Homo Mysticus

In his seminal work, A Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) laid the foundation for the future development of Jewish philosophy. In the centuries following his death, his book became the exemplar of reasoning faith. Its purpose was to reconcile Aristotle with Jewish philosophy and to provide a philosophical basis for Judaism’s teachings. Written in Arabic, the Guide was translated into Hebrew and Latin, with its influence extending to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In Homo Mysticus, José Faur offers a modern rereading of Maimonides’s groundbreaking work. He examines the ideas, perspectives, and methodologies developed in modern critical theory and poststructural analysis and applies them to achieve an exciting new interpretation of the Guide. Faur’s interpretation of this text reveals Maimonides’s views on prophecy and philosophy, on imagination and intellect, on providence, on the importance of fulfilling the commandments, and above all on esoterism and mysticism. The result is a radical new interpretation of Maimonides, which will become the starting point for all future discussion and research on the philosopher and his important work.

homo mysticus: ex machina By: Juan Valdez Homo mysticus is a book about the science of mysticism, seen through the lens of ancient cosmogony and sacred geometry. This book connects the spiritual and the otherworldly to the practical and tangible in a refreshingly down to earth way. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the subjects of both mysticism and science.

Homo Mysticus presents three renowned lectures delivered by Wolfgang Struve from 1974 to 1984, translated into English in this volume. The first two were published in German in 1983 and serve to develop the fundamental difference between world and reality, philosophy and mysticism, and relative and absolute transcendence. The third lecture was given in 1984 and seeks to present the non-conformity of reality with all natural and reflective experience of the I and what imaginings and volition proceed from it. It shows how the terror and the horror at this non-conformity pervades the thinking and feeling of mankind and, properly endured, translates man into the real. In the confusion and quagmire of contemporary “mysticism,” “religious thought,” “alternative thought,” “esotericism,” and so on, it is refreshing to find a truly philosophical discussion of mysticism that is rigorous and analytical. Philosophical and mystical experiences are finally given expression in this remarkable collection.

This book represents a germinal effort that urges all religious and world leaders to savor the mystical spirituality, especially the cosmology and spirituality of sacred sustainability of the indigenous peoples. The power of indigenous spirit world is harnessed for the common good of the indigenous communities and the regenerative power of mother earth. This everyday mysticism of the world as spirited and sacred serves to re-enchant a world disillusioned by the unsustainability of destructive economic systems that have spawned the current ecological crises. Author Jojo Fung offers insight from his lived-experience and this book represents his effort to correlate the indigenous spirit world with Catholic Pneumatology and articulate the activity of God’s Spirit as the Spirit of Sacred Sustainability.

The focus of this volume is on essential themes, images and generic patterns, beginning with a Talmudic legend about four scholars. They, by means of daring mystical interpretations of Scripture, entered a Paradise, representing different means of imaginative reading, perception, memory and application of the law. One of them died, one went mad, another became a heretic and the other came back as a traditional exegete and teacher. Based on that legend, this book examines a small group of late 19th and early 20th century European Jewish intellectuals and artists in the light of their dreams, writings, and moments of crisis. These men and women, comedians in both the sense of stage actors and clowns or witty performers, believed they had entered a new secular and tolerant society, but discovered that there was no escape from their Jewish heritage and way of seeing the world. This monograph looks into the imperfect mirror of cultural experience, discovers a hazy world of illusions, dreams and nightmares on the other side of the looking glass, and sometimes constructs a midrashic conceit of the comical and grotesque screen between them.

Metaphysics Reconsidered: A Gnostic Reading of Kant By: Juan Valdez This work sits at the tail end of a progression of studies into theology, mysticism, and philosophy which reaches its apex here philosophically. It builds off of the understanding of the (shared) foundations of theological, mystical, and philosophical knowledge from antiquity that we explore in Theology Reconsidered and Homo Mysticus that have supported the development of advanced societies throughout human history, and conjoins this knowledge with more modern conceptions of the world as reflected in scientific disciplines such as physics, psychology, and biology to establish a new system of metaphysics, a postmodern system of metaphysics, which accounts for philosophical skepticism as well as physical materialism and has both a psychological as well as physical element to it—the world as it appears and the world as itis in Kantian terms. In creating this model, we first illustrate the deficiencies of the prevailing metaphysical paradigm, one that reflects a deep-seated belief in the ontological supremacy of “objective reality,” and find the source of these deficiencies, point them out, and then make some adjustments to the underlying system (Kantian metaphysics primarily) such that its misguided conclusions are both brought to light and at the same time corrected. In so doing, we in effect root our system of metaphysics, the Metaphysics of Awareness, directly into the Western philosophical tradition.

This book focuses on Abraham Abulafia's esoteric thought in relation to Maimonides, Maimonideans, and Islamic thought in the line of Leo Strauss' theory of the history of philosophy. A survey of Abulafia's sources leads into an analysis of the esoteric meaning on the famous parable of the three rings, considering also the possible connection between this parable, which Abdulafia inserted into a book dedicated to his student, the 13th century rabbi Nathan the wise, and the Lessing's Play "Nathan the Wise." The book also examines Abulafia's universalistic understanding of the nature of the Bible, the Hebrew language, and the people of Israel (or the Sinaic revelation). The universal aspects of Abulafia’s thought have been put in relief against the more widespread Kabbalistic views which are predominantly particularistic. A number of texts have also been identified here for the first time as authored by Abulafia.