mechanism for replicating the existing order of things.

The second half of the twentieth century in Japan saw the birth of scores of new religions – a phenomenon to which the Japanese have applied the appealing label kamigami no rasshu-awa, "the rush hour of the gods.

Concorde fallacy," the conviction that it's less wasteful to keep on throwing money into a failing project than to cut your losses and do something else.

Roman augurs and Chinese mandarins both knew well that when rumors about monstrous beings became more than usually common in a community, that might indicate rising stresses that could take a more overt political form later on. The same logic still applies today; the parts of America most caught up in the cattle mutilation panic of the mid-1970s, for example, were exactly those areas where radical anti-government activism took off most rapidly a decade later.

Thus the tired fantasy of cheap, abundant nuclear power needs to be buried alongside the Eisenhower-era propagandists who dreamed it up in the first place.

Is insisting that one can only be saved by the best possible god so different from insisting that one will only ride in the best possible car?

Alchemy was (and is) considerably more than the attempt to turn base metals into gold. To an alchemist, all material things ripen toward perfection unless something gets in the way. The alchemist's mission is to remove the obstacles that keep material things from attaining their perfection. For metals, that perfection is gold; for the human body, health; for the human spirit, union with the divine-and all these and many more are appropriate goals for alchemical work.

Listen to the insults being flung around in the political controversies of the present day—the thieving rich, the shiftless poor, and the rest of it—and notice how many of them amount to claims that wealth that ought to belong to one group of people is being unfairly held by another.

I know that I hung on the windy tree Nine full nights, Pierced by a spear offered to Odin Myself to myself of which none knows Upon that tree Where its roots run...

There are perhaps seven broad claims about the afterlife, with innumerable variations and combinations of belief.

have no way of knowing what combination of external pressures and personal failings led that physician to conceal a less costly cure from my friend and keep her on expensive and ineffective drugs with a gallery of noxious side effects instead, but from outside the walls of the office, it certainly looked like a callous betrayal of whatever ethics the medical profession might still have left—and again, the view from outside is the one that counts.

The world is not prepared yet to understand the philosophy of Occult Sciences- let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world, whether Spirits' of the dead or Elementals; and that there are hidden powers in man, which are capable of making a God of him on earth." -H. P. Blavatsky (1831-1891)

It's unfashionable these days to notice that a great many human beings have had, and continue to have, experiences that they describe as interactions with such powers by way of the teachings and practices just mentioned, and so scholars in a baker's dozen of disciplines and more have busied themselves coming up with other things that religion must "really" be about.

To persist, despite boredom, frustration, the attraction of other activities, and the fear of change and growth, is to win.

Like all supposedly classless societies, America makes up for its lack of formal caste barriers by raising class prejudice to a fine art; the cheap shots at small town America so common among the urban middle classes who dominate today's green scene are an expression of that, and so is the peer pressure that keeps most Americans from doing the sensible thing and buying cheap and sturdy used products in place of increasingly overpriced and slipshod new ones.

Amythia," the pathological lack of myths, has been diagnosed as the root cause of any number of modern sociological and psychological evils.

The irony here, and it's not a small one, is that our culture is anything but bereft of myths. Whatever the sources of our many problems, a myth shortage is emphatically not among them.

could be accomplished by a shift in priorities that involves accepting less prosperous lifestyles, and embraces rich personal, intellectual, and social lives as substitutes for, or even improvements on, the material extravagance that the industrial nations currently offer their more favored inmates.